Sunday Open Thread [3.20.16]
Utah—Y2 Analytics–Cruz 53, Kasich 29, Trump 11.
National—Morning Consult–Trump 43, Cruz 27, Kasich 14
National—Morning Consult–Clinton 49, Sanders 40
How many times have we read this:
“Republican leaders adamantly opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy are preparing a 100-day campaign to deny him the presidential nomination, starting with an aggressive battle in Wisconsin’s April 5 primary and extending into the summer, with a delegate-by-delegate lobbying effort that would cast Mr. Trump as a calamitous choice for the general election,” the New York Times reports. “Recognizing that Mr. Trump has seized a formidable advantage in the race, they say that an effort to block him would rely on an array of desperation measures, the political equivalent of guerrilla fighting.” “There is no longer room for error or delay, the anti-Trump forces say, and without a flawlessly executed plan of attack, he could well become unstoppable.”
It is just simply hysterical how mind-blowingly incompetent all these Republican billionaires are.
But read Nate Cohn on how Trump could miss his delegate target.
Staffers at the five major television networks are grappling with what role their organizations may have played in amplifying Donald Trump’s successful campaign of insults, generalizations about minority groups, and at times flat-out lies.
Conversations with more than a dozen reporters, producers, and executives across the major networks reveal internal tensions about the wall-to-wall coverage Trump has received and the degree to which the Republican frontrunner has — or hasn’t — been challenged on their air.
Two network sources also confirmed the unprecedented control the television networks have surrendered to Trump in a series of private negotiations, allowing him to dictate specific details about placement of cameras at his event, to ensure coverage consists primarily of a single shot of his face.
George Will, everybody:
The GOP’s Blocking of Supreme Court Pick Is Indefensible
The Republican party’s incoherent response to the Supreme Court vacancy is a partisan reflex in search of a justifying principle. The multiplicity of Republican rationalizations for their refusal to even consider Merrick Garland radiates insincerity. Republicans instantly responded to Antonin Scalia’s death by proclaiming that no nominee, however admirable in temperament, intellect, and experience, would be accorded a hearing. […]
In their tossed salad of situational ethics, the Republicans’ most contradictory and least conservative self-justification is: The Court’s supposedly fragile legitimacy is endangered unless the electorate speaks before a vacancy is filled. The preposterous premise is that the Court will be “politicized” unless vacancies are left vacant until a political campaign registers public opinion about, say, “Chevron deference.” […]
Republicans who vow to deny Garland a hearing and who pledge to support Donald Trump if he is their party’s nominee are saying: Democracy somehow requires that this vacancy on a non-majoritarian institution must be filled only after voters have had their say through the election of the next president. And constitutional values will be served if the vacancy is filled not by Garland but by someone chosen by President Trump, a stupendously uninformed dilettante who thinks judges “sign” what he refers to as “bills.” There is every reason to think that Trump understands none of the issues pertinent to the Supreme Court’s role in the American regime, and there is no reason to doubt that he would bring to the selection of justices what he brings to all matters — arrogance leavened by frivolousness.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states. But it’s a frequent talking point that white voter enthusiasm was higher for Reagan and turnout down for Romney. Not so. In 1980, 59 percent of whites voted and in 2012, 64 percent of whites voted.
But still the myth survives that there are these masses of untapped white voters just waiting for the right candidate. Call it the Lost Tribes of the Amazon theory: If only you paddle far enough up the river and bang the drum loud enough, these previously hidden voters will gather to the river’s edge. The simple truth is that there simply aren’t enough white voters in the America of 2016 to win a national election without also getting a substantial share of the non-white vote. Romney won 17 percent of the non-white vote. Depending on white voter turnout, a Republican needs between 25 percent and 35 percent of the non-white vote to win.
A recent poll put Trump’s support among whites at 49%, while only 19% among non-whites. If that holds, not only will Trump not win like Romney, it will be a worse loss. States that Romney won, like Indiana and North Carolina and Missouri, would be won by Clinton. Further, given the nature of the racist, bigoted and fascist Trump, he will spike turnout among nonwhites and Democrats of all races. That’s where we get into landslide terrority, with Clinton winning Arizona and Texas, maybe even Arkansas and Mississippi. Don’t believe me? Play with RCP’s Demographic turnout tool. I did, giving Trump 49% of the white vote, reducing his Latino vote to 20% while keeping their turnout percentage at 2012 levels, which is all generous to Trump. And this is the landslide for Hillary it produces:
Jamelle Boule of Slate says racist blacklash against President Obama is what explains Trump. I agree.
