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“Facts Are Facts”: Bernie Sanders Will Not Be President

I respect Bernie Sanders. I admire his passion and his devotion to the common good as he conceives it. I find his style of leftist politics — with greater ties to the class-focused concerns of the Old Left than to the cultural and identity obsessions of the New — quite compelling. I admire the democratic socialist welfare states of Northern Europe on which he models his own policy proposals and would be happy to see the United States move further in that direction.

But it isn’t going to happen.

If you Feel the Bern, by all means keep fighting the good fight. Work to get Sanders and his issues placed front and center in the campaign. Act as if you think he has a good chance of burying Hillary Clinton, winning the Democratic nomination, and then triumphing over whichever candidate comes out on top at the end of the GOP primary scrum.

But facts are facts — and the fact is that Bernie Sanders is not going to be elected president of the United States.

The first obstacle Sanders faces is of course winning the Democratic Party’s nominating contest against Hillary Clinton. At the moment Sanders and his supporters feel like they have a good shot because he’s currently leading many polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. If he takes those first two states, showing that Clinton is beatable, then all bets are off.

Except that they’re not.

For one thing, lily-white Iowa isn’t especially representative, and neither is even more lily-white New Hampshire, which also just so happens to border Sanders’ home state of Vermont. Once the voting moves on to states in the South, West, and Midwest, and to bigger, more demographically diverse states where vastly more delegates are at stake, Clinton is quite likely to come out on top over and over again.

How likely? Very. We know this because of the national polling spread. Clinton has led Sanders in every poll taken since the start of the election cycle. The most recent ones place Clinton in the lead by anywhere from 4 to 25 percentage points, with the RealClearPolitics polling average showing Clinton nearly 13 points ahead. When a candidate consistently comes out on top, she is winning.

But what about the 2008 scenario? That’s when Barack Obama leapt ahead of Clinton in February after trailing her handily up to that point and ended up beating her to the nomination. That’s obviously the script that Sanders supporters hope to see repeated this time around.

The problem is that Bernie Sanders isn’t Barack Obama — and no, I’m not just talking about Obama’s presumably much greater ability to mobilize the African-American vote. I also mean his enviable capacity to inspire moderates as well as liberals to vote for him. Sanders, by contrast, is the strong favorite of those who identify as “very liberal” but understandably polls weakly among self-described “moderate” Democrats. With Sanders continuing to propose very liberal economic policies that even leading progressive commentators consider to be vague and unrealistic, that is unlikely to change.

But doesn’t Clinton face equal and opposite problems of her own by appealing primarily to moderates in the party? She would if there were equal numbers of economically liberal and moderate Democrats, but there aren’t. Though the number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents willing to describe themselves as economically liberal has increased in recent years, the terms still apply to just 32 percent of the total. The proportion of those describing themselves as economically moderate or conservative, meanwhile, is 64 percent.

Which means that Clinton’s more economically moderate base of support is roughly double the size of Sanders’ liberal base.

To those, finally, who look to Donald Trump’s remarkable ascent in the Republican primary field as a sign that a populist insurgent can overturn the preferences of party establishments, a note of caution is in order. Leaving aside the fact that, unlike Sanders, Trump has been leading in national polls for six months straight, and often by wide margins, there remains the complication that Trump’s campaign scrambles established ideological assumptions on the right rather than simply reinforcing or radicalizing them. The mogul from Manhattan combines a far-right stance on immigration with economic positions that make him sound like a moderate Democrat. That’s why his candidacy is so dangerous to the GOP: It threatens to tear apart the electoral coalition and ideological agenda that has more or less held the party together since Ronald Reagan was elected 36 years ago.

Sanders’ candidacy threatens no such thing. It merely aims to pull his party further to the left — as Democrats have defined the left since 1972. Now if Sanders had responded to Clinton’s very liberal latter-day stance on gun control by championing the rights of gun owners, or if he’d made other strategic moves to the right on social issues (on abortion or religious freedom, perhaps), then he might well have sowed Trumpean chaos among Democrats and ended up leapfrogging Clinton to the nomination. But as it is, Sanders is merely doing what ideologically doctrinaire primary candidates always do: working to radicalize and purify his party’s already established ideological commitments.

