“Ted Cruz’s Balancing Act; Anti-Trump Or Trump Lite?”: A Party Suddenly Divided Between Satan And Everybody Else
Ted Cruz took a break from his usual performance as a hammer-headed movement conservative yesterday and tried on the ill-fitting but perhaps essential clothes of a party unifier while in a private meeting of New York Republicans, according to a report from Politico‘s Katie Glueck.
Ted Cruz on Monday acknowledged he’s concerned about how a contested convention might “fracture” the party ahead of the general election, especially if Donald Trump lashes out should he lose the primary.
“There is no doubt, we are likely headed to a contested convention,” the Texas senator told a private gathering of Republicans here in Manhattan, according to audio of the meeting obtained by POLITICO. “One of the greatest risks of a contested convention is, if you come out with a party fractured, it potentially makes you vulnerable going into the general election. I believe, in a contested convention, we’ll have a strong advantage and we will earn the majority of the delegates and unify the party. But in that circumstance it’s not difficult to imagine Donald Trump getting very upset, and making his upsetness [known].”
This solicitude for the feelings of Trump and his supporters is impressive for the guy who in the vocabulary of the mogul’s campaign is routinely referred to as “Lyin’ Ted.” But it’s a real issue for him. If he’s the nominee, he’s already going to be a general election underdog. Dealing with a Trump Rump faction, whether or not it encompasses a third-party or indie campaign, could be fatal for Cruz. And he does have some natural ties to the Trump constituency in terms of being a Republican more eager to shoot terrorists as they allegedly cross the border than over in some godforsaken Middle Eastern country.
At the same time, though, Cruz cannot really start worrying about Trump voters until he’s fully used the #NeverTrump movement to put himself into a position to win the nomination. If Cruz goes out of his way to remind Republican officeholders that he was their nightmare candidate until Trump showed up as the real devil, the temptation to go for the gold in a contested convention and blow up Cruz on a third ballot after Cruz blows up Trump on the second ballot will be powerful.
Beyond all that, you just don’t get the sense that the junior senator from Texas was cut out to be a unity figure, even for a party suddenly divided between Satan and everybody else. Unity candidates are reassuring and have a knack for making you see your own reflection in their soft and soulful eyes. Cruz has the persona of someone who’s been told by his crazy father a thousand times that God has chosen him to redeem America from its secular socialist captors. He’s in the presidential race not to unite Republicans but to smite Babylon and maybe bring on the End Times. He thus does not represent a natural compromise between those who want to lower their marginal tax rates and melt the polar caps and those who mainly want to ensure they’ll never have to “press 1 for English” or hold their tongues in the presence of women and minorities ever again.
Cruz’s ultimate appeal to non-apocalyptic Republicans is as a necessary evil in an extreme situation. That’s a low bar all right, but not one Ted Cruz will leap with any height to spare.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, April 18, 2016
“Bernie’s ‘Momentum’ Is A Farce”: Sanders Owes His Recent Winning Streak To Demographics, Not Momentum
If the prevailing media narrative is to be believed, as we head into next Tuesday’s crucial New York state primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – by virtue of winning seven of the last eight Democratic nominating contests – has gained crucial momentum, while Hillary Clinton has seen her earlier momentum slip away.
But is that true?
It’s certainly a narrative that Sanders and his supporters have tried to popularize in their recent public comments. As Sanders told George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday on “This Week“: “In the last three and a half weeks, we have reduced [Clinton’s] margin by a third. … We believe that we have the momentum. We believe that the polling is showing that we’re closing the gap. Actually, as you may have noticed, of the last three national polls out there, we have defeated Secretary Clinton in two of them. So there’s no question I think the momentum is with us.”
In truth, the answer depends in part on what one means by momentum, which turns out to be a much-touted but often poorly defined concept. When pundits talk about momentum, they usually refer to one of two possibilities. The first refers to the winnowing of candidates, as typically happens early in the nominating process. When this occurs, it can appear that the remaining candidates gain “momentum” by virtue of picking up some of the departed candidates’ support. There is evidence indicating this type of momentum does occur. However, that’s not the type of momentum that pundits are referencing now, more than halfway through the fight for the Democratic nomination. Bernie’s recent victories haven’t driven anyone from the race.
