State of the Race - Super Tuesday II

Now that Super Tuesday II is over and both parties have just about settled on their nominees, let’s take a quick look back at some lessons learned about what has undoubtedly been the strangest election cycle in a long time:

The Hostile Takeover of the Republican Party Was Not Hard or Expensive. Donald Trump has stampeded his way to the GOP nomination largely on TV appearances and a Twitter feed. He has spent less than $25 million, did not even start advertising until January, and eschewed the conventional retail campaign tactics in Iowa and New Hampshire that are supposedly essential to winning those states (he finished a close second in the former and won the latter in a walk). Meanwhile, his opponents raised (and spent) close to $200 million to little effect. In Florida, they threw more than $20 million in negative ads at him and he still won by 18 points. Trump barely broke a sweat while outlasting current and former Governors and Senators that made up the biggest (though not the “deepest”) field of Republicans in history. For as odious as his politics are, his achievement may be the most impressive feat in recent political history.

Horse Race Reporting Has Completely Taken Over Presidential Politics. Did you know Marco Rubio wants to completely eliminate the capital gains tax? Or that Rand Paul called for temporarily stopping Muslims from 32 countries from entering the United States? That Chris Christie wanted a massive overhaul of Social Security? Of course you did not because the media has become completely consumed by polling and “who won the day” analysis popularized by publications like POLITICO and cable shows like With All Due Respect. At the same time, there has been even more emphasis on faux controversies like whether Hillary Clinton tipped properly at a Chipotle instead of a deeper dive into the policies of the candidates. 

The Media Could Not Make Marco Rubio Happen. No candidate benefitted more from favorable media coverage than Marco Rubio and no candidate so successfully manipulated the press for his own gain. He spun a third place finish in Iowa into a “victory,” sold the media on a “3-2-1” strategy in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, then ignored it when it turned into “3-5-2,” and finally bought himself another month in the race by selling himself as the consensus candidate even as he was getting rolled in state after state. When he trained his fire on Trump, it backfired spectacularly and then, in a final swing of shamelessness, he bemoaned the tone of a campaign he helped lower by making allegations about hand size and pants peeing. 

The Bern Is Real. Readers of my blog know where my allegiance lies, but I will give the 74-year old democratic socialist his due, his campaign legitimately tapped into left-wing frustration and his fundraising prowess is remarkable. The media coverage of him has been awful throughout. There is no question the media was slow off the mark in seeing his popularity, but they have now overcorrected even as he is at a 60/40 deficit in both delegates and the popular vote against Hillary Clinton while she enjoys a more than 9:1 lead in super delegates that will ultimately push her over the top - which is how Obama won the nomination in 2008 even though he and Mrs. Clinton split the popular vote very close to 50/50. Sanders has been the most effective insurgent since Gene McCarthy in 1968, but he has also benefitted from tissue thin vetting that has given him a wide berth to drum home his message. After losing all five races on Super Tuesday II, he would rise in stature if he dropped out, but instead, he will soldier on, even though he has no chance of winning the nomination. 

The Establishment Is Dead. At varying times, TIME magazine anointed Rand Paul “the most interesting man in politics,” Marco Rubio “the Republican savior,” and Chris Christie simply “THE BOSS.” (caps in original). This was before Jeb Bush brought his family name into the race and immediately vaulted to the top of the polls. Paul dropped out after Iowa, Christie after New Hampshire, and Bush after South Carolina. Rubio limped on with little money but plenty of endorsements and media support (see above) before dropping out after being humiliated in his home state of Florida. Other candidates, like 2012 runner-up Rick Santorum, 2008 runner-up Mike Huckabee, three-term Texas Governor Rick Perry, and South Carolina’s senior Senator Lindsey Graham, barely registered before quitting to no ado. If a year ago you had a reality TV star and the most hated man in Congress as your two most likely victors in the Republican field, bravo.

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The State of the Race For President

With one caucus and one primary under their collective belts, the Democrats and Republicans head west and south to Nevada and South Carolina before a spate of contests on March 1^st dubbed the “SEC Primary.” So, where are we in the race to succeed President Obama?

