Delaware Liberal

Sunday Open Thread [5.1.16]

Delaware Dem

Amanda Taub:

The Republican party thought, in 2012, that its challenge would be to expand its coalition of voters enough to make the party nationally viable again. But it turns out to be facing an even worse and more urgent problem: the coalition it already has.

That coalition is dividing in two, split between Republicans as we typically know them — social conservatives who believe in small government, low taxes, and limited regulation — and a newly active block of voters known as authoritarians, defined not by demographics but by psychological profile. Authoritarians are hostile to outgroups and embrace aggressive, punitive policies toward them, including harsh anti-immigration laws and aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. But they aren’t particularly interested in the traditional Republican economic agenda. Indeed, they’re uninterested in tax cuts, protective of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and skeptical of foreign trade.

The GOP is essentially now two parties in a shaky, contentious coalition. These two factions want different policies and different kinds of politics. Their split has made the 2016 GOP primary one of the strangest and most shocking political developments in a generation, but there is more to come.

The authoritarians, in the coming years, will not break the GOP, but they will deeply alter its electoral politics. They will likely put the White House out of Republicans’ reach. In Congress and in state legislatures, they will make GOP caucuses more unruly and more extreme, worsening polarization and gridlock. They will weaken the party as an institution, opening up more right-wing primary challenges and an even greater role for outside donors.

They could bring, in other words, an era of Republican politics that combines the disruption and chaos of the Tea Party with the divisive, xenophobic policies and politics of Donald Trump playing out across the electoral map.

Matt Bai: “Like Stalin and Churchill huddled over a map of Europe in 1944, Ted Cruz and John Kasich began a very odd week by announcing — publicly, for reasons known only to them — that they were divvying up the remaining primary states in order to maintain individual spheres of influence. Cruz would get Indiana (which is next to Ohio), while Kasich would get New Mexico (which shares a border with Texas). Super-logical.”

“Of course, primary voters — unlike, say, Polish peasants — tend to do whatever they want, so all this plotting didn’t exactly make Cruz and Kasich grandmasters of global domination. More like a couple of guys playing Risk in somebody’s basement… And like most games of Risk, the whole thing fell apart within a few hours, as both campaigns backtracked and said they weren’t telling voters in any state not to vote for their chosen candidates, exactly. They just weren’t telling voters they should vote for their chosen candidates, either.”

Matt Yglesias thinks Donald Trump could do to the national Republican Party what Pete Wilson did to the California Republican Party:

Donald Trump might doom the Republican party. As he inches closer to the nomination, national polling suggests he is in a very weak position in the general election. A loss in November could leave the party in shambles, more divided than ever. That’s a big deal, but some right-of-center Trump skeptics are trying to talk themselves into the idea that he’s only a temporary setback to the party.

RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende notes correctly that there is a long history of pundits over-reading single landslide elections and writing parties out of history, only to see them bounce back two or four — or even six — years later. Even a really bad 2016 election could be the just the same for the GOP. That may be right. But there’s a chance that it could be wrong. Just ask Pete Wilson, the former governor of California who managed to turn a contested state into a Democratic stronghold by over-indulging a shrinking white majority’s fear of uncontrolled immigration and ending up defining his party as permanently unacceptable to the state’s new diverse majority.

What happened in California should serve as a warning to future of the Republican party.

Politico: “In interviews, several aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed growing alarm that Cruz would lose Indiana’s primary on Tuesday — an outcome that would be a major blow to his hopes of holding Trump below the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination on the party convention’s first ballot. The aides concede that, without a win in an Indiana primary where 57 delegates are at stake, Cruz’s shot at the nomination would significantly narrow.”

“And while the Texas senator has closed the gap in Indiana in recent days, he still trails Trump and his decision to tap Carly Fiorina as a running mate has provided only a modest boost in the state, according to sources familiar with the campaign’s internal deliberations.”

“Donald Trump’s campaign got burned again Saturday in the hunt for loyal delegates to the Republican national convention — this time on turf where he’d recently trounced his rivals in primary elections,” Politico reports.

“Though the mogul’s campaign showed more muscle than ever in this shadow primary, he walked away in defeat in Arizona — losing about 40 of the 55 delegate slots that were up for grabs on the day. That’s despite a dominant primary win there on March 22 and a furious attempt by supporters to guarantee the election of allies to the national convention.”

Josh Marshall:

The likelihood of Trump’s nomination was there for anyone to see in February when Republicans committed to [blocking the nomination of Judge Garland]. Now that it’s all but a certainly it casts the these swing states senate races in a much grimmer light for the incumbents.

Assuming Clinton v Trump plays out anything like what now seems likely, Trump is likely to lose and lose big in these states. These senators need to do everything they can to localize these elections and portray themselves as independent players in Washington politics. That’s always the plan when you’re tacking against a strong headwind like this.

My read is that the SCOTUS blockade largely blocks off that route for this election. It’s really hard to cast yourself as ‘independent’, representing your state rather than a national political party, when you are not only doing something that is obviously and even explicitly for the national political party, but when you are obviously being damaged politically for doing so. So the fact that it’s damaging and obviously damaging makes it even more damaging, if that makes sense. If you’re willing to endanger your own reelection to avoid bucking your DC team, you’re pretty obviously not independent at all.

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