There is a second type of momentum, however, one more consistent with how the term is being used in the current media narrative. It is the belief that a succession of electoral victories can increase the probability that the winning candidate will do better in subsequent contests simply by virtue of those previous wins. Under this scenario, winning begets more winning – the more wins, the greater the subsequent momentum – and losing has the opposite effect. When pressed to clarify how this type of momentum operates, proponents explain that winning leads to increased campaign contributions and more volunteers – resources that ultimately translate into more votes, and thus more wins. For those making this momentum-as-bandwagon argument, Bernie’s current winning streak is clear proof that his momentum is very real – each victory during the last three-and-a-half weeks made it more likely that he would win the next contest. For this reason, Sanders and his supporters believe he is poised to do very well in next Tuesday’s New York primary.
There’s only one problem with this scenario. There’s just not much evidence that momentum of this type exists, at least not in the recent context of Sanders’ victories. Instead, the likelier explanation for Sanders’ recent success (as I noted in my recent Professor Pundits contribution) is that the Democrats have held a string of contests on terrain that was particularly favorable to Sanders. Demographics, and not momentum, has been the key to his success.
It’s no secret that Sanders does best in caucus states dominated by more ideologically motivated participants and in states with low minority populations. As it turns out, six of Sanders’ last seven victories came in largely white caucus states. (Hawaii, a caucus state, was a demographic exception.) In fact, 11 of his 15 victories to date have come in caucus states. (He almost gained a 12th victory in the Iowa caucus, where he finished a close second to Clinton.) On the other hand, she has won 16 of the 21 primaries held so far. Indeed, if one constructs a regression equation to explain Sanders’ vote share, the two biggest predictors are whether it is a caucus state and whether it had a large proportion of white, liberal voters. By this standard, one might argue he actually underperformed expectations in Wyoming, a largely white, caucus state, where he won “only” about 56 percent of the vote, less than he earned in several similar nearby states. More importantly, he split the 14 Wyoming delegates evenly with Clinton. That’s not exactly the “momentum” he needs.
This is not to say that momentum is a completely meaningless concept. There is some evidence that voters’ choices in the primaries are influenced in part by perceptions regarding how likely it is that the candidate is going to be elected. If a candidate can clear a certain threshold of perceived electoral viability, her chances of gaining additional votes increase.
But this is precisely where the Sanders’ momentum argument works against itself. Because Sanders’ recent victories have come predominantly in smaller caucus states and because of the Democratic Party’s proportional delegate allocation rules, Sanders’ winning streak hasn’t substantially cut into Clinton’s delegate lead, at least not nearly enough to alter the perception that she remains the clear favorite to win the nomination. Since March 22, when Sanders’ current win streak began, he has gained a net of only 70 pledged delegates on Clinton and still trails her by more than 250 pledged delegates. Her lead expands to more than 700 if one includes superdelegates. Moreover, Clinton can more than wipe out Sanders’ recent gains with a strong showing in her home state of New York next Tuesday, where there are 247 pledged delegates at stake.
This failure to clear the viability threshold has two unfortunate consequences for Sanders. First, despite his claims to the contrary, his recent victories provide little reason for Clinton’s superdelegate supporters to change their minds and back Bernie. Second, to the extent that perceptions of electoral viability matter to prospective voters in upcoming states, it is Clinton and not Sanders who is most likely to benefit. She is the perceived front-runner, and thus she is more likely to gain the support of voters who want to back the race favorite. And those perceptions of viability are not likely to change in the foreseeable future, as the Democratic race returns to terrain, in the form of larger, more demographically diverse primary states, likely more favorable to Clinton, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California. On the other hand, and unfortunately for Sanders, only one of the remaining 16 Democratic contests is a caucus state.
Does momentum exist? Yes, if one means the added benefit a candidate receives by virtue of being perceived as the most viable candidate, electorally speaking. Based on that definition, at this point in the Democratic race, it is Clinton and not Sanders who has the better claim to possessing the “Big Mo.” And that’s not likely to change in the immediate future.
By: Matthew Dickinson, Professor, Middlebury College; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, April 14, 2016
“True America And Those Alien Regions”: Republicans Sneer At ‘New York Values.’ That’s Their Problem
When we look back on the 2016 primary campaign, few images will be as bizarre and amusing as Ted Cruz visiting a matzo bakery in Brooklyn and singing a few rounds of “Dayenu” with a bunch of kids. But that’s hardly been the only bit of weirdness coming out of the campaign in the last couple of days. “This is like being so alive, being in New York,” said John Kasich after chowing down on some Italian food in the Bronx.
