“Reasons To Remain Skeptical”: The Case Against Trump Winning Remains Strong
Not one but two new polls give former reality TV star Donald Trump commanding national leads among Republican voters. So it must be time for another installment in my ongoing effort to document the reasons he won’t be the nominee.
The New York Times’ “The Upshot” blog provides the latest fodder, with the excellent Nate Cohn making a thorough and persuasive case today for Trump as long-shot (but, importantly, not an impossibility) for his party’s nod.
First, there’s recent history: “In nearly every election cycle, there are candidates who lead national polls and sometimes even win states, but don’t come close to winning the nomination,” he writes. Four years ago, it was Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, eight years ago it was Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, four years before that Howard Dean was the clear Democratic front-runner at this point.
Mr. Trump shares a lot in common with strong factional candidates who have ultimately fallen short in recent cycles: He does not have broad appeal throughout the party; he is unacceptable to the party’s establishment; and there are reasons to believe that his high numbers may be driven by unsustainable factors — like voters who are less likely to turn out or who are responding to pollsters with “Trump” because they haven’t heard any other name for four months.
Second, Cohn notes the important fact that the tyrant of Trump Tower does worse in polls that screen for likely voters (a point, to his credit, he’s been making since August). That’s ground Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur also covers today in what the headline of his piece calls the “Trump uncertainty principle.” In brief, Trump’s “leads tend to be higher in surveys of Americans who say they plan to vote than those whom pollsters traditionally consider more likely to vote as they have voted in recent elections.” The question, Kapur notes, is whether Trump can build a world-class organization that will produce yuuuuge turn-out (the answer is that either he is or he’s doing a great job of convincing the media that he is), a la Barack Obama eight years ago.
A third important – and related – point that Cohn makes is that Trump’s “dominance of media coverage may be harder to sustain once the field narrows, or actual voting results roll in.” The surest way to puncture the Trump media bubble is to beat him; if, for example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has moved to the front of Iowa polls, beats the real estate developer in the Buckeye State, he’ll enjoy an incredible media boomlet. Cohn even envisions scenarios with an early Trump win followed by a quick fizzle (think 1996 Pat Buchanan) as the field winnows, and the not-Trump vote coalesces around a single opponent.
Cohn’s whole piece is worth a read because he gives important caveats explaining why he isn’t dismissing Trump entirely.
The Washington Post’s Steven Ginsberg mentioned in a recent interview with Trump that his opponents’ campaigns assume that one way or another he’ll disappear from the race. They no doubt have many of the aforementioned factors in mind. One gauge as to whether that thinking still holds will be this evening’s debate: If there’s stepped-up ferocity in the attacks on Trump, it could be a sign that they’re starting to take the alternative seriously.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U. S. News and World Report, December 15, 2015
“None Of Them Have Any Idea Of What’s Going On”: The GOP’s Foreign-Policy Dunces Must Think We’re Stupid
In a rare moment of lucidity, Ben Carson recently confessed that “there’s nobody running [for president] who has a great deal of international experience, except for Hillary Clinton.” This was, he stressed, meant as a knock against the former Secretary of State, whose tenure as America’s top diplomat included cascading foreign policy disasters in the Middle East, a disastrous attempt at rapprochement with Russia, and the bloody chaos of post-Gaddafi Libya.
But like many of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, Carson believes the catastrophic failures of an experienced politician require the fresh thinking of an inexperienced civilian with a “logical” foreign policy. And besides, as a doctor he has “the most experience making life or death decisions.”
It’s not just a deficit of foreign policy experience amongst Republicans that should worry voters, but the stunning deficit of foreign policy knowledge. Just two days before his comments about Clinton, Carson stood before the Republican Jewish Coalition fumbling with a prepared script, correctly identifying the confessional allegiance of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas without having been briefed on how to pronounce Hamas.
One would like to take comfort that Carson’s plummeting popularity is attributable to the comic incoherence of his foreign policy platform. But the continued rise of Donald Trump, whose ideas are dumber (but louder) than Carson’s, neatly disproves this theory.