That strategy will only win Sanders the nomination if the Democrats lurch quite a bit further leftward — or if some new (or old) scandal suddenly engulfs Hillary Clinton — in the coming weeks or months.

But in that unlikely (but not impossible) event, wouldn’t Democratic nominee Sanders stand a very good chance of winning the presidency? Haven’t a series of head-to-head polls shown that Sanders does well and in some cases even better than Clinton against the leading Republican candidates?

Yes they have, but those polls deserve to be taken with several grains of salt.

For one thing, these same polls also show Clinton in a dead-heat against the fading and transparently absurd sideshow candidacy of evangelical neurosurgeon Ben Carson. That’s strong prima facie evidence that the poll results are driven to a significant extent by voter ignorance. Put Carson on a debate stage opposite Clinton, and his support would collapse rapidly and dramatically.

Perhaps even more far-fetched is the finding that Sanders would defeat Trump by a wider margin than Clinton. Clinton’s hypothetical victory over Trump by a narrow 2.5 percentage points can be explained by the fact that both candidates would be appealing to the same bloc of white working-class voters, many of whom are Democrats. That could indeed make Clinton vulnerable against Trump. But to believe that Sanders would outperform her to beat Trump by 5.3 percentage points one has to presume that Sanders could do a better job than Clinton of persuading this (or some other) bloc of pro-Trump voters to support him instead.

Let’s just say that I find that implausible. Americans as a whole are strongly disinclined to vote for a socialist — more disinclined than they are to vote for a Catholic, a woman, a black, a Hispanic, a Jew, a Mormon, a homosexual, a Muslim, or an atheist. Is it at all likely that white working-class would-be Trump supporters are among the country’s most open-minded voters in this respect?

Sorry, I don’t buy it — and neither should you.

Bernie Sanders is a good man and an effective advocate for the causes he champions. But he isn’t going to be president.

 

By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 19, 2016

January 22, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

“The Last Stage Of Grief”: From ‘Panic’ To ‘Acceptance’ On Trump?

For much of 2015, one of the most commonly uttered words in Republican circles was “panic,” as in, “irritation is giving way to panic” among GOP insiders “as it becomes increasingly plausible” that Donald Trump might win the Republicans’ presidential nomination.

But NBC News raised an interesting point this morning about the stages of grief.

[H]ave we finally reached the last stage, acceptance? Now none of this means that Trump is going to win the GOP presidential nomination. But it does mean that he’s become much more acceptable to Republicans than we ever thought possible; that he’s indelibly shaped the GOP contest in his own image; and that he’s in firm control of this GOP race.

I feel like this is the first week of the entire cycle in which I’ve seen and heard a growing number of Republicans reach this point. National Review’s Rich Lowry noted this week, for example, that from his conversations, the GOP establishment’s mood on Trump is “moving from fear/loathing to resignation/rationalization.” (MSNBC’s Chris Hayes added soon after that he’s heard the same thing.)

Jon Chait flagged examples of others making similar comments. The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis quoted a Republican source saying, “On the ground? Everyone literally is getting resigned to Trump as nominee.” Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary in the Bush/Cheney White House, said he now gives Trump a 60% chance of winning the party’s nomination.

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie added this morning, “[I]nstead of brushing Trump aside, Republican elites are learning to love the Donald and accept him as a potential nominee, or at least a candidate they can work with.”

Try to imagine commentary like this from, say, August. It would have been almost unfathomable.

This is not, by the way, a prediction saying I think Trump will be the nominee. A grand total of zero votes have been cast – the Iowa caucuses, which Trump may very well lose, is still 16 days away – and there are all kinds of questions we don’t know the answer to, not the least of which is whether the frontrunner’s backers will actually show up when it counts.

My point, however, is that we appear to have entered a very different, largely unexpected stage in the race: one in which Republicans stop obsessing over when Trump will collapse and start accepting the idea that maybe, just maybe, he won’t.

