“It’s Marketing, Pure And Simple”: Don’t Be Fooled — Donald Trump’s ‘Silent Majority’ Doesn’t Exist
At his rallies, Donald Trump’s supporters carry signs that read, “The Silent Majority Stands with Trump.” On Twitter, his supporters invoke the slogan to answer the candidate’s critics, such as myself, adding, “Silent No More.” Yet it’s the other part of the phrase that merits attention. Is there any sense in which Trump’s supporters constitute a majority?
Trump may indeed get to the 1,237 delegates he needs for a majority at the Republican convention. He might even get to a majority of the voters of the Republican Party, though I think that’s highly unlikely.
As of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Utah, Trump had secured 37 percent of the vote of the Republican primary electorate, or roughly 7.8 million votes out of approximately 21 million.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 142.2 million registered voters in the country as of 2014. This means that, so far, Trump has secured the support of 6 percent of the electorate. Yes, that’s right, 6 percent. Or perhaps it would be better to focus on the two-thirds of the electorate who actually vote. In that case, it should be acknowledged that Trump has secured, well, 8 percent. Even after every state has voted in primaries , Trump’s tally will at best probably be around 10 percent of the general electorate. Of course, turnout is lower in the primaries than in the general election, but that doesn’t change the fact that Trump can’t claim a silent majority.
Yet recently, a journalist from a reputable outlet called me for an interview, and among her questions was one that began, “Given that the vast majority of Republicans support Trump . . . ”
Thanks to all the signs at his rallies, Trump’s message about a no longer silent “silent majority” has been broadcast so frequently that people have begun to believe it. It’s marketing, pure and simple.
We know that Trump really cares about the signs at his rallies because his campaign manager wades into the crowds to accost protesters with signs containing swear words, on one occasion even grabbing a protester by the collar. On ABC’s “This Week,” Trump explained, “He wanted them to take down those horrible profanity-laced signs.” He added, “When signs are put up, lifted up with tremendous profanity on them, I mean the worst profanity, and you have television cameras all over the place and people see these signs, I think maybe those people have some blame and should suffer some blame, also.”
This clear focus on the part of Trump and his campaign manager on the branding that will get onto television reveals the core of Trump’s campaign. The thesis is that a silent majority exists and that Trump will be its champion, decimating its foes. His strategy has been to secure votes by convincing people he already has them. If his thesis about a silent majority is wrong, his candidacy has no basis. Importantly, the numbers are telling us that the thesis is wrong.
Trump is little more than a celebrity who has been converting a fan base into vote share. What’s more, his celebrity is like a jet plane that’s about to run out of fuel.
Trump has been winning because he started with much greater name recognition than anyone other than the old establishment candidates. Some 20 million people watched “The Apprentice”; he began the campaign with 3.4 million Twitter followers. As an outsider in an election driven by antipathy to elites, Trump was able to clear out the other candidates with national name recognition: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. This left him facing candidates new to most Americans: Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson.
Three of these relatively unknown candidates, Cruz, Kasich and Rubio, have beaten Trump soundly in all the markets small enough for a newcomer to penetrate against a celebrity. Of the 11 contests in which fewer than 200,000 people voted, Trump has lost eight. In other words, when voters get a chance to come to know the other candidates, they reject Trump.
Cruz, with his victory in Oklahoma and the draw in Missouri, has proved his ability to penetrate larger markets. This means he can beat Trump in markets where the pool of votes to capture reaches 1 million.
At this point, the challenge for both Cruz and Kasich is to penetrate the markets with pools of greater than 1 million voters. To date, Trump has captured all the contests between 1 million and 2 million, and he has done so with 38 percent of the votes. And to date, each contest with a vote pool of greater than 2 million has been won by a home-state candidate. Cruz took the biggest prize with Texas; Trump took the second-biggest with Florida (Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach gives him a high-profile second home beyond New York); and Kasich took the third in Ohio.
In other words, we don’t know yet who truly has the potential to capture the biggest remaining vote markets with no home-state favorite: California and Pennsylvania. Cruz and Kasich will benefit more than Trump from the winnowing of the field, thanks to the simple fact that, at last, many people will learn their names. In the lead-up to Super Tuesday votes on March 1, people were still having trouble pronouncing Kasich.
