Matt Yglesias says says you cannot talk about Donald Trump’s success without talking about racism.
Over the weekend, Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin in the New York Times published a 2,000-word account of how Donald Trump managed to execute “a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.” Remarkably, the idea of racism never appears in the article.
Race is alluded to at one point in the article, but it’s kind of backdoor and offered essentially as a form of false consciousness argument attributed to Robert Putnam. Closer to the top, the authors observe that “Trump is an unlikely spokesman for the grievances of financially struggling, alienated Americans: a high-living Manhattan billionaire who erects skyscrapers for the wealthy and can easily get politicians on the phone.”
What they don’t consider is that one reason Trump is an unlikely spokesman for the grievances of the financially struggling is that he isn’t a spokesman for the grievances of the financially struggling. Some of his supporters are poor, of course, but they mostly aren’t. And most economically struggling Americans aren’t supporting him. To understand the patterns of support and opposition to Trump, you have to talk about race.
Trump is not the candidate of the poor, or of the working man. He is the candidate of white resentment. Not economic resentment towards the 1%. But racial resentment. Hence, there is no crossover appeal to true Sanders voters. If someone says they are a Sanders voter and sees appeal in Trump and intends to vote for him over Hillary in the fall, that is because they are racist, and were supporting Sanders only because they opposed Hillary.
The Republican Party is coming apart, and Donald Trump is leading the charge. The GOP establishment, now aware of the existential crisis they face, is in full panic mode. Media elites and most of the punditry class appear to have been taken completely by surprise.
But this turn of events wasn’t just foreseeable — it was inevitable. Which is why I’ve been writing about it — and of all things, doing TED Talks on it — for years. (See Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming.)
The pitchforks are coming and Trump brought them. But I think that Donald Trump himself has far less to do with the fall of the GOP than the GOP itself. Because from the point of view of the typical GOP voter — their 99% — the modern Republican Party has been one of the most epic failures and betrayals of all time.
The modern GOP as a political construct has principally been an alliance between two interest groups: urban economic elites and rural social conservatives. The reason the party is disintegrating is that it has over-delivered to the former, and completely failed the latter.
A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.
Operating under the assumption that Sanders will win the California primary but still fall far short of amassing enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, the document calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.
We have Kentucky and Oregon next Tuesday, May 17. Bernie could win both, or lose both. Then you have the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico primaries on June 4 and 5, and both will be won by Hillary. Then on June 7, you will have California, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Hillary will win California, New Jersey, and New Mexico while Bernie will probably win the Dakotas and Montana. You think Bernie is going to win California? Well, Bernie’s state director just quit, and Bernie has just gone dark in California. That’s right, no ads. That doesn’t bode well.
David Wade: “We already know Sanders isn’t going to win the Democratic Party’s nomination; Hillary Clinton has amassed more than 92 percent of the delegates needed to secure the nomination, and she’ll easily pick up the rest. So right now, Sanders’ campaign is the walking dead: a zombie. And having worked for John Kerry during the slugfest of the 2004 primaries, I’ve seen up close how much damage this sort of prolonged ‘zombie’ candidacy can inflict on the eventual nominee—and what’s ultimately at stake for the country.”
“I don’t claim that the dragged-out primary made the difference in November 2004; the race came down to the wire, and big forces—including post-9/11 anxiety and ‘Swift Boat’ smears—loomed large. But in presidential campaigns, the one resource that’s never renewable is time. Zombie candidates can’t win the nomination, but they squander vast amounts of time and slowly chip away at the prohibitive front-runner. Some of the damage is obvious—the endless series of public dents in the candidate’s reputation; some are subtle, noticeable in ways that perhaps only political operatives can appreciate.”
Harry Enten: “You’re going to hear a lot about the Electoral College this cycle. At various points, one state or another will be declared pivotal. But stay calm, especially with so long to go until Election Day. It’s too early to take any poll too seriously. We’ll have plenty of time to get into the weeds of different Electoral College scenarios in the months to come.”
“For now, if you’re interested in whether Trump or Clinton is likely to be our next president, I’d pay attention to the average of national polls. Let’s wait until we’re closer to the election and we have a lot more state polling before we zoom in closer than 30,000 feet.”
“Joe Biden took months to decide he wouldn’t run for president — but he was sold on Elizabeth Warren as his running mate from the start,” people familiar with the situation told Politico.
“And he still thinks the Massachusetts firebrand would be Hillary Clinton’s best choice to replace him as the nation’s No. 2 in January 2017.”
I’m convinced it is going to happen. Warren solves the Bernie problem completely, and she has been auditioning for the role of attack dog during her Twitter War with Trump. And she is awesome. Clinton-Warren!!!
Donald J. Trump’s behavior in recent days — the political threats to the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan; the name-calling on Twitter; the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s marriage — has deeply puzzled Republicans who expected him to move to unite the party, start acting presidential and begin courting the female voters he will need in the general election.
But Mr. Trump’s choices reflect an unusual conviction: He said he had a “mandate” from his supporters to run as a fiery populist outsider and to rely on his raucous rallies to build support through “word of mouth,” rather than to embrace a traditional, mellower and more inclusive approach that congressional Republicans will advocate in meetings with him on Thursday.
Mr. Trump’s strategy is replete with risks. Roughly 60 percent of Americans view him negatively, according to pollsters, who say more-of-the-same Trump is not likely to improve those numbers. While a majority of Republican primary voters said they were looking for a political outsider, Mr. Trump will face a majority of voters in November who prefer a candidate with political experience, according to primary exit polls and several national polls. Many Republicans think they will lose the presidency and seats in the House and Senate if he continues using language that offends women and some racial and religious groups [and everyone else not named Archie Bunker].
“Nothing to see here. Let’s move on now” is not an acceptable substitute for transparency on Trump’s taxes. New York Times reporters Patrick Healey and Alan Rappeport observe “Making tax returns public is not required of presidential candidates, but there is a long tradition of major party nominees doing so. Joseph J. Thorndike, who tracks presidential tax returns as the director of the Tax History Project at the nonpartisan Tax Analysts, said Mr. Trump would be the first major candidate since 1976 to not make any of his full returns public. President Gerald R. Ford released a summary of his tax returns that year…Dr. Thorndike noted that President Richard M. Nixon released his tax returns while he was under audit, starting the tradition of presidential candidates making their returns public.”
Either Trump has defrauded the Government for decades (very possible, and the Government suspects this given his constant audits) or Trump is not as rich as he claims, a massive blow to his ego.
The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation.
This is the reality that wavering Republicans need to understand before casting their lot with a presumptive nominee they abhor only slightly less than his likely opponent. If the next presidency is going to be a disaster, why should the GOP want to own it?
Why did almost everybody fail to predict Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries? Nate Silver blames the news media, disorganized Republican elites, and the surprising appeal of cultural grievance. Nate Cohn lists a number of factors, from the unusually large candidate field to the friendly calendar. Jim Rutenberg thinks journalism strayed too far from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Justin Wolfers zeroes in on Condorcet’s paradox. Here’s the factor I think everybody missed: The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.
Trump's national polling bounce since clinching the nomination. Average bounce? 2.5 points. Median bounce? 1 point. pic.twitter.com/zz5urmylcG
— Harry Enten (@ForecasterEnten) May 11, 2016