The “stages of grief” framework is admittedly a bit of a cliche, but NBC’s First Read may be onto something here. Republicans were initially in denial (“Come Labor Day, Trump will be an unpleasant memory”), which led to anger (“This guy is going to tear the party apart and hand Congress to Democrats!”). Soon after, there was some bargaining (“What can we do to elevate someone from the establishment ‘lane’?”), followed by plenty of depression (“I’ve seen the latest polls and I need another drink.”)

The fifth stage is acceptance. Watch this space.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 15, 22016

January 17, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, Establishment Republicans, GOP Primary Debates | , , , , | 4 Comments

“Calgary Ted”: What Goes Around Comes Around; Trump Shifts His Birther Gaze To Cruz

Who says Donald Trump lacks subtlety? The way he’s raising “birther” questions about his chief rival for the nomination is worthy of Machiavelli.

“I’d hate to see something like that get in his way,” Trump said of the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was born in Canada. Trump referred to the Constitution’s provision that “No Person except a natural born Citizen” — whatever that means — is eligible to be president.

“But a lot of people are talking about it,” Trump continued, in an interview with Post reporters, “and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Cruz flatly denied ever having a Canadian passport, telling CNN that this was just one of those “silly sideshows” the media love to engage in. But there is no question that he was born in Calgary, Alberta, to an American mother and a Cuban father. And there is no question that he had Canadian citizenship — before renouncing it in preparation for his presidential run.

Ah, what goes around comes around. For years, the Republican Party had nothing but patronizing nods and winks for the unhinged birthers — Trump included — who claimed, despite definitive proof to the contrary, that President Obama was born in some other country. Now, as party leaders desperately look for a way to deny Trump the nomination, the candidate with the best chance of doing so happens to have been born, without any doubt, in some other country.

Trump still leads the national Republican polls by a mile, while Cruz has pulled ahead of the rest of the field and now stands alone in second place. In first-to-vote Iowa, however, Cruz has taken a narrow lead over the bombastic billionaire and is favored to win. Hence Trump’s sudden concern over the birthplace of a man who perhaps should be nicknamed Calgary Ted.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump told The Post. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision.”

Most legal experts agree that Cruz is eligible to run; the fact that his mother was a U.S. citizen means he had citizenship from birth, which would appear to satisfy the “natural born” requirement. But the question of precisely what the Constitution means has never been fully explored by the courts.

The issue came up in 2008 because Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) the GOP nominee, was born in the Panama Canal Zone to parents who were U.S. citizens. The Senate went so far as to pass a nonbinding resolution “recognizing that John Sidney McCain, III, is a natural born citizen.”

You’d think McCain might be sympathetic to Cruz’s situation, but did I mention that what goes around comes around? Cruz has gone out of his way to alienate many of his Senate colleagues, and McCain has called him and his allies “wacko birds.” Perhaps that’s why McCain, when asked by a Phoenix television station to comment on Cruz’s eligibility, responded: “I think there is a question. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into.”

McCain noted that the Canal Zone was “a territory of the United States of America” when he was born. And there was a precedent, he argued, since 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it, too, was a U.S. territory.

Whereas Canada is a whole different country.

I confess that I find the whole flap absurd. Cruz should be deemed unsuitable for the presidency because of his wrongheaded ultra-right-wing views and his dangerous political ruthlessness, not because his American mother happened to be living in Canada when he was born.

But maybe Cruz will have to squirm a bit. A lawsuit has been filed in Vermont to keep him off the ballot there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if suits were filed in other states as well. Somehow I doubt he’ll get the same moral support from his fellow senators that McCain was given.

Has the party of Lincoln really come to this, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? The two men still insist that they like each other, their campaign-long bromance not extinguished. I’m reminded of something Machiavelli didn’t say but should have: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

 

By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 7, 2016

January 10, 2016 Posted by | Birthers, Birthright Citizenship, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Democracy Trumped”: Could Trump Actually Win The Election?

I’ve been having incessant conversations with friends, family, and colleagues about politics, and they all boil down to the same question. Could Donald Trump be our next president?