Since the latest ISIS-affiliated and inspired mass murders in Paris and San Bernardino, Trump has busied himself with solving the problem of violent Islamism. Battling against the scourge of facts, he angrily recalled the 2001 northern New Jersey intifada, in which “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered the attacks of 9/11 from across the Hudson River. He demonstrated his conservative bona fides when agreeing that the federal government might maintain a database of “all Muslims” in America. When his supporters cheered that idea, Trump turned the crassness up a few notches and suggested that the United States might block entry of every Muslim on Earth.
And what does one do with all of those Syrian war refugees? Trump, the right-wing Walter Ulbricht, believes in the power of walls to contain most every problem facing America, from trade to immigration to radical Islam. His solution is risible but simple: build a “big, beautiful safe zone” within Syria “so people can live and they’ll be happier.” (Incidentally, his anti-immigration wall in the United States would be “tall” but, as a sop to aesthetes on the southern border, he promises to “make it very good looking.”)
And that’s just on the home front.
According to Trump, the nettlesome problem of the genocidal, imperialist “Islamic State” isn’t so nettlesome after all. In a recent radio ad, he offered a glimpse of his new counterterrorism strategy: President Trump would “quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS.” (This is a slight modification of his previously enumerated plan to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”). Not to be outdone, Sen. Ted Cruz has consistently reimagined Raqqa as a desert Dresden, promising to “carpet-bomb [the Islamic State] into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”
Cruz later enlarged on his anti-ISIS policies, revealing on Twitter that “if I’m elected president, I will direct the Department of Defense to destroy ISIS.”
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
But can we achieve victory through airpower alone? Having previously knocked Marco Rubio as a “neocon” whose hobbies include “military adventurism,” Cruz dismissed the idea of using ground troops in Syria. But with polls suggesting that Americans are spoiling for a fight with Islamism, the Texas senator now says that he would consider “using whatever ground troops are necessary” to defeat ISIS.
Donald Trump too scorns Republicans who supported the Iraq War. But our post-Paris world demands a little more ideological sinew, so he too has vacillated on American ground troops engaging in the fight against ISIS “if need be.” Marco Rubio has been consistent on this point, but adds that we should videotape our raids on “Sunni leadership nodes” and post to YouTube footage of “ISIS leaders cry[ing] like babies when they’re captured.”
All of this would require significant expenditure, and with the exception of Rand Paul, every conservative on stage tonight desires more government spending on the military. While acknowledging that America’s military is the world’s strongest, Trump believes that fattening the Pentagon’s already bloated budget would provoke the ISIS leadership into retreat. He’ll make “the military so strong no one—and I mean no one—will mess with us.” (Yesterday, Jeb Bush tweeted that “the day that I’m elected president is the day we begin rebuilding the Armed Forces of America,” which suggests that we won’t be rebuilding the armed forces anytime soon.)
All of these policies are fantastically meaningless, an inconvenience that appears to be of little concern to primary voters. But almost every Republican candidate believes in the vapidity of those voters, swapping out coherent strategy for bellicose rhetoric.
One would think that a renewed focus amongst voters on terrorism would be an opportunity for Republicans, who remain the more trusted party on national security. After all, Hillary Clinton did little to stanch the bleeding in Syria and Bernie Sanders’s most comprehensive foreign policy experience is establishing a sister city program with Nicaragua’s Marxist dictatorship in Vermont. Instead, the Republican brand is now associated with oafish suggestions that the United States Air Force flatten Syria and the Department of Homeland Security create a non-Muslim fortress state.
The hated Republican establishment, we are told, is afraid of renegade ideas. Well, no. They’re afraid of bad ideas. They are afraid of candidates who promise to learn as they lead. Indeed, Trump criticized Carson as “incapable of learning foreign policy,” adding that when the professional conspiracy theorists in his campaign tell him what to think “within about two seconds I understand it.” Because to the current Republican frontrunner, the most powerful man on Earth needn’t have knowledge of foreign policy, but the desire and aptitude for on-the-job training.
