State of the Race: And Then There Were Five

What was once described as the “deepest” bench of Republican candidates for President has been winnowed down to two political neophytes, two first-term U.S. Senators, and a two-term governor with almost no chance of winning. 

Eight months ago Donald Trump entered the race for President as a laughingstock and is now the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. In just the past week, he insulted the most recent Republican ex-President in front of more than 10 million debate viewers using talking points that sounded like they came from Moveon.org or Code Pink, got skewered by the Pope, and dismissed out of hand any changes to Social Security or Medicare. The end result? He won the South Carolina primary going away. The breadth and depth of Trump’s win was across the board - he won moderates and fought Ted Cruz to a tie among evangelicals. He also won the military vote even as he had questioned whether the Bush Administration had lied about WMD in Iraq.

Meanwhile, his closest two competitors are the most hated man in the Senate (Ted Cruz) and one of his colleagues (Marco Rubio) who has a penchant for giving victory speeches when he loses and had arguably the single worst debate meltdown since Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle he was no Jack Kennedy. Lagging behind those two men are Ben Carson, whose entire campaign appears to have been an elaborate direct order mail fundraising scheme that collected money to pay for more direct mail fundraising (there is a less polite name for it, but I won’t go there), and John Kasich, the two-term Ohio Governor and former U.S. Congressman who had a brief moment in the New Hampshire sun (2nd place) that now seems like a hundred years ago. 

Where do we go from here? The Nevada caucuses are in two days and then seven days after that the so-called “SEC Primary” will hand out nearly a quarter of all primary delegates. Polling has been spotty in most places, but most show Trump ahead, with a few exceptions (Texas, where Cruz is narrowly winning and Minnesota, the one state Rubio may actually be able to win). Jeb Bush’s scant support can now be distributed, though polling suggests the impact will be negligible other than in the race for donor dollars (which have not moved the needle against Trump). 

In fact, while the conventional wisdom is that most deep-pocketed donors will move from Bush to Rubio based on amorphous “electability,” I would not be surprised if Kasich gets a second look, especially if Bush endorses him. While Rubio projects youth and vigor, he has also shown that when pressed, he will fold, not a comforting thought if Trump trains his rhetorical sights on the Florida Senator. Chris Christie’s exposure of Rubio’s soft underbelly would trouble me if I were a Republican bigwig, whereas Kasich’s blue collar roots, lengthy resume and residency in the Ohio Governor’s mansion would seem like the safer bet. Cruz is radioactive to D.C. Republicans and has not shown he can expand his base beyond very conservative and/or highly religious voters. 

Ultimately, it may not matter. Trump has a solid core of support that cannot be moved and the idea that as more people drop out their supporters will coalesce around a single alternative like Rubio is dubious. The key for Trump is whether he can continue “telling it like it is” while refining his message enough to give comfort that if he wins the nomination he will not blow up the country. The reality is that if anyone besides Trump had performed so strongly in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and likely Nevada, no one would question whether that person would win the nomination; but because Trump’s candidacy is so outside the box of conventional Beltway thinking, they *still* cannot get their heads around that idea. 

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Donald Trump Is All In

A while back, Chris Hayes hosted a Facebook chat where he was asked a question about why MSNBC airs Lock Up, a show about life in prison, for hours on end during the weekend when the network, in the questioner’s view, should be airing news or talk. Hayes’s answer, as is his wont, was rational, thought through, and a bit contrarian. Essentially, he said that Lock Up is a ratings winner for the network, indeed, the show’s viewership was greater than Hayes’s eponymous weeknight show, and that you should not presume that just because you think a program is lowest-common-denominator and a waste of time, that others feel the same.

I have been thinking about this question and answer in the context of the all-consuming political Berserker that is Donald Trump. You see, the endless hours of cable TV time, column inches in print and online, and predictable “this will be the end of Trump” thought pieces have done nothing to stop Trump’s rise. If anything, he is stronger now than the day he entered the race for President, with much bombast (and predictions of his immediate demise) declaring the need to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. 

What is being missed, either intentionally or through ignorance, is the phenomenon that Hayes neatly captured – what is said along the Acela Corridor or on Meet The Press by journalists and pundits who consume political conventional wisdom like oxygen is far removed from the “ordinary” Americans in fly-over country who have fueled Trump’s rise. Trump has broken every rule of politics and not paid a penalty for it and the people who analyze it are unable to interpret it because they cannot see why he is getting away with it. And they cannot see that because they are not willing to admit there is a virulent strain of nativism, racism, and xenophobia that courses through the veins of today’s Republican Party. To the Beltway crowd, the problem is a lack of bi-partisanship exemplified by Obama’s failure to invite Republicans to the White House for cocktail hour or Senators no longer getting all chummy after hours. 

