“Rubio Suddenly Notices Trump”: The Fervor Of Someone Who Has Undergone A Deathbed Conversion
What a difference a sense of urgency makes.
Having finally stood up to the bully Donald Trump in Thursday night’s debate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio continued his assault on the GOP front-runner on NBC’s “Today” show.
But the most remarkable part of Rubio 2.0 is the hypocrisy and shamelessness of that same urgency.
“We’re on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who’s a con artist,” Rubio said. “His target audience is working Americans who are really struggling over the last few years in this economy but he has spent a career sticking it to working Americans.” Remember the phrases “con artist” and “sticking it to working Americans” – you’re going to hear that a lot from Rubio, who famously excels at hitting his talking points. In the “Today” interview, for example, he used the former expression four times and the latter three in a four-and-a-half minute interview. (The line of attack is actually quite strong, not least because it has the virtue of being correct – this morning’s clips will make good fodder for Hillary Clinton’s admen in the fall.)
And how did we get to be “on the verge of” of a Trump victory? Rubio’s answer, of course, is the media: He, Rubio, has had articles written about his driving record, he complained, while the tyrant of Trump Tower is “always making things up and no one holds him accountable for it. … He’s being treated with kid gloves by many in the media in the hopes that he’s the nominee. Some of them are biased – they’d love to see a liberal like Donald Trump take over the Republican Party. And others know he’s easy to beat once he gets there.”
It’s as if Rubio just wandered into the race and realized that the party of Saint Ronald of Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by Trump. How could such a thing happen?
Don’t blame Marco! It’s not like he’s been sitting meekly for months watching up close as Trump runs roughshod over the party, right? Marco Rubio hasn’t been on the debate stage and the hustings, treating Trump with “kid gloves,” failing to hold him accountable for his nonsensical ravings and – lest we forget – abetting his neofascist Muslim bashing, right? It was literally two days ago on the very same TV show that Rubio dismissed the idea that he had to attack Trump as “a media narrative,” piously saying he “didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans.” (Except for Ted Cruz, whom he was busy ripping apart.)
I get that Rubio’s campaign learned the lesson of Jeb Bush and was smart enough to deliberately not telegraph the volley of punches they planned for Trump. And Rubio doesn’t bear all the blame alone – fellow survivor Ted Cruz, for example, made a conscious strategy of bear-hugging Trump for much of the last several months. But Rubio’s shock – shock! – that Trump has been allowed to get this far is rather rich.
Rubio suddenly has the fervor of someone who has undergone a deathbed conversion, which is pretty much what he has. As I wrote yesterday, the extent to which Trump is in the catbird seat is reflected by the fact that the Florida primary – where the former reality TV star is doubling Rubio in the polls – is an existential test for the freshman senator but not Trump. A loss there kills Rubio, while vanquishing Trump would merely mean holding serve at home.
So we’ll see if Rubio’s mad stop-Trump scramble pays off. If it doesn’t and he wants to blame someone for losing his beloved conservative movement to a con artist, he can start by looking in the mirror.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 26, 2016
“Master Of The Expectations Game”: Marco Rubio Loses To Trump By 22 Points In Nevada, Says Trump ‘Underperformed’
Marco Rubio may not be good at winning primary elections, but he’s the all-time master of the expectations game. And since the “true winner” of the Republican nomination isn’t determined by delegate count but by “news cycles won,” the former Florida senator has this thing nearly locked up.
First, there was Rubio’s triumph in Iowa, where he spun a third-place finish into a landslide victory. Then, by carefully sabotaging himself in New Hampshire, the senator set himself up for a second-place “win” in South Carolina. But Tuesday night in Nevada Rubio took his game to whole different level.
At first things didn’t look so great for Marco — Donald Trump did beat him by 22 points in the state’s caucus. But on Fox News Wednesday morning, Rubio revealed that drawing roughly half of Trump’s support in Nevada was actually a come-from-behind win in the expectations game.
“Last time, Mitt Romney got over 50 percent, so Donald Trump actually underperformed [what] Mitt Romney did, not once but twice in this state,” Rubio explained to Fox & Friends, referring to the 2008 and 2012 primary races.
Rubio is to spinning defeat as Steph Curry is to the three-pointer, and this was Marco’s half-court shot.