Here is an amalgam of the conversation. See which side you’re on:

—I think Trump might actually win.

—You mean the Republican nomination?

—No, I mean the election.

—Get serious. For starters, the Republican leaders would never allow that. They’d be much better off with Rubio-Kasich or Kasich-Rubio.

—Maybe they would. But there are no smoke-filled rooms anymore. Leaders don’t make these decisions. Primary voters do, and they love Trump. The more outrageous he is and the less connected to facts, the more his support grows.

—Yeah, but he’s a media phenomenon. He is such an egomaniac that he hasn’t even bothered to build an organization. He has no ground game. That’s why Cruz has pulled ahead on Iowa.

—Iowa is a special case because it’s a caucus state. In a society where people are increasingly disconnected from politics, Trump can motivate people just as a media candidate. If he needs an organization to get out his vote, he can buy one.

—He’s already peaked.

—Maybe, but under the new Republican rules that were put in place in 2014, all of the primaries after March 15 are winner-take-all. He only needs to come in first and he gets all of the state’s delegates, even if he has 25 percent of the vote and, say, the runner-up has 22 percent. The Republicans did this to get an early nominee. They didn’t foresee Trump.

—It’s still unlikely that he will get 50 percent of the delegates. If he gets less than 50 percent and it’s a brokered convention, all of the others will unite to prevent Trump from being the nominee.

—Think again. Trump may be a fool and a demagogue when it comes to actual policy, but one thing he’s good at is making deals. Suppose he comes into the convention with 45 percent of the delegates. All he has to do is offer the vice-presidential nomination to someone who controls at least 5 percent of the delegates, and he’s over the top. Can you imagine all of the other candidates, who really hate each other, somehow uniting to block Trump?

—Even if by some miracle he’s nominated, he can’t win. He has just alienated too many groups—women, blacks, Muslims, immigrants.

—That depends. If we have a few more terrorist incidents, or if some more skeletons come out of Hillary’s closet, all bets are off.

—Mainstream Republicans will vote for Hillary in droves.

—Yes, such as they are. But Hillary is not producing much enthusiasm, whereas Trump’s base is really fired up.

—But imagine the debates. This is complicated stuff. Hillary is so much better informed on the issues. He just makes it up.

—Right, but that doesn’t seem to hurt him. She is hawkish for a Democrat, but there is no way she will be tougher than Trump. And the fact that this is very complicated stuff and Hillary really understands the complexity—that doesn’t necessarily play to her advantage. A lot of voters want simple. And there is one more element.

—What’s that?

—Trump is already the most populist of the Republican candidates, and the most appealing to working-class voters. He doesn’t hate government the way the others do. You can count on him to move left after he is nominated, posing as the defender of Social Security and Medicare, and demanding higher taxes on the rich. Hillary, long allied with Wall Street, is less than an ideal opponent. She may take some Republican votes, but he may take more Democratic ones.

—That’s sobering. Do you happen to know the rules for emigrating to Canada?

 

By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, December 29, 2015

January 2, 2016 Posted by | Democracy, Donald Trump, Establishment Republicans, GOP Voters | , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“The Massive Irony For Ted Cruz”: Bromance On The Rocks: Surging Ted Cruz Begins To Poke Donald Trump

Ted Cruz’s moment has arrived.

Less than 10 weeks before Iowa voters cast the first votes of the presidential campaign season in Feb. 1 caucuses, a new Quinnipiac poll shows the Texas senator statistically tied with Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump for the lead in the state. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Cruz is tentatively beginning to take on the brash New York billionaire after months of cozying up.

Twice in recent days, the Texan has seized opportunities to distance himself from Trump’s policies and rhetoric.

First, Cruz disagreed with Trump after the New Yorker expressed openness to setting up a registry of Muslim Americans in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. “I’m a big fan of Donald Trump’s but I’m not a fan of government registries of American citizens,” Cruz told reporters in Iowa, according to Politico. “The First Amendment protects religious liberty, I’ve spent the past several decades defending religious liberty.”