But none of these theories answer the question why now. Each of these forces has been in play for years. Wages for working-class Americans have long been stagnant, and the collapse of job opportunities for workers without a college degree was apparent in the 1990s, long before the Great Recession. What’s more, economic and social decline—as well as frustration with foreign competition, which Trump has channeled in his campaign—isn’t unique to white Americans. Millions of Americans—blacks and Latinos in particular—have faced declining economic prospects and social disintegration for years without turning to a demagogue like Trump.
Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.
All of which is to say that we’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama.
[…] In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008. […]
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.
Eric Lavitz says Republicans must be forced to answer for what they and their policies did to Kansas and Louisiana.
In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State’s governor’s mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement’s blueprint for Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. In 2012, Brownback helped replace the few remaining moderate Republicans in the legislature with conservative true believers. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.’ ”
As you’ve probably guessed, that model collapsed. Like the budget plans of every Republican presidential candidate, Brownback’s “real live experiment” proceeded from the hypothesis that tax cuts for the wealthy are such a boon to economic growth, they actually end up paying for themselves (so long as you kick the undeserving poor out of their welfare hammocks). The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback’s 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss. Meanwhile, Kansas’s job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri’s 1.5 percent and Colorado’s 3.3.
Those numbers have hardly improved in the intervening years. In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nation’s economy grew 1.9 percent. Brownback pledged to bring 100,000* new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st.
Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state’s public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback’s inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state’s university system. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback’s approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States.
Bobby Jindal did the same thing to Louisiana. Read the full article.
“Donald Trump is fighting efforts to hold a trial in a federal class-action lawsuit over his Trump University real-estate program either just before or after the Republican National Convention in July,” Politico reports.
“Such a trial has the potential to pull Trump off the campaign trail in order to serve as a witness. And in a filing late Friday night in federal court in San Diego, lawyers for Trump said plaintiffs’ lawyers are intentionally trying to schedule the trial to interfere with his presidential campaign.”
Sam Wang: “Kasich has no path to getting a majority of delegates. However, he does have a way to prevent Trump from getting a majority. That would be to completely withdraw from winner-take-all states. In fact, he should say so publicly, the way that Rubio pulled out of Ohio last week. In these states, he divides the ‘non-Trump’ voter bloc, which polling suggests is about 55-60% of Republican voters. Therefore if Kasich does not drain support from Cruz, Cruz can win those states’ delegates.”
“Kasich should still campaign in the remaining proportional states, which are: Utah, New England (New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington), and New Mexico.”
Harry Enten: “Republican turnout is up and Democratic turnout is down in the 2016 primary contests so far. That has some Republicans giddy for the fall.”
“But Democrats shouldn’t worry. Republicans shouldn’t celebrate. As others have pointed out, voter turnout is an indication of the competitiveness of a primary contest, not of what will happen in the general election. The GOP presidential primary is more competitive than the Democratic race.”
“Indeed, history suggests that there is no relationship between primary turnout and the general election outcome.”
It is hard to pin “tax cuts for the wealthy and austerity will create growth” on Republicans when it is also advocated by Democrats like John Carney, Tom Carper and Jack Markell. Sure Kansas is an extreme case, but Brownback would recognize our recent budgets as conforming to his plan.
My point being… What’s the point of pointing out that this is “Republican econimoc policy” when there is no alternate policy being offered by anyone?
That electoral college map vastly underestimates GOP voter suppression and general disruption of norms of behavior.
Jason, was Barack Obama’s economic policy a Republican policy? The one where he passed economic stimulus, more government spending, and raised taxes on the wealthy? Is Hillary Clinton’s policy Republican? The one she proposes raising the taxes on the wealthy another 5%, raising the rate on capital gains, and lifting the income cap on Social Security?
When you say there is no alternative policy to tax cuts and trickle down, you misrepresenting the facts.
When we start so close to “the center” I think we see what we end up with. Especially when you have elected Dems like John Carney and Tom Carper giving up the game at the outset.