Just think about the degree of difficulty here: Mitt Romney is the most famous Mormon politician of our era. He won Nevada in 2012 by collecting 95 percent of the Mormon vote. Trump, on the other hand, had his Muslim-ban proposal officially condemned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in December. And the Donald enjoys no other comparable demographic advantage in the Silver State — there is no large community of Queens-born heirs to real-estate fortunes in the region. What’s more, Rubio was once a member of the Mormon Church, and leveraging that connection was the heart of his own strategy in Nevada.
And yet, against all odds, Rubio was able to push the words “Donald Trump actually underperformed” through his lips.
Rubio’s triumph in Nevada should give him plenty of momentum going into the big expectations games on Super Tuesday. After all, the Florida senator has now established that he is so bad at winning elections that when another candidate beats him by a mere 22 points, that’s an underperformance. Using this metric, Donald Trump is likely to underperform in several states next week.
By: Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 24, 2016
“Too Late To Catch Him?”: Trump’s Remorseless Delegate Math Means Rubio and Cruz Are Screwed
The story of Donald Trump’s doomed campaign has been replaced by the story of his inevitability as the Republican nominee.
It’s a sea change indicative of his constant ability to defy expectations. He placed second in the nation’s first contest in Iowa, went on to dominate in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and won Nevada’s GOP caucus on Tuesday night.
But it’s not Trump’s past wins that foretell doom for any Republican candidate trying to stop this phenomenon. It’s the fact that a week out from Super Tuesday, Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win most of the remaining voting states—and their delegates—across the country. To clinch the nomination before the Republican convention, Trump needs 1,237 committed delegates. Before Nevada, he had 67 delegates, and Ted Cruz was in second place with 11.
Here’s how the math works.
On Super Tuesday alone, the only states that Trump currently risks losing, according to Real Clear Politics averages, are Arkansas and Texas. And both of those states have Cruz leading by surmountable percentages (note, though, that polling in both states is not always frequent or entirely current).
Even if Trump comes in second in Texas, he could still win.
Texas is a state that is typically proportional in its delegate allocation but has what the website Frontloading HQ calls a “trigger,” which creates a condition in which the state becomes winner-take-all. This would happen if a candidate wins a majority of the vote. Should this overwhelming victory not happen for Cruz, and, say, Trump comes in second in a proportional setting, the senator from Texas must cede a portion of the 155 delegates in play, thereby essentially handing the contest and the nomination to Trump. If Cruz can’t win his home state, he has little chance throughout the rest of the spring.
The Republican primary contest has long had what Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor and neuroscientist, refers to as a “deadline problem.” Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, posited on Feb. 11 that the Republican field needed to get smaller in a hurry, setting two specific deadlines to try to defeat Trump.
The first deadline is Feb. 29, at which point Wang thinks there need to be only two alternatives to Trump prior to March 1 voting. The second is March 14, when Wang thinks there can be only one other option besides Trump.
The issue is that many of the states leading up to March 8 fit the model of Trump’s South Carolina victory, in which he captured about a third of the vote but still managed to get all the delegates due to proportionality rules.
Even after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race following his defeat in South Carolina, Trump still faces four opponents before March 1. Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Cruz will all try and see if they can win their respective home states (where all of them except Rubio are leading). Ben Carson has stubbornly stayed in the race despite finishing fourth at best in most states. But he could be out if his campaign contributions dry up in the coming weeks.
This means that unless everyone but Rubio and Cruz quits in the next week, Trump can’t be caught.
“Any talk of stopping Trump is highly unrealistic,” Wang told The Daily Beast. “Nearly all analysts, including data pundits, are blinded by the peculiarity of Trump’s campaign.”
Wang said he thinks Rubio has no chance of locking up the nomination anytime soon because the field is too divided for him to corral a lot of delegates by Super Tuesday. And if the senator loses his home state of Florida, which polling suggests he might, there isn’t enough time to make up the delegate difference before the Republican convention in July.
Josh Putnam, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who runs Frontloading HQ, told The Daily Beast that the only scenario that would allow a Trump defeat in the primary is a one-on-one matchup.
“If only Trump is winning, then no one can catch him in the delegate count,” Putnam said. “The only play in that scenario would be for opponents to either drop out or play to keep Trump under the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot at the national convention.”
One state that could slow Trump’s speeding train is Ohio, whose winner-take-all contest could keep him shy of the delegate count necessary to clinch the nomination. Trump sits atop the polls there, narrowly beating Buckeye Gov. Kasich.