The Republican Party should avoid being taken in by Trump’s marketing claim to represent a silent majority and the related suggestions that his supporters might riot if the party turns away from him at a contested convention. The electorate is proving false the thesis that a silent majority stands with Trump. Yes, a determined minority stands with Trump, but that minority is likely to shrink as other candidates gain in name recognition. The party would be unwise to stake its fortunes on this determined minority.
By: Danielle Allen, Contributing Columnist, The Washington Post, March 25, 2016
“Changing The Electoral Dynamic”: The Unexpected Political Impact Of Terrorist Violence
Early this morning, as many Americans were just learning about this morning’s deadly terrorist violence in Brussels, Politico’s Blake Hounshell noted on Twitter, “America may be one major terrorist attack away from Donald Trump as president.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes responded soon after that it’s a scenario that keeps him up at night.
This line of thought is not at all uncommon: in a general election, Trump, burdened by broad unpopularity, would start the race as an underdog, but many analyses have concluded that he could win the presidency anyway if voters are sufficiently terrified. It feeds into a conventional wisdom that suggest Republicans benefit politically in the wake of terrorism, and Trump specifically benefits even more.
But the conventional wisdom may not be entirely correct. Yes, Trump has seen a boost in GOP support after attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, but extrapolating to a national audience is a different story. I’m reminded of this Washington Post/ABC News poll we discussed around Thanksgiving – after the Paris attacks and when Americans were increasingly panicked about refugees.
A crescendo of tough talk on Syrian refugees and terrorism seems to be elevating the toughest talkers in the GOP primary – most notably Donald Trump. But among the broader American public, the most trusted person to handle the issue is Hillary Clinton. […]
By 50 percent to 42 percent, more Americans say they trust Clinton to handle the threat of terrorism than Trump, who leads the Republican field and responded to the Paris terrorist attacks by calling for heightened surveillance of mosques and redoubling his opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to settle in the U.S.
Clinton’s eight-point advantage over Trump wasn’t unique: the same poll showed the Democratic frontrunner also leading the other GOP contenders when respondents were asked, “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?”
It’s not the only data available on this. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted this morning, “A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 30 percent of Americans think Trump is ‘ready to be Commander in Chief,’ while 60 percent say he isn’t. For Hillary Clinton, those numbers are 46-45.”
As we discussed several months ago, Democrats may be at a perceived disadvantage on matters related to national security generally, but Clinton, if she’s the Democratic nominee, will have more foreign-policy experience than any other presidential candidate in a generation. All of the remaining Republican candidates are either literal or practical amateurs on international affairs.
If the question is one of preparedness, it’s a test the former Secretary of State passes easily.
All of this matters, of course, because of the degree to which it challenges preconceived ideas about which issues benefit which parties. Republicans widely believe they benefit most when elections focus on the issues where they’re strongest: national security, foreign policy, counter-terrorism, etc. Just so long as voters overlook their discredited ideas and track record of foreign-policy failure – and in Trump’s case, the fact that he’s painfully clueless – GOP officials are certain they’re on firmer ground when voters’ attention moves away from the economy, health care, education, and the environment.
But there’s some evidence that suggests Clinton’s resume is unique, and with her background comes an ability to speak with authority on an issue Republicans claim as their own. It changes the electoral dynamic in ways the political world may not have fully digested yet.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 22, 2016
“On Invincible Ignorance”: The G.O.P.’s Intellectual Leader Is Still Making The Same Old Claims
Remember Paul Ryan? The speaker of the House used to be a media darling, lionized as the epitome of the Serious, Honest Conservative — never mind those of us who actually looked at the numbers in his budgets and concluded that he was a con man. These days, of course, he is overshadowed by the looming Trumpocalypse.
But while Donald Trump could win the White House — or lose so badly that even our rotten-borough system of congressional districts, which heavily favors the G.O.P., delivers the House to the Democrats — the odds are that come January, Hillary Clinton will be president, and Mr. Ryan still speaker. So I was interested to read what Mr. Ryan said in a recent interview with John Harwood. What has he learned from recent events?