This is not Republican economic policy in Dover. It is a Democratic Governor and leadership that crafts and sponsors and passes this harmful drivel in Delaware.
Representative John Kowalko
“was Barack Obama’s economic policy a Republican policy? ”
Which Barack Obama? Obama is a mixed bag on the economy, depending on when you take the sample.
“Obama 2008” was elected on a center-Democrat pledge to allow the flagship of Republican economic policy to expire (Bush tax cuts).
Obama 2010 took ownership of Republican economic policy when instead, he extended the Bush tax cuts, which moved his economic policy rightward off center-Democrat and into Republican territory.
Obama 2013 began speaking about income inequality, defining it as a central problem for the first time to my knowledge, but without acknowledging or apologizing for his role in promoting inequality by extending the Republican economic policy.
Post-2013, after he had lost all legislative leverage (Dem Congress, expiration clause on taxes), he has been center-left in his rhetoric, and his executive actions have taken some concrete actions against income inequality, plus some notable vetoes.
Obamacare will be a great left-Democratic achievement if it is pragmatically and incrementally built on to become more like single payer (cut out the insurance companies, negotiate for drug prices). If not, it will stand as a corporatist triumph like Medicare Part D.
Gov. Jerry Brown in CA has certainly offered an alternative. The man was born a fiscal conservative, but his own maneuvering around California’s failing budget process and economy featured confronting people with the fact that the government you want has to be paid for. He made a bunch of horrific cuts early on that didn’t just deal with the state’s operating deficit and structural debt, but also set him up to ask for additional revenues. Brown is never going to he Bernie Sanders on this, but is at least working on pushing back on the irrational anti-tax attitude that probably started in CA back in the day. And maybe that started with the state’s effort to freeze property taxes that Brown was in the middle of and continues to be a structural problem for CA.
Even better is Governor Mark Dayton in Minnesota. Won the Gov’s office and raised taxes on the wealthy. He also spent more money on education, raised the min wage and implemented other progressive policies that has Minnesota economically much better off than Kansas or Louisiana or Delaware probably. Still, MN probably started off in better shape than CA was when Brown took office.
Neither of these is a perfect model, and (as you might imagine) perfect compliance with some ideal is not important to me. But people like Brown and Dayton pushing back on the All the Government You Can Eat for Free with an insistence on some new revenues to get there is hopeful.
“Is Hillary Clinton’s [economic] policy Republican?”
A view from Wall Street:
http://www.dividend.com/news/2016/01/19/your-dividend-portfolio-what-if-hillary-were-president/
“For dividend investors, a Clinton presidency—if her husband’s experience is any guide—is apt to be more centrist and pragmatic than the positions the candidate has taken during her primary campaigning.”
The full Eric Lavitz piece is not just well worth the read, it’s vitally important. He starts out with a counter-reality situation: Pretend Bernie Sanders had been elected governor of Vermont in 2010 (to parallel Brownback’s year of triumph in Kansas) and that he implemented a state budget full of his most liberal giveaways, wrecking the state’s economy in the process.
Do you think Democrats would be campaigning on that agenda despite rampant failure? Yet that’s what Republicans are doing, and have been doing, for going on three decades now.
The tragedy of this race isn’t Trump. It’s that the abject objective failure of Republican “economics” is happening in total silence.
“if her husband’s experience is any guide”
Yeah, I’ll just give that link the attention it deserves – none.
“Is Hillary Clinton’s policy Republican? The one she proposes raising the taxes on the wealthy another 5%, raising the rate on capital gains”
Despite her rhetoric against quarterly capitalism, it is disappointing that Hillary is not proposing to raise the tax on dividends for upper income investors. During the Bill Clinton boom, capital gains and dividends were both taxed as regular income at 39% (although Bill unwisely cut the capital gains rate to 20% near the end of his term). Bush’s deepest rate cuts were to dividends, cutting the rate on capital gains and dividends both to 15%.
Obamacare added a 3% surcharge to capital gains and dividends, making an 18% rate on both. Obama failed tu use the expiration hammer to claw back the pre-Bush dividend rate (treated as regular income). The fiscal cliff deal raised both rates to 20%, which with the Obamacare surcharge makes 23%.
The low rates on capital gains and dividends, especially dividends, are driving quarterly capitalism. Wall Street thinks low capital gains rates promote “growth,” which in their world means “short term growth,” which in turn allows larger dividend payouts, but not long term growth.