Even in a situation in which Trump, Rubio, and Cruz are the last three standing, as conventional wisdom would suggest, the road still looks rocky for Cruz and Rubio. An Economist/YouGov poll taken last week showed Trump with 46 percent of the vote, Rubio with 28 percent, and Cruz with 26 percent. An earlier NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Trump leading in the same circumstance.
Also, as saliently noted by Sahil Kapur in a Bloomberg Politics piece, as of January, Trump had a higher share of Republican voters who would consider voting for him than Mitt Romney had in 2012 around the same time. This suggests the mythic establishment lane has been almost entirely consumed by the singular Trump lane.
Rubio, the presumed second-place candidate at this point, cannot merely rely on absorbing Bush’s supporters either, as ideologically those supporters could just as easily go with Kasich as Rubio. In fact, the only way the Florida senator could catch the frontrunner is to siphon off some of Trump’s support, which seems unlikely. In a January NBC poll, 51 percent of Trump supporters said they were absolutely sure of their choice, while only 26 percent said the same for Rubio.
Wang says the question of Trump’s “ceiling” in terms of national polls is worthless. The real question is just how high his delegate count can go.
“Under Republican rules, it is possible to win a majority of delegates with as little as 30 percent of the vote, if conditions are right,” Wang said, using South Carolina, where Trump took all 50 delegates with only 33 percent of the vote, as an example. “That involves a split field, which is why I have been so focused on that. At Trump’s current level of support, about 35-40 percent, his delegate ceiling is above 50 percent,” meaning, according to Wang’s model, that even if Trump garners 35 percent of the popular support, he can still earn at least half of all the national delegates available.
As for Rubio, the blunt question is, what state can he win on Super Tuesday? He led by a small margin in Minnesota and could see an opening in Colorado. But otherwise his chances look bleak.
In the fantasy scenario where Rubio is viewed as a possible foil for Trump, is it possible to still be a viable contender if you don’t win a state before March 15?
As Nevada’s caucus began, Rubio was getting ready to test this hypothesis with a slew of new endorsements in hand. But in an election where facts don’t matter and Trump is drowning out the noise, it’s going to take more than an impressive posse to catch the frontrunner—as Tuesday night’s results showed.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, February 24, 2016
“Pressed Against The Back Edge Of Their Own Sword”: When Will Republicans Start Recognizing How Screwed They Are?
For months and months, movement conservatives and elected Republicans—along with a non-trivial contingent of political commentators and data journalists—promoted as conventional wisdom an idea that was really much more akin to wishful thinking. That idea, boiled down to its essence, was that the very weirdness of the Donald Trump phenomenon—his undisguised bigotry, his total lack of governing experience, the unanimous (if not always vocal) opposition of Republican elites to his candidacy—would sooner or later doom him.
When Trump not only didn’t collapse, but built a commanding nationwide polling lead—which he is now converting into a substantial delegate lead—the conventional wisdom took a turn. Once the candidate field dwindled down to a two-or-three person race, the new thinking went, Trump would hit a ceiling. Even if he never exactly collapsed, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz could slug it out to the GOP convention and conspire to deny Trump the nomination. Alternatively, a single challenger might defeat Trump outright.
In this latter scenario, Trump is assumed to be vulnerable from both directions. In a head-to-head against Cruz, he would succumb to the consolidation of the religious and ideological right, along with a meaningful segment of the Republican mainstream. Alternatively (and preferably, as far as most Republicans are concerned), Rubio would emerge and defeat Trump in the blue and purple states of the Northeast, the Rust Belt, and the West.
For a moment after Rubio’s unexpected (but very narrow) second-place finish in the South Carolina primary Saturday night, you could mistake his shiny mien for a glimmer of hope that Trump’s reckoning was at hand. Or, if not at hand, clearly visible in the middle distance.
But after brief scrutiny, and for several reasons, this second-best fantasy falls apart. First, and most obviously, this is still at best a three-man race between Trump, Rubio, and Cruz. If it never dwindles into a two-man race, then the most Republicans can hope for is a contested convention this summer. After attempting but failing to destroy Cruz’s candidacy a month ago, establishment Republicans are now pressed up against the back edge of their own sword. The Texas senator is in the race, and has no incentive to drop out—especially not before Super Tuesday, when a number of Bible Belt states (and his own) will hold their nominating contests. Trump, it should be noted, just routed the field across almost every GOP demographic, including evangelicals, in South Carolina.
