Friday Open Thread [1.29.2016]

NATIONAL–IBD/TIPP: Clinton 50, Sanders 38, O’Malley 2
PENNSYLVANIA–Franklin & Marshall: Clinton 46, Sanders 29, O’Malley 2
WISCONSIN–Marquette: Clinton 45, Sanders 43, O’Malley 1
NATIONAL–IBD/TIPP: Trump 31, Cruz 21, Rubio 10, Carson 9, Bush 5, Christie 1, Paul 4, Kasich 2, Fiorina 2, Huckabee 1, Santorum 1
IOWA–PPP: Trump 31, Cruz 23, Rubio 14, Carson 9, Paul 4, Bush 4, Huckabee 4, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Kasich 2, Santorum 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE–Suffolk University: Trump 27, Cruz 12, Kasich 12, Rubio 10, Bush 11, Christie 6, Carson 5, Fiorina 4, Paul 2
PENNSYLVANIA–Franklin & Marshall: Trump 24, Cruz 14, Rubio 11, Carson 5, Bush 5, Christie 5, Huckabee 2, Fiorina 2, Paul 2, Kasich 1, Santorum 1
PENNSYLVANIA–Marquette: Trump 24, Rubio 18, Cruz 16, Carson 8, Christie 5, Paul 3, Fiorina 3, Bush 2, Kasich 2, Huckabee

Nate Silver on last night’s alternate reality debate from the world without Trump as a candidate:

True, Trump’s absence was hard to ignore during the first 30 minutes of the debate. It didn’t help that the Fox News moderators focused their first few questions around Trump. The other candidates seemed a little unsure of themselves.

But by the second half of the debate, you had — as Chris Wallace reminded Ted Cruz — an actual debate. It was a good and vigorous discussion, with lots of tough questions posed by Wallace and Megyn Kelly. And it gave us a glimpse of which candidates are most diminished by Trump, and which actually seem to benefit from his presence.

According to our staff grades,2 the candidate with the best night was someone who’s usually forgotten about … Rand Paul. With his libertarian-leaning views, Paul is a hard guy for the media to characterize: He’s certainly not an “establishment” candidate, but he also doesn’t fit the stereotype of a fire-breathing, red meat conservative. In an election without Trump, Paul might be among the more interesting candidates for the press to cover. In an election with Trump, he’s treated as an afterthought.

Matt Baume:

It’s a little known fact that the Republican Party is actually a massive superweapon designed to absorb the quintessence of a nearby star and then transform it into a beam of pure phantom energy. Although the Republican base has proven itself capable of destroying an entire planet, recently spies have discovered a point of vulnerability by which it might be brought down: a thermal oscillator named Donald Trump.

Trump, you might’ve heard, is planning to skip the next Fox News debate. Bravo to him for his ongoing success at remaining at the top of the news cycle, and for his seemingly endless capacity to support the topical-comedy industry. Every day that he remains as a candidate brings forth new signs that we are entering Republican end times, where absolutely nothing makes sense anymore. Conservatives are turning on each other, Michael Moore is interviewing Megyn Kelly, dogs and cats are living together, and the whole party is in chaos.

What fun.

“A wide range of senior Republicans told Politico that if Trump wins Iowa, he’ll more than likely be the nominee. One factor they repeatedly pointed to: An Iowa victory over Cruz would validate opinion polls showing him in command of the race. The Trump phenomenon would officially become a reality.”

Said a top official of a rival GOP campaign: “If Donald Trump wins Iowa, I think he has won—period. Ted Cruz is supposed to win Iowa. If Trump wins, he’ll be on a trajectory to come out of the SEC primaries [March 1] with close to triple the delegates of anyone else.”

Political insiders tell Politico that Sen. Ted Cruz “had the worst night of the seven GOP presidential candidates on stage Thursday.”

“More than 4-in-10 GOP insiders – given the choice of the seven GOP candidates on the stage, plus Trump – rated Cruz as the loser of Thursday night’s debate, citing his defensive posture on his past immigration stances and opposition to ethanol subsidies.”

Des Moines Register: “Without the dominant national front-runner in the room, the target was the candidate who inherited center stage for the night: Ted Cruz. But the Texas U.S. senator largely forfeited this golden opportunity.”

Ron Fournier says the Thursday Debate was a nightmare for the Republicans: “Will duck­ing the de­bate hurt Trump’s stand­ing with pa­ro­chi­al Iowa voters or em­bolden his icon­o­clast­ic brand? I trust Trump on this one: He said, ‘Who the hell knows?’”

“What I do know: Thursday night was a night­mare for the GOP—an­oth­er step to­ward what ap­pears to be a deep and en­dur­ing split between the party’s es­tab­lish­ment and its angry in­sur­gents, a rude and un­ruly polit­ic­al cir­cus that re­af­firms for in­de­pend­ent voters their worst im­pres­sions of the Grand Old Party.”

Josh Marshall on what Trump is accomplishing by skipping last night’s Republican debate.

Pundits and political obsessives tend to get distracted by process and policy literalism. But politics generally and especially intra-Republican political battles are really about demonstrating dominance – not policy mastery or polling leads but a series of symbols and actions that mark the dominating from the dominated.

Aaron Blake uses data from the latest WaPo/ABC poll to say that the electorate really isn’t all that angry.