Then over the weekend, he politely chided inflammatory rhetoric from fellow Republicans on immigration, citing Trump, in an interview with The Associated Press. “Tone matters,” Cruz said. “Are there some in the Republican Party whose rhetoric is unhelpful with regard to immigration? Yes.”

Cruz’s campaign said to expect more distinctions to come.

“Senator Cruz has drawn policy contrasts with his opponents before and he will continue to do so as he shares his own record and positions with voters on the campaign trail,” said Catherine Frazier, Cruz’s spokeswoman. “As the field continues to narrow, it’s only natural that the contrasts between the front-runners will become more evident.”

The contrast-drawing follows an unusual summer and fall bromance between Trump and Cruz that included a July meeting at Trump Tower in New York, instigated by the Texan, and a September rally on Capitol Hill headlined by the two Republican candidates. On Oct. 8, Cruz admitted his strategy was to eventually win over Trump’s supporters. “In time, I don’t believe Donald is going to be the nominee, and I think in time the lion’s share of his supporters end up with us,” he told WABC’s Rita Cosby.

Trump’s persistent national lead since July, defying a steady stream of predictions about an impending implosion, has forced a strategic shift for Cruz. The Texan is looking to capitalize as he rises to the top tier of the GOP race and as former Iowa front-runner Ben Carson sinks under scrutiny. The new Quinnipiac poll of Iowa Republicans, released Tuesday, found Trump at 25 percent, with Cruz at 23 percent — a 2 percent gap that is inside the survey’s margin of error. Carson was third in the Quinnipiac Poll with 18 percent.

“Ted Cruz should be taken very seriously. He’s laid out a very well thought out grassroots and fundraising network across the country. He’s been very strategic in his timing,” said Ron Bonjean, a veteran Republican operative who is not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns.

For Cruz, Trump presents an obstacle and an opportunity. The politically incorrect New Yorker has been outperforming the Texas firebrand at his own greatest talent: deploying scorched-earth rhetoric to channel the anti-establishment sentiments in the GOP. But Trump’s bravado gives Cruz a chance to paint himself as something nobody in Washington would accuse him of being: prudent and measured.

“There is massive irony here for Ted Cruz to be asking Donald Trump to tone it down,” said Bonjean. “He’s trying to look like the most adult candidate in the room — the most realistic alternative that could take away Trump voters.”

The irony is that Cruz has built an image upon angering Republican leaders with tactics like incubating the government shutdown of 2013, forcing weekend work as he makes a stand, and calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the floor this summer. It has been a tactical use of his Senate seat, Bonjean said, that has enabled Cruz to cultivate his conservative base and that now positions him to seize his political advantage. “He has built a foundation brick by brick for this moment.”

The appeal of Cruz is straightforward: He’s a crusader for tea party and evangelical Christian causes with the scars to show for smashing fists with a Republican Party leadership that is increasingly disliked by the base. And he has an unusually large war chest for a non-establishment figure — $26.5 million as of his third quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission, along with $37.8 million as of June 30 by a quartet of super PACs supporting him — towering over the fundraising of past Iowa caucus winners Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who are running again and trying to appeal to the same conservative base.

Cruz is battling on a second front with presidential rival and fellow Sen. Marco Rubio, seeking to cast the Floridian as an establishment-friendly foil to his insurgent persona. The two first-term senators, who have been neck and neck for third place in an average of national polls, are duking it out over Rubio’s support for immigration reform in 2013 and Cruz’s vote this year to curtail the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone data.

Meanwhile, Trump has suggested Cruz is copying his ideas, telling conservative radio host Laura Ingraham last week that “Ted Cruz is now agreeing with me 100 percent.” The confrontational New Yorker has also indicated he’ll take the gloves off if Cruz becomes a threat to his nomination.

“If he catches on, I guess we’ll have to go to war,” Trump said last Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

 

By: Sahil Kapur, Bloomberg News, Tribune News Service; The National Memo, November 24, 2015

November 26, 2015 Posted by | Donald Trump, GOP Presidential Candidates, Ted Cruz | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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