And the answer is, nothing.
Like just about everyone in the Republican establishment, Mr. Ryan is in denial about the roots of Trumpism, about the extent to which the party deliberately cultivated anger and racial backlash, only to lose control of the monster it created. But what I found especially striking were his comments on tax policy. I know, boring — but indulge me here. There’s a larger moral.
You might think that Republican thought leaders would be engaged in some soul-searching about their party’s obsession with cutting taxes on the wealthy. Why do candidates who inveigh against the evils of budget deficits and federal debt feel obliged to propose huge high-end tax cuts — much bigger than those of George W. Bush — that would eliminate trillions in revenue?
And economics aside, why such a commitment to a policy that has never had much support even from the party’s own base, and appears even more politically suspect in the face of a populist uprising?
But here’s what Mr. Ryan said about all those tax cuts for the top 1 percent: “I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you’re talking about is what we call static distribution. It’s a ridiculous notion.”
Aha. The income mobility zombie strikes again.
Ever since income inequality began its sharp rise in the 1980s, one favorite conservative excuse has been that it doesn’t mean anything, because economic positions change all the time. People who are rich this year might not be rich next year, so the gap between the rich and the rest doesn’t matter, right?
Well, it’s true that people move up and down the economic ladder, and apologists for inequality love to cite statistics showing that many people who are in the top 1 percent in any given year are out of that category the next year.
But a closer look at the data shows that there is less to this observation than it seems. These days, it takes an income of around $400,000 a year to put you in the top 1 percent, and most of the fluctuation in incomes we see involves people going from, say, $350,000 to $450,000 or vice versa. As one comprehensive survey put it, “The majority of economic mobility occurs over fairly small spans of the distribution.” Average incomes over multiple years are almost as unequally distributed as incomes in any given year, which means that tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich are indeed targeted at a small group of people, not the public at large.
And here’s the thing: This isn’t a new observation. As it happens, I personally took on the very same argument Mr. Ryan is making — and showed that it was wrong — almost 25 years ago. Yet the man widely considered the G.O.P.’s intellectual leader is still making the same old claims.
O.K., maybe I’m just indulging a pet peeve by focusing on this particular subject. Yet the persistence of the income mobility zombie, like the tax-cuts-mean-growth zombie (which should have been killed, once and for all, by the debacles in Kansas and Louisiana), is part of a pattern.
Appalled Republicans may rail against Donald Trump’s arrogant ignorance. But how different, really, are the party’s mainstream leaders? Their blinkered view of the world has the veneer of respectability, may go along with an appearance of thoughtfulness, but in reality it’s just as impervious to evidence — maybe even more so, because it has the power of groupthink behind it.
This is why you shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old defunct orthodoxy. Oh, and a last-minute turn to someone like John Kasich would, in its own way, have similar implications.
What we’re getting instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to rethink its premises. That’s a good thing — or it would be, if it didn’t also come with the risk of President Trump.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 21, 2016
“Ignore It And It Will Go Away”: Gov. Scott’s Unwritten Policy On Climate Change — Don’t Talk About It
Dear Florida Gov. Rick Scott:
So it turns out the experts were mistaken. It turns out the impact of climate change on Florida — and much of the coastal United States — is not going to be anywhere near as bad as had been predicted. Apparently, it’s going to be much worse.
That’s the sobering finding of a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. Previous scenarios, grim as they were, failed to take into account projected population growth. Factor that in, say the researchers, and the number of people likely to be affected by rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps explodes to triple the previous most dire estimates.
The brunt of the catastrophe is expected to be felt in the Southeast, cities like Biloxi, Mississippi, Charleston, South Carolina, and an obscure little seaside hamlet called Miami, Florida. Already, tourists in Miami Beach have to slosh through ankle-deep waters when the tide is especially high. By 2100, that might be regarded as the good old days.
The new study projects a future in which as many as 13.1 million Americans, nearly half of them in Florida, find themselves forced to flee or adapt as seawater rises toward their doorsteps. A child born today might be part of the nation’s largest mass exodus since the Great Migration a century ago.
Interestingly enough, governor, those frightful projections come a year almost to the day after a Miami Herald report that revealed your unwritten policy for dealing with climate change: Don’t talk about it. Forbid state officials from using the very words.