And Rasputin-like instincts.
“I predicted Osama bin Laden,” Trump said in November. “In my book, I predicted terrorism. Because I can feel it, like I feel a good location, O.K.?”
O.K. I feel safer now. So when do we commence carpet bombing?
By: Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast, December 15, 2015
“The Political Stupidity Of The GOP’s Political ‘Experts'”: Simply Out Of Touch With Political Reality
The GOP’s political specialists — its political operatives and consultants — aren’t very smart about politics.
GOP operatives seem to believe that what GOP voters really like about Donald Trump is his “style” and “populism.” If only other Republican candidates would imitate some aspects of Trump’s style, the consultants bleat, they could surf some of the Trump wave.
This is facile nonsense.
Political operatives and the media like to blast “Trumpism” as substance-free bluster. But the parts of Trumpism that have most resonated with GOP voters actually map onto a clear and fairly obvious political agenda: hostile to immigration, trade and globalization, foreign adventures, and an economic and political system that seems to be rigged by insiders against outsiders. Combine that with a big appetite for national greatness. Regardless of the merits of this agenda, it’s an agenda. Call it the radical center, as my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty and the Washington Free Beacon‘s Matt Continetti have.
This is why Republican insiders’ attacks against Trump have been singularly ineffective. He’s not a true conservative! they shout. Yes, and Trump voters are, at least in part, rebelling against conservative orthodoxy. If you want to deflate Trump, you have to put forward actual proposals that will appeal to Trump voters in a package that doesn’t have Trump’s baggage. Emoting like a reality TV star while peddling a flat tax simply won’t do.
But the GOP political class’ political stupidity goes beyond Trump. Consider immigration. I’d have my own super PAC if I got a dollar for every time a GOP political operative told a journalist on background that the way for the GOP to be nationally competitive and win Latinos is to support comprehensive immigration reform. This is simply not true, as Real Clear Politics‘ Sean Trende has exhaustively and laboriously documented.
If it supported comprehensive immigration reform, the GOP would lose a chunk of the white vote, and anyhow, Latino voters are by and large driven by the same concerns as other voters, not just immigration. The GOP’s disadvantage among them has more to do with the income difference between Latino voters and median voters than with anything intrinsic to Latino voters.
Or consider another issue where GOP political operatives are simply out of touch with political reality: abortion. While most Republicans are socially conservative, most GOP political operatives tend to fall more on the libertarian side of the conservative spectrum and are often socially liberal. Their advice to most GOP politicians: Just shut up about abortion, lest you turn off women. Just do the minimum required to signal to pro-life voters that you’re on their side, and thereafter duck the issue.
This is wrongheaded, and almost certainly hurts the GOP nationally. Millions upon millions of women are more likely to call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” What’s more, the significant political gap within women is between single women and married women. Single women are very pro-choice, and very Democratic anyway. Many more married women are Republicans — and the rest are up for grabs. They may even be the single most important swing constituency. And many of them are pro-life, albeit squishy on the issue.
Republicans have a built-in political advantage against Democrats on abortion. They could use something like late-term abortion to drive a wedge between the Democratic nominee and key swing voters — especially suburban moms. For the GOP, it is a tragedy of politico groupthink that the party doesn’t use this strategy more.
Political operatives think voters are boobs. And sure, your average voter may not be a policy wonk, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid. People can be quite canny, especially when you’re talking about their wallet. So no, Trumpism isn’t just about flash, and giving flash without substance in response won’t change it, because voters (yes, even Trump voters) do care about substance. Similarly, Latinos are not an interest group that cares only about issues related to their identity, but care instead about a broad spectrum of issues. And women, believe it or not, are not defined by their uteruses, and are just as capable as men of forming their own considered views on abortion, as with any other issue.