Donald Trump is angry. Bernie Sanders is angry. And Americans think their neighbors are very angry, too.

Except that they’re simply not — or at least, not abnormally angry. Despite the rise of two candidates who have embraced the idea of anger, our country simply isn’t unusually angry about how things are going in Washington

I think this race is going to be very boring. It is going to be a status quo election. Hillary and Trump will quickly win their nominations, and we will be “entertained” by Trump all year long, and then Hillary will win in a devastating landslide that will destroy the Republican Party for a few generations.

Olivia Nuzzi at The Daily Beast:

[Trump’s rallies] are unlike any other political event, not only in size, but in organization. People wait in line in the freezing cold for hours, like they might do for the new iPhone or a Cronut, and then pass through TSA-like security to get inside. There are no campaign volunteers taking down their information or encouraging them to caucus. Even the vendors selling “Make America Great Again!” hats and buttons tend to be unaffiliated with the Trump organization. And for every attendee there to express their undying devotion, there are more than a few who are only rubbernecking. After all, if the freakshow came to your town, you’d be remiss not to go see it.

David Wasserman and the folks at The Cook Political Report have run some numbers on the Democratic delegate math.

The key takeaway from our model below: in order for Sanders to be “on track” to break even in pledged delegates nationally, he wouldn’t just need to win Iowa and New Hampshire by a hair. He would need to win 70 percent of Iowa’s delegates and 63 percent of New Hampshire’s delegates.

Jonathan Chait on why Trump won the debate:

The reason is very simple. Republican insiders apparently agree that Ted Cruz, who took heavy fire from debate moderators showing his disingenuous positioning on immigration, fared the worst. (Politico headline: “GOP insiders: It was a rough night for Ted Cruz.”) Republican insiders also agree that if Trump wins Iowa, he may have clear sailing to the nomination, as he already commands large leads in the next two states. (Politico headline: “An Iowa win might make the Trump train unstoppable.”) And Cruz is the major threat to stop Trump from winning Iowa. Ergo, Cruz losing means Trump wins.

Ed Kilgore agrees, though he expands it out to all the candidates who debate lost, so that means Trump won:

The debate Donald Trump skipped had a decent number of fireworks, some ebbs and flows, and a skewed discussion (not one question on the economy, unless I missed it while mulling one of Ben Carson’s interesting locations or trying to catch up with Marco Rubio’s high-speed delivery). But nobody who could have scored a real victory that mattered actually did. Ted Cruz had his worst debate by far, as Megyn Kelly and the other candidates basically called him a slick liar — not what you want when you are trying to convince Iowa evangelicals you are young King Josiah sent to cleanse the land. Speaking of slick: Cruz may have been the champion college debater, but Marco Rubio sounded like one with his determination to pack two minutes of stock speech into every minute of talk. His own flip-flopping on immigration was cast in sharp relief, and his gratuitous shout-outs to Jesus Christ were exceeded only by Cruz’s to Iowa nativist Steve King.

Meanwhile, some of the better performances were by candidates who are going nowhere in Iowa and are struggling to survive in New Hampshire. The last thing the Republican Establishment needs is for Chris Christie or John Kasich to get a second wind, since neither is going to win in New Hampshire or the states immediately following it on the calendar — but could take votes away from a more viable candidate like, say, Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush, who has just enough money left to run another $10 to $20 million in attack ads aimed at Rubio, had a pretty good night, too.

All of this is pretty good news for the guy who wasn’t there.

Andrew Prokop says Ted Cruz lost the debate right when he could least afford to.

Dylan Matthews has Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Rand Paul as the winners of the debate and Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Fox News as the losers.

Man, Fox News just got clowned.

They lost the main attraction of the debate before it even started. They lost viewers to the sideshow that attraction put together instead. They lost a highly public game of chicken with Trump, attempting to show that he needed them more than they need him but proving the exact opposite.

It’s easy to imagine a universe where Trump came out looking flighty and they came out looking responsible. But in our universe, Trump clearly humiliated them while suffering no costs to himself.

It’s worse than that, though. Not only did Fox News lose its standoff with Trump, it went on to spend the debate attacking Ted Cruz very heavily — the main effect of which is to weaken Trump’s strongest competition right before the Iowa caucuses.

Trump managed to pull off an aikido-esque move wherein he redirected Fox News’s firepower away from himself and onto Cruz. And it worked as well as he could’ve possibly imagined. He’s really, really good at this game.

“Three different dynamics are raising the prospects that delegates to the Republican convention could arrive in Cleveland in July without a clear first-ballot winner, something that hasn’t happened in American politics in decades,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“First, there is the unusually crowded GOP field and the unconventional impact of Donald Trump, the New York businessman who in breaking all of the conventional campaign rules has energized voters who don’t normally come out for the party’s primaries. Then there is the Republican Party’s redrawn primary map that gives more sway to Southern states that often back nominees who aren’t successful in other regions. And, finally, the party has instituted a new way of counting delegates in early contests that will spread them out among the competitors, preventing anyone from separating from the pack.”

Jonah Goldberg says the conservative crackup is real: “I’ve been hearing about the impending ‘conservative crackup’ for nearly 25 years…Well, thanks to Donald Trump, tomorrow may be here. There’s a fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump’s run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid.”

“The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience.”