 

The Democrats: What was already a small field is now down to two competitors – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Clinton eked out a win in Iowa while Sanders romped in New Hampshire. While the delegate count from those two contests is close, Clinton also has more than 300 committed “super delegates” in her corner, while Sanders has fewer than ten. The conventional wisdom is that Clinton is failing to connect with the voters in the way Sanders is, and in particular, with young voters, who went for Sanders by massive margins in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Moreover, Sanders has mobilized a huge small donor fundraising effort that will allow him to match (if not exceed) Clinton’s advertising and other campaign outreach.

 

Analysis: Sanders’s popularity in two states with very liberal, almost exclusively white populations will be tested starting with Nevada and South Carolina and then, far more substantially throughout the Sun and Rust Belts. He has the benefit of making arguments for policies that promise things people like but have absolutely no chance of ever being enacted, while she is left with the pragmatic/practical argument of incremental change. In other words, he wants you to have your dessert before dinner, and she is telling you to eat your vegetables. In the debates, he is clearly out of his depth on foreign policy but the media has done little vetting of his policy positions, voting record, or anything else that ordinarily attends the coverage of a major party candidate for President – let’s hope that changes. In the meantime, Hillary would be best served by avoiding attacking him, the media clearly does not like it and it is not her best look. Better to focus on her lengthy record of achievement and advocacy and let that speak for itself. She is battling Sanders, Republicans, and the media, so she is best served by focusing on a positive message about herself because she is held, as none other than Mark Halperin has admitted, to a different standard than other candidates.

 

The Likely Outcome: Clinton rallies slowly in Nevada and South Carolina before winning decisive victories on March 1^st and 15^th that may not secure the nomination, but will make the math inevitable.

 

The Wild Card: Pent up frustration over Obama’s inability to pass progressive legislation (e.g., single payer health care), the media’s not-so-veiled loathing of Clinton, and a massive surge of young voters create a tsunami wave that crushes her and delivers the Democratic nomination to a 74 year old socialist who was not even a registered member of the party a year ago.

 

The Republicans: Allow me to pause and chuckle at the idea that when this cycle started the media claimed the Republicans boasted the “deepest field” in their history. The current front runner is a reality TV star and the guy running right behind him is the most hated man in Congress. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush has spent $100 million to finish sixth in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire and former “it” candidates Scott Walker and Chris Christie barely registered before bowing out.

 

Anyway, with that off my chest, we are down to five contenders – Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. History tells us that in the modern era, the Republicans have picked the winner of either Iowa or New Hampshire, which would reduce the options to Trump or Cruz, but perhaps this year is the exception that proves the rule.

 

Analysis: The outsider/batshit crazy wing of the Republican Party commanded a majority of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire (if you dump in the Fiorina and Carson crumbs), so the only hope for someone other than Trump or Cruz would be to get in a three way race (worst threesome ever?) where those two would split the “anti-establishment” vote and the rest of the party coalesced around this third person. The only problem? Well, two actually: first, there is no guarantee that such a coalescing would occur. Trump’s protectionist message may sell very well in Ohio or Michigan, so even if Kasich was left standing as the alternative to him and Cruz, there is no guarantee he would win that vote; second, if the Kasich/Bush/Rubio clustering continues, they may all stay in the race, leaving Trump or Cruz to rack up wins by collecting somewhere between 25-35 percent of the vote in each state.

 

The Likely Outcome: Again, history shows that even with all this uncertainty, the likelihood is that a winner will emerge and right now, that guy looks to be Donald J. Trump. That a political novice showed a better fingertip feel for the electorate than competitors with decades more experience and millions in consultants as well as the entire political journalist class is pretty remarkable. Cruz could try to monopolize the evangelical vote and win a narrow majority of delegates, but if the race is down to him and Trump, I suspect the powers that be will hold their nose and go with the businessman who does deals, not the kamikaze pilot who everyone hates.

 

The Wild Card: Trump melts down, Bush, Rubio or Kasich emerge as a consensus “establishment” pick and the party happily steps over Cruz’s political carcass as the GOP eyes a return to the White House in a race against a 74 year old socialist from Vermont.