Voters want to feel like politicians understand them, yes, but they also want politicians to give them answers that will solve their problems, and they do have a capacity for evaluating these answers and formulating views about them, and that does influence how they vote.
And if the GOP got a better class of politicos, it might win more elections.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, December 7, 2015
“Trump And The “Low-Skilled” Labor Myth”: The Latest Expression Of A Widely Shared Elite-Conservative Notion
In an otherwise sensible column about the limitations and possible consequences of dubbing Donald Trump a fascist, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggests that one of “the legitimate reasons” Trump’s campaign has endured so long is that conservative voters share a “reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration.”
This is just the latest expression of a widely shared elite-conservative notion that a mix of concerns about labor supply and the rule of law animates anti-immigration sentiment on the right. That, to put it crudely, “they’re taking our jobs!” is an expression of anger about wages, employment displacement, and people breaking rules.
But in my experience, growing up with no small number of undocumented Mexicans and white xenophobes in inland Southern California, these technocratic and philosophical concerns were way, way subsidiary to cultural anxiety and racism.
For instance, I vividly remember this old Pete Wilson ad depicting illegal immigrants as invaders.
Shortly after its run was complete—with the overwhelming support of whites across the state, and particularly in the Inland Empire region—California passed Proposition 187. It, among other things, sought to kick undocumented children out of public schools.
It’s hard to see how persecuting children (or, charitably, persecuting undocumented parents by targeting their children) principally addresses worries about labor supply and rule of law.
This isn’t to say that wages and fairness were absent from the white immigration critique, or that the racial and cultural sentiments weren’t in some sense rooted in economic insecurity. But it is to say that racial and cultural antipathies often dominated the expression of their hostility to immigration and immigrants.
This is no less true today. We saw it last year, when many on the right depicted child-migrants from Central America as ISIS infiltrators and Ebola carriers. Again, it’s hard to see that as mostly an expression of opposition to low-skilled immigration.
You can’t, in my view, gain real insight into Trump’s appeal without accounting for the fact that way above and beyond their passion for playing by the rules, many of these whites simply dislike Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants a great deal. It might also explain why the Republican establishment, embodied in this election by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, has failed to gain footing at the rule-of-law-centered sweet spot between comprehensive reform and mass deportation. Enforcement first, but no mass deportation—the Bush/Rubio position—might be roughly the middle point on a theoretical continuum between Trumpism and the Democratic Party view. But it bears little resemblance to the normative preferences of xenophobic whites.
Giving voice to their rage, as Trump does, is a more apt response to their desires than mild appeals to law-abiding, economic fairness, and pragmatism. Elite conservatives like Douthat can’t wish that away.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, December 4, 2015
“No Clear Edge For GOP”: GOP Fearmongers Might Be Surprised To Learn That Americans Trust Hillary More On Terror
With a thousand points of darkness pointing toward a fear-of-terrorism-based Republican presidential election, it’s important to remember that the likely Democratic nominee has some national-security credentials of her own. An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week shows that when Americans are asked “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?” Hillary Clinton leads every named Republican rival.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent laid it out:
On the question of who is more trusted to handle terrorism, Clinton leads Trump among Americans by 50-42; she leads Ben Carson by 49-40; she leads Ted Cruz by 48-40; she leads Marco Rubio by 47-43; and she leads Jeb Bush by 46-43. In fairness, the last two of those are not statistically significant leads, and among registered voters, her lead “slims or disappears.” But this poll does suggest at a minimum that there is no clear edge for the GOP candidates over Clinton on the issue.
What’s striking here is that it comes even as Obama’s approval on terrorism is down to 40 percent. As Post polling guru Scott Clement notes, the poll shows a sizable bloc of voters who disapprove of Obama on terrorism but nonetheless say they trust Clinton over her GOP rivals on the issue.
This last finding, if it is accurate, complicates the Republicans’ challenge. They must focus specifically on HRC’s national-security record and agenda even as the party base insatiably craves a steady diet of Obama-bashing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 4, 2015
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