Second, John Kasich is still in the race, too, and has a much more natural appeal than Rubio with the nominally moderate, working-class white voters who will determine the winners of blue- and purple-state primaries in the coming month. Indeed, in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Massachusetts, Kasich is poised to rival or outperform Rubio in the race for second place. But that brings us to the most important point.
The very idea that Trump will encounter resistance outside the South is based on a simplistic and doubly inapt conception of “moderation.” The first premise is that, by promising to appeal outside of the Republican Party’s typical constituencies, Rubio is by definition more moderate than Trump; the second is that appealing to the center in a general election is no different than appealing to “moderate” Republicans in a GOP primary.
If this race is proving anything, though, it’s that what constitutes “moderation” to elite conservatives (relative dovishness on immigration aimed at swing voters in a general election) isn’t what constitutes moderation among Republican voters (restrictionist immigration policy paired with heterodox support for redistributive social policies). The big flaw in the assumption that Rubio (or anyone, really) can make up ground against Trump in blue states is that “moderate” voters are actually Trump’s ace in the hole.
New #Massachusetts Poll#GOP@realDonaldTrump– 50%@marcorubio– 16%@JohnKasich– 13%@tedcruz– 10%@RealBenCarson– 2%
— ECPS (@EmersonPolling) February 22, 2016
This appeal very likely extends to nominally moderate Republican voters in the interior West and California, where Republicans will cotton to Trump’s anti-immigration absolutism.
Tuesday night’s Nevada caucus will be an important test of GOP faith. Does Trump have a ceiling? Can Rubio further consolidate the field? Is Cruz’s end beginning? The polling on all of these questions should chasten the right. And in a way, the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries already revealed how prohibitive Trump’s odds of becoming the GOP nominee have become. Trump lapped the field in a moderate state, and then he did almost as well in a state that should have been fairly hostile to his mix of feigned religiosity, anti-Bushism, and unflinching hawkishness.
If Trump prevails once again, perhaps the conservative establishment will set aside its contrived obsession with whose second- or third-place finish was the most inspiring, and accept that peering past the behemoth in front of them won’t make him disappear.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, February 23, 2016
“Ohio’s Kasich Slashes Planned Parenthood Funding”: Eager To Curry Favor With His Party’s Far-Right Base
As the field of Republican presidential candidate shrinks to just five people, John Kasich has adopted a rather specific posture: he’s the grown-up in the room. The rest of the field includes two first-term senators and two political amateurs, leaving the Ohio governor as the only candidate stressing qualities such as executive experience, governing skills, and pragmatism.
And that makes perfect sense given the circumstances. Kasich can’t be as right-wing as his rivals; he can’t be as unhinged as his rivals; and he certainly can’t avoid the “career politician” label. Looking for an opening, the Republican governor has decided to present himself as a more mainstream, and more electable, conservative.
In the five-person GOP field, that leaves Kasich as the last option for the party’s remaining “moderate” voters. But let’s not mistake perceptions for reality. As we were reminded over the weekend, the Ohio Republican may be playing the role of 2016 pragmatist, but that doesn’t make him an actual moderate.
Republican presidential hopeful and Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Sunday signed a bill that aims to strip funding from Planned Parenthood in the state. […] After Kasich came in a strong second place in the New Hampshire primary, the Republican assembly in Ohio passed legislation that targets about $1.3 million in funding for Planned Parenthood in the state.
That money helps support screenings for breast cancer, STD testing, programs working to prevent violence against women, and more.
Remember, we’re not talking about public funding of abortions, which is already largely prohibited. Rather, state lawmakers passed a measure to block “any entity that performs or promotes nontherapeutic abortions” from receiving funds for women’s health treatments that have nothing to do with terminating pregnancies.
And Kasich, eager to curry favor with his party’s far-right base, eagerly signed the bill into law.
The NBC affiliate in Columbus reported that Planned Parenthood’s work in Ohio will continue, “but its community health programs would be cut. The group says programs targeted in the bill helped Planned Parenthood in the last year to provide more than 47,000 STD tests and 3,600 HIV tests to Ohioans, serve nearly 2,800 new or expectant mothers, and inform young people and women about healthy relationships.”
In other words, in practical terms, John Kasich decided to slash services for thousands of Ohio women, for no substantive reason, with a simple stroke of his pen. The public will pay a steep price because the governor wants to advance his ambitions.
This is what passes for “moderation” among GOP presidential candidates in 2016.
Disclosure: My wife works for Planned Parenthood, but she played no role in this piece, and her work is unrelated to the organization’s affiliates in Ohio.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 23, 2016
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