This facile diagnosis of what ails us ignores the extreme rightward tilt in the Republican Party that would run off Ronald Reagan (he of the 1986 “amnesty” law, tax increases, and “cut and run” strategy in Lebanon). And this anger should not come as a surprise to anyone. It was less than six years ago that Tea Party activists shouted down their elected officials at town hall meetings, bought into right-wing paranoia over “death panels,” and protested against the Affordable Care Act waiving signs that depicted the President as a bone-in-his-nose witch doctor, Adolf Hitler or Heath Ledger’s Joker. That same virulent strain of bigotry and intolerance that still questions the President’s birth place or religion is simply being transferred to fears over people illegally entering our country and Muslims. 

Of course, Trump may not get to the finish line, but the media downplays the fact that many of his competitors are simply peddling a lightly sanitized version of his basest prejudices. Whether it is Ben Carson’s opinion that a Muslim should not be President, Marco Rubio’s call not just to close mosques but places where “radicals” might congregate (as if they would hold up a sign or something?), Ted Cruz’s effort to allow states to “opt out” of accepting Syrian refugees, Jeb Bush’s call to only allow Syrian refugees who are Christians into the country, or Rand Paul’s proposed legislation that would bar immigration from 32 majority Muslim countries, these ideas all traffic on the same side of the street, but are just a click or two to the “left” of temporarily barring any Muslim from America.  

For almost six months, the media has dismissed Trump’s rise as a novelty act that would wear thin or an ego that would implode. Instead of continuing to discount or denigrate his campaign, the media would be far better served trying to understand why he is doing so well and not simply fulminating against it.

Stuff Happens

After nine people were murdered in yet another mass shooting, Jeb Bush shrugged it off - "stuff happens" he said - and when that "stuff" happens, apparently, the last thing you do is try to figure out how to make sure less of it happens in the future. Bush's offensive remarks were also exposed as foolish - he mentioned that if a child dies in a pool, the inclination may be to require that fences be built around them, but that might not be the best idea - ignoring the fact that the state of Florida passed such a law when he was Governor. 

Of course, this was just the latest in a series of foot-in-mouth moments for Jeb. Whether it was his four day fumble over whether the country should have invaded Iraq, his loose use of the term "anchor babies" (clarified the next day to claim he was speaking of Asian-Americans?!), or his suggestion that his brother "kept us safe" (well sure, if you ignore the whole 9/11 thing), it is a good thing Jeb has a Greek chorus of journalists swooping in to defend him or put "context" around his musings:

The media's focus on Trump's rise and Hillary's email has papered over two simple facts - (1) Jeb Bush is not a very good candidate and (2) the more Republican primary voters hear and see him, the less they like him. Bush's polling has sagged the longer this campaign has gone and just dropped to 4% in the latest national Pew poll. Bush has also fallen well back of the contenders in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire but it was not until this past week that the idea Bush is in trouble seeped into the mainstream media with a piece in The Washington Post, even though his swoon has been going on for weeks. 

And it may be that the conventional wisdom is true - that a $120 million war chest can be deployed to pump up Bush's flagging campaign, but the lay of the land does not look promising - Bush is a poor fit for Iowa and its social/religious conservative voters, who have handed people like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum their caucus votes and New Hampshire has been exquisitely anti-Bush since 1992, when Pat Buchanan took 37% of the vote against President George H.W. Bush and then in 2000 when John McCain thumped then-Governor George W. Bush by 17 points. The March 1st "SEC Primary" is steeped in more southern states unfriendly to Bush (he's behind Rubio and Trump in his adopted home state of Florida) and by then, the jig may be up.

No one is more surprised than me. After all, I had Bush as the 2016 GOP nominee way back in October 2011, more than a year before Obama crushed Romney. But what I, and I think many in the media missed is how hard right the GOP primary electorate has become. Most polls show the support of three candidates with no prior political experience totaling close to if not more than 50% of the vote. While pundits like to trot out Romney's struggles in 2012 as a potential caution against writing off Bush, Romney never sank so low in the polls and never lost sight of the front-runner even as that seat was rotating among lightweights like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. 

No, Bush has gotten a pass for so long simply because of his last name and the media's expectation that history will repeat itself - that Republicans "fall in line" at the end of the day and go for the name brand. But what if this time is different? After all, stuff happens.

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