Yes, you claimed no such policy exists, but you were contradicted by multiple ex-employees of the state Department of Environmental Protection, and their testimony was compelling. “We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, a former state Department of Environmental Protection attorney.
This strategy — essentially a governmental gag order — is one your Republican Party has frequently used in recent years. The apparent idea is that if you forbid discussion of it, a problem resolves itself. We’ve repeatedly seen the great success of this policy. George W. Bush’s ban on U.S. funding to international groups that provide information on pregnancy termination brought abortion to a screeching halt. A congressional ban on research into gun violence helped make mass shootings a thing of the past.
Sorry, governor. Pulling your leg.
Actually, the most recent figures available from the World Health Organization tell us the international abortion rate stands at 28 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, about where it’s been since the turn of the century. And there were at least 10 mass shootings in this country just last week — 40 people wounded, 14 killed.
The truth is, sir, “Ignore it and it will go away” is a policy more suited to children than to adults. And past a certain age, even kids learn the untenability of such thinking. The disastrous report card you stuff down in your backpack is always dug out. The broken vase you sweep under the couch is always discovered.
Similarly, the environmental disaster whose discussion you forbid will flood your streets and put property valued in the tens of billions of dollars at risk, whether it is talked about or not.
Governor, your party is forever taking action to fight “dangers” — mass voter fraud, sharia law — that do not exist. It is beyond unconscionable that it and you stick your fingers in your ears when confronted with a threat that is not only real but, conceivably, existential.
The science is clear, sir. The trend lines are, too. Americans are rushing to the shore. Housing and infrastructure are rising to meet them.
The potential price of silence was already high a year ago. It just rose higher still.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 16, 2016
“A Meaningful Deterrent”: Senate Republicans Rediscover The Value Of ‘Pinata Politics’
Almost exactly 10 years ago, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) was concerned about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito facing “attacks” from Senate Democrats. Eventually, the Texas Republican said at the time, senators “will need to come to terms with our confirmation process.” Cornyn added that treating nominees “more like pinatas than human beings” is “something none of us should be willing to tolerate.”
That was when there was a Republican president in the White House. Now that President Obama is the one doing the nominating, Cornyn is apparently less concerned about Pinata Politics.
Even though Senate Republicans have no intention of holding hearings on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, that doesn’t mean he or she won’t be dragged through the mud.
And the chamber’s No. 2 Republican made that clear to a small cluster of reporters Monday, saying he believed the nominee, “will bear some resemblance to a pinata.”
A decade ago, Cornyn characterized this as “something none of us should be willing to tolerate,” but this year, one gets the impression that the Senate Majority Whip not only tolerates the same practices he denounced, he also intends to be one of the lawmakers holding the stick, swinging for candy.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was unimpressed with the rhetoric. “Senator Cornyn has now taken the next step and suggested – without knowing who this nominee is, without considering what their record is, what their experience is, how qualified they are for the job – he is suggesting that they’ll be subjected to bashing by Republicans,” Earnest told reporters yesterday. “It’s unclear for what reason, other than the president of the United States has chosen to fulfill his constitutional responsibility to nominate someone to fill a vacancy.”
That said, if Cornyn and the GOP’s tolerance for Pinata Politics is intended to intimidate potential nominees – “It’s a nice career you have there, it’d be a shame if we had to beat you with a stick” – it might be working.
Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval’s (R) was floated as a possible choice for the Supreme Court, though he soon after withdrew his name from consideration. Yesterday, as MSNBC reported, a high-profile member of the president’s cabinet did the same thing.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has “asked not to be considered” for nomination to the Supreme Court to take the spot formerly occupied by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
Today, The Hill reported that another possible contender also bowed out.
Federal Appellate Judge Adalberto Jordan has taken himself out of consideration to become President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, CNN reported Wednesday.
The Miami-based judge was reportedly a contender to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and would have been the first Cuban-American to sit on the high court.
Of course, people may have all kinds of reasons to withdraw from consideration, but it’s easy to imagine Republican rhetoric about pinatas serving as a meaningful deterrent.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 9, 2016
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