The Trump Bump

When Donald Trump entered the Presidential race on June 16th, his entry was met with derision (the press), consternation (fellow Republicans), and bemusement (Democrats). The event itself was mercilessly mocked, from his egotistical escalator descent to the members of the audience who were paid to be there, few thought "Mr. Trump" was doing anything other than what he tends to do - pump up his own "brand" through bombast and braggadocio. 

Whatever lift Trump may have received from the announcement was quickly deflated when he tore into the issue of immigration, and specifically, describing how murderers, drug dealers, and rapists were crossing the border to wreak havoc here in the good old U.S. of A. Business partners like Macy's (where Trump-branded menswear is sold, much of it made in China (irony)), NBC (home of his reality TV show "The Apprentice"), and Serta (yes, Virginia, there is a Trump-branded mattress), quickly cut ties with the real estate mogul. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to Trump's expected obscurity - his poll numbers took off. The more attention the media gave Trump's incendiary comments, the more popular he became, quickly vaulting into second place in polls taken in Iowa and North Carolina and, amazingly, leaping into first place in a YouGov/Economist poll taken nationwide of Republican voters. Just yesterday, he spoke to more than 4,000 people in Arizona, a crowd that dwarfed the largest ones drawn by any of his challengers. Trump has tapped into a vein of Republican voters who are deeply distrustful of Washington and "the establishment," fear the demographic changes going on in our country, and want someone to stand up for them. That their standard bearer would be a New York City real estate developer with a ridiculous hairdo and no filter was missed entirely by the press corps. 

All this all happened while Jeb Bush, who the media is breaking its back to carry water for, announced he had raised more than $114 million, much of it through a Super PAC affiliated with his candidacy. The media is stuck in the narrative that name recognition + deep pocketed donors = front runner even though Jeb has done little to merit this title. He is a desultory public speaker, stumbled badly when asked a rudimentary question about Iraq, and has not had much in the way of negative press coverage of what one would think would be hot button topics like his handling of Terri Schiavo while Governor of Florida or the fact that almost all of his foreign policy advisors served his father, brother, or both and what that might say about the direction he would lead the country.

Indeed, it seems like the dirty little secret to Jeb's candidacy is that he may end up being an emperor with no clothes. I will admit, way back in 2011, I foresaw him being nominated for many of the same reasons pundits still cling to - his family name, his experience, and sobriety, but the Republican party of 2015 is a different place than it was even four short years ago. Trump's rhetoric may be overheated, but it is not substantively much different than what you hear on Fox News or by many other leading Republicans (just google "Steve King cantaloupes"). And that's just on immigration. Other wedge social issues, like same sex marriage and contraception put most of the leading contenders for the nomination well outside mainstream thought in our country, but little attention is being paid to those topics because Trump is taking up so much oxygen. 

For all the money Bush has raised, the polls do not bear out much enthusiasm for his candidacy. Scott Walker is in the lead in Iowa, and while Bush leads (barely) in New Hampshire, the Granite State has been notoriously unfriendly to his family - Poppy Bush was crushed by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and stumbled badly against Pat Buchanan in 1992, and in 2000, John McCain blew out George W. Bush by almost 20 points. After that, the primary calendar moves to South Carolina, which has a favorite son candidate in the race and whose politics are more conservative than Bush's, and Nevada, where the Rand Paul acolytes are ready to put their man over the top. A string of Southern primaries have moved up to garner greater attention and there again, Bush may struggle against more conservative and evangelical opponents like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum (who did very well in the Deep South in 2012), and Rick Perry. 

Contrary to what his brother was able to do in 2000 - chase off challengers and secure endorsements through the might of his fundraising acumen - the Republican field this year is larger than it has ever been and Jeb has not separated himself in either national or early primary polls. If anything, his enormous financial haul speaks solely to the allure of his family name, something he claims he would not need (and would not use) to get elected. Of course, you won't hear anything approaching negative coverage from the Beltway media - they are too focused on pumping up Jeb as the "adult in the room" and the recipient of a polling surge (from 12 to 15%!) but Trump's popularity and sudden rise also illustrate something that is becoming more obvious with each passing election - the disconnect between the Beltway bubble and the rest of America. Fifteen years ago, another Bush hoovered up tens of millions of dollars and was anointed the frontrunner. Today, that narrative no longer holds true. 

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