For a few days, Republicans will pretend to be smitten with the Big Apple; it’s like a foreign trip, where the candidates come to a strange and unfamiliar land to behold the natives and sample their exotic culture.
But as we watch, remember this: If someone other than Donald Trump wins the nomination, he will not be returning to New York after its primary a week from Tuesday, unless it’s to raise money. And that’s another indication of Republicans’ fundamental weakness when it comes time to try to assemble a national majority in order to win the White House.
You might object that this isn’t just a Republican problem; there are many places in this great and diverse country of ours where Democrats are not competitive. And that’s absolutely true. In a general election, the Democratic candidate isn’t going to be campaigning in Mississippi or Oklahoma.
But there’s a difference in the way politicians in the two parties approach those alien regions. Democrats always insist that they’d love to have the support of voters in the South or conservative parts of the Midwest and West. They don’t attack those places as fundamentally un-American. Theirs may be just as much a regional party as the GOP, but they won’t ever say so.
Republicans, on the other hand, regularly assert that the places where they’re strongest are the true America, where the most virtuous people live and the real heart of our country resides. When Ted Cruz attacked Donald Trump for having “New York values” back in January, it wasn’t anything we hadn’t heard before. Indeed, Republicans everywhere (and a few Democrats, but this is mostly a Republican thing) will say they have “[insert our state] values,” as a way of charging that their opponents are strangers who see the world in fundamentally different ways than we do.
The truth, though, is that Cruz was absolutely right when he said that “New York values” are not what Republican voters are looking for, no matter how much support Trump has. When pressed on this point Cruz will say that he was talking about liberal ideology, but it’s much more than that. It’s the fact that New York is urban, young, constantly changing, and perhaps most of all, dominated by immigrants and minorities (more than a third of New York’s population was born outside the U.S. and two-thirds are non-white).
Like many other big cities, New York reflects the diverse coalition Democrats count on to push them over 50 percent, much more so than the nearly all-white GOP. That’s what makes it a threatening place to the typical Republican voter who wants America to go back to being the country it was when they were kids.
And interestingly enough, it’s the New Yorker Donald Trump who seems to have the strongest hold on the Republicans who feel that kind of threat most acutely. In a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 64 percent of Trump supporters agreed with the statement, “it bothers me when I come in contact with immigrants who speak little or no English,” something that your average New Yorker experiences just about every day. A much smaller (though still substantial) 46 percent of Cruz supporters and 38 percent of John Kasich’s supporters agreed. Trump may hail from Queens and live in Manhattan, but it’s his ability to tap into the fears and resentments of people whom you couldn’t pay to come to New York that has put him in the lead.
One might argue that the long primary campaign discourages regionalism and divisiveness by forcing candidates to pander to all kinds of Americans from all over the country. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t actually work out that way in practice. Cruz is on the defensive a bit right now over the “New York values” comment (Kasich has a new ad attacking him over it, featuring a vaguely New York-ish-sounding narrator talking about how Kasich is in touch with “our New York values”). But he knew exactly what he was doing when he said it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 8, 2016
“The Way We Never Were”: Decades On, Advocates Of ‘Family Values’ Still Miss The Point
A quarter-century ago, amid a political environment obsessed with the decline of “family values,” a book was published that methodically blew holes in the myth-making at the heart of this outlook.
The title summed it up: “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Stephanie Coontz’s 1992 book was a work of first-rate history, and it undermined a slew of common misperceptions of family life in America, but it was also a plea to take off the rose-colored glasses that cause us to get so many political issues wrong.
Fittingly, Coontz’s publisher, Basic Books, has released a revised edition just as the moralizing we’ve come to expect from presidential campaigns kicks into overdrive.
You’ll recognize the common conceits: that families must have two parents at all cost; that some people thrive while others fail based on their self-reliance; that private enterprise is the sole engine of economic growth.
Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, is research director at the Council on Contemporary Families, which highlights her work and that of similar scholars. It’s always enlightening.
Here’s the problem she consistently highlights, one that is endemic to politics: Twist the past and base current public policy on these misperceptions, and you will end up with a destructive effort that exacerbates the problems of inequality.
You can’t make America great “again,” a la Donald Trump, if you are clueless to what work life really looked like for most of the 20th century.
You can’t restore traditional family values, a la Ted Cruz, if you start with an interpretation of family that never existed in America.
And you certainly won’t resonate as a ceiling crasher for women, a la Hillary Clinton, if you continue to encourage policies and business structures that promote inequality between men and women and high- and low-wage workers.