To short-circuit quarterly capitalism, treat dividends and capital gains both as regular income.
My point: She is not her husband. I really wish we could stop saying things like, “if her husband’s experience is any guide”. And I’ll dismiss that framing every time.
The layman’s term for “dividend investors” is “retirees.”
When I think of “dividend investors,” I see Mitt Romney and Charlie Copeland.
I’m sure retirees would rather have their pensions back than be the stalking horse for a Wall Street scheme to pump up short term profits.
“Pretend Bernie Sanders had been elected governor of Vermont in 2010 (to parallel Brownback’s year of triumph in Kansas) and that he implemented a state budget full of his most liberal giveaways, wrecking the state’s economy in the process.”
The full name of the plan is “national single payer.” It won’t work at the state level.
@aaa “The tragedy of this race isn’t Trump. It’s that the abject objective failure of Republican “economics” is happening in total silence.”
Never in my life has the media been more guilty of malpractice. The Fourth Estate is supposed to inform the electorate and help guide this nation to a better future!
…not maximize profits by running some rank and obscene reality show.
In the old days, guys like Trump were ridiculed and then totally ignored.
And that’s why we’ve never seen the likes of him rise up in American politics.
That Stuart Spencer piece pretty much says the R’s are doomed if Trump is the nominee. And it’s based on numbers that make sense to me. No wonder the R’s are now so desperate for an alternative. The Senate is lost if Trump gets the nomination, and maybe the House is in play. At least, the D’s should pick up a couple of dozen seats.
Yeah, I’ll just give that link the attention it deserves – none.
Fair enough.
What did you think in ’92 when Ms. Rodham Clinton said (paraphrasing) “if you elect him, you get ME?”
OK, so we say Spencer’s numbers make sense, and Trump gets dumped, and the Dems have the majority in House and Senate. So what?
We get the return of Harry and Nancy. Hillary triangulates.
I guess it’s better than the alternative, but I don’t see a wave of progressivism on the horizon.
For me, the issue is the Supreme Court. In addition to the replacement for Scalia, at the least it ensures that, any of the more liberal members retiring, like Ginzburg, will not be replaced with Federalist Society cult members. And I don’t think that Anthony Kennedy is long for the Court.
And if Clarence Thomas goes away…
Other than that, it’s not exactly “Happy Days Are Here Again”.
@puck: You’re picturing the wrong guys. Rich people don’t invest looking to maximize dividends; they’re generally after bigger game. The ones who invest looking for the dividends are the people who sock away whatever they can during their working lives and live on the 3% annual return.
As for whether they would prefer pensions, so what? You’re going to fuck them over until pensions come back in style? Yeah, that’s an electoral winner, all right.
Also, go read the article. My synopsis didn’t do it justice if that’s all you got out of it. Single payer isn’t really the issue.
Even if it was, they’ve run the math on single payer. The savings would come from 11 million lost jobs. Anyone but an ideologue would realize that’s something that has to be phased in, not changed all at once, unless you have some genius plan for putting 11 million people back to work immediately. Otherwise you’re looking at a major recession.
It also bears mentioning that Vermont passed single payer years ago but still hasn’t figured out a way to make it work on that scale.
@aaa:”The ones who invest looking for the dividends are the people who sock away whatever they can during their working lives and live on the 3% annual return.”
I call bullshit. Look up the structure of current dividend tax rates. Your example retiree is currently paying 15% on dividend income, or maybe even 0% if their overall income is less than $37K.
Of course any increase in dividend tax rate should totally exempt people under a certain income level. My point is about about taxing the rich to influence their investing behavior, not the working class nest egg. Don’t let the rich hide behind the working class, like they did for the Bush tax cuts.
In other words I should just let you demonize the rich however you choose, accuracy be damned. Got it.
Retirees don’t sell their stock, so capital gains isn’t much of a factor for them. There’s a lot more money in capital gains than in dividends.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/9/29/1426011/-Studies-Raise-capital-gains-tax-rates-to-lower-income-inequality
There’s a lot more money in capital gains than in dividends.
Yes — and you can see from this Bloomberg graph that wealthy people don’t exactly invest to maximize dividends.
Retiree investors weren’t complaining during the 1990s investment boom with its 39% top rate on dividends.