Yet it is from this stewpot of historical illiteracy that many politicians ladle out their rhetoric, and voters gobble it up.
When the book was first published in the 1990s, experts of the day were wringing their hands over a range of issues: increasing rates of out-of-wedlock childbirth, numbers of single mothers, women in the workforce and welfare dependency. So many of the studies seemed to focus on women and the imagined threats from their changing roles in society — especially the threats they posed to children.
Yet what Coontz discovered back then would still be news to many: “I found that the male breadwinner family of the 1950s was a very recent, short-lived invention and that during its heyday, rates of poverty, child abuse, marital unhappiness and domestic violence were actually higher than in the more diverse 1990s.”
Here’s another tidbit: Almost a quarter of 1950s brides were pregnant on their wedding day. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician alluding mistily to the chaste and virtuous past.
So often we hear that unwed motherhood is a primary cause of poverty and economic insecurity. But Coontz cites current studies showing that income inequality is four times more important than family structure in explaining the growth in poverty.
Getting the story on poverty right is hugely important. It would force any honest politician to focus on things more likely to affect families: quality educational opportunities, access to childcare and family leave policies.
And those advantages are where America, in comparison to other industrialized countries, has really fallen down in recent decades.
Finally, there is what Coontz terms the myth of self-reliance. This one trips up Republicans and Democrats alike. It starts with a revisionist understanding of the role government has long played in aiding businesses, mortgage holders, farmers and college students, as well as the poor in various benefit and tax-credit programs.
Yet only some people are singled out as “takers”: minorities, single mothers and the like. The point is to make slashing their benefits seem like an act of fairness. After all, it is reasoned, it’s important to make people self-sufficient as well to balance state budgets.
“Legislators remain wedded to the historically disproven notion that subsidies to banks and corporations create jobs while subsidies to families create only laziness,” Coontz writes. The data say otherwise.
Remember that the next time a politician starts talking about his family’s humble beginnings and claims “we always stood on our own two feet.”
Media, it must be said, often echo these false narratives — perhaps because it’s so easy. What Coontz’s invaluable research shows us, though, is that to help families we must first understand them. Many of our politicians aren’t really trying.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, April 8, 2016
“A Very Enthusiastic Cycle For Democrats”: There Are New Signs That Trump Is Indeed Energizing Democrats
It’s been a long time — eight years, to be exact — since the words Democrats and enthusiasm have been credibly uttered in the same sentence. And even now, it seems the most enthusiastic Democrats are those highly attached to a presidential candidate who is probably going to lose the nomination on what will feel like a technical knockout or just points. Meanwhile, Republicans are very excited — or in some cases, freaked out — and are participating in primaries at high levels.
Observers have naturally wondered if the very things that so excite Republicans in the presidential contest will eventually excite Democrats — negatively, of course, by creating the specter of an extremist presidency occupied by either a white-identity politician or a throwback to Barry Goldwater.
Now via Greg Sargent comes some data from Stan Greenberg on engagement in the election indicating the Trump Factor could indeed be making a difference with Democratic groups:
Last November, Greenberg warned that the lack of engagement of Dem voter groups loomed as a big problem for Democrats. Now, however, this new poll shows a big bump in engagement among college educated women, minorities, white unmarried women, and Democrats overall. This would suggest a potential downside with Trump’s apparent strategy of unleashing white (male) backlash: Anything Trump says and does to keep that backlash at fever pitch — like the things he’s been all over the media for lately — risks increasing the engagement of Dem leaning groups.
It’s the age-old problem with highly conspicuous voter-mobilization techniques: the more loudly you labor to rev up your “base,” the more you do your opponents’ work in revving up their base as well. It’s why Get Out the Vote programs are often more effective when they operate under the radar screen. There’s nobody more on the radar screen than Donald J. Trump.
If Cruz manages to beat Trump in Cleveland, here’s guessing his scary-to-Democrats features will become rapidly more evident when they are no longer eclipsed by Trump’s. There will always be a few Susan Sarandons out there who insist there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties unless one or the other is under entirely new management. But this could turn out to be a very enthusiastic cycle for Democrats even if they have some misgivings about their nominee. Back in the heyday of racial politics in the 1960s and 1970s, there was talk of reactionary backlash sometimes stimulating progressive frontlash. That could be what we are beginning to see right now.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, April 1, 2016
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