Debate Recap: Important Things That Went Unsaid

Last night's Republican debate was perhaps the least strategically interesting of the season, and not just because one of the more strategically interesting candidates declined to attend. With a few minor exceptions, the remaining candidates did not engage each other extensively, and the moderators frequently lobbed single questions at specific candidates before moving on without asking others to respond. Marco Rubio continues to be engaged in a two-front war with Ted Cruz on one side and Jeb Bush on the other, but that was already obvious before the debate (especially for those of us living in a media market that encompasses the state of New Hampshire; if you thought you'd never see an ad suggesting that Cruz was actually a closet socialist, prepare to be surprised).

One brief moment, however, struck me as revealing—not about any of the candidates in particular, but with respect to the Republican Party as a whole. Bret Baier asked Chris Christie about his plans to cut federal spending, noting that many Republicans promise to shrink the size of government on the campaign trail but fail to do so once elected. "Can you name even one thing that the federal government does now," Baier asked, "that it should not do at all?"

Christie adroitly chose to answer by pledging to eliminate federal funding of Planned Parenthood, a currently popular conservative objective, and responded to Baier's followup query of "anything bigger than that?" by arguing that nothing could be bigger than "thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children being murdered in the womb." But Baier's question raised perhaps the central chronic difficulty that Republican politicians face: how to fulfill conservative demands for a smaller, less onerous government without cutting programs and policies that most voters like, and Christie's answer did not fully address this dilemma. (Whatever the other merits of defunding Planned Parenthood, doing so will not itself balance the budget.)

Even Ted Cruz, who portrays himself as the conservative conscience of the Senate, responded to a subsequent Baier question about health care by sidestepping the issue of whether his plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deprive millions of Americans of the coverage expansion provided by the law. Cruz mentioned several conservative health care reform ideas—selling health insurance across state lines, expanding health savings accounts, severing insurance from employment—but policy experts do not believe that these measures would expand coverage to most of the citizens who gained insurance under the ACA. Cruz, too, recognizes the political dangers that lurk in committing oneself too explicitly to the revocation of existing government benefits.

It's too bad that this debate, just like most of the other Republican debates this year, devoted so little time to the issues of taxes, spending, health care, and other forms of domestic policy, given their centrality to the interests of voters and the actual responsibilities of the federal government. But if the current rise of ideological purism in the Republican Party is at least partially due to the gap between the ambitious campaign promises and modest governing record of GOP officeholders, the current set of candidates seems unlikely to resolve this tension by applying their general anti-government rhetoric to the specific government programs that constitute the bulk of the federal budget.

Donald Trump, Media Darling

Last night, Donald Trump abruptly pulled out of Thursday's Fox debate. Moreover, he did so via a statement that included references to his best-selling book and the amount of his net worth, characterized the candidate as "an extremely successful person" who was "show[ing] guts" merely by deigning to run for president, and actually, literally included the sentence "Roger Ailes and Fox think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn't play games."

I'm trying to think of any candidate in the history of American politics who could get away with anything close to a stunt like this without the press either ripping him to bits or measuring him for a straitjacket. Sure, some people mocked Trump online for being scared of facing Megyn Kelly, or played "get-a-load-of-this" with some of the passages in his statement, but it's getting impossible to ignore the mismatch between the outlandishness of Trump's behavior and the degree of acceptance in the media. Trump's sustained popular success has scrambled the minds of the press to such an extent that the ordinary rules of coverage simply don't apply. Imagine the media response if Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush ever acted once like Trump does as a matter of course.

It's easy to see why Trump is treated differently. Trump's antics are entertaining. He's a once-in-a-lifetime political phenomenon. His continued lead in the polls has dramatically exceeded expectations (always a good formula for positive news coverage). In fact, his performance at this stage of the race has so throughly contradicted conventional wisdom that some in the media seem to hold him in awe as a genius who has discovered previously unknown laws of the political universe.

It's not the job of the press to stop Trump, or to try to influence the outcome of the nomination process on behalf of any candidate. But he's sure getting a pretty easy ride these days compared to the competition, thanks simply to the results of the polls he is so fond of quoting.

Is It Better to Try and Fail Than Not to Try at All? Not in Politics!

With apologies to my friends and colleagues in the Party Decides camp, you don't need a bunch of political scientists to tell you that most Republican leaders would rather see their party nominate someone other than Donald Trump for president. If the resiliency of a front-running Trump campaign is the shock of the year in American politics, surely the second-biggest surprise is the response of the Republican regulars—or rather, like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, the non-response. Trump seemingly represents a potentially serious threat to the party's interests in nearly every conceivable fashion, from his idiosyncratic policies to his controversial rhetoric to his debatable qualifications for the office he seeks. Yet Republican senators, governors, and other elected leaders have not collectively mobilized to counter Trump's ascent, even as the first events of the primary season rapidly approach.

The currently trendy interpretation of this apparent indifference to, or even acceptance of, Trump's rise is that it reflects Washington Republicans' white-hot hatred of Ted Cruz. Recent news stories like this one and this one, in which various Republican graybeards like Bob Dole, Trent Lott, and Rudy Giuliani express a preference for Trump over Cruz, have been treated as a remarkable indication of Cruz's unmatched unpopularity among party regulars and the dim view that they take of the Texan's chances in a general election—to the point that they regard the unknown quantity of Trump as worth the risk in comparison. Perhaps these figures view the nomination as already narrowing to a Trump-Cruz race and have reluctantly thrown in their lot with Trump as the lesser of two evils; more likely, they are merely trying to build Trump up temporarily in order to dispose of Cruz in Iowa and New Hampshire, ultimately increasing the odds of a more traditional nominee such as Rubio, Bush, or Christie.

But if Cruz were not in the race, or not a threat to win, would party regulars have already mounted a broad anti-Trump offensive? There are reasons to be skeptical. Veteran Republican officeholders have faced relentless attacks from the Tea Party and other rebellious purists over the past several years, absorbing considerable damage: the Republican speaker was pushed out of office, the House majority leader was defeated for renomination, fully one-third of the Republican senators who sought re-election between 2010 and 2014 were held to 60 percent of the vote or less in their state primaries (with three losing outright), and non-incumbent congressional candidates favored by national party organizations such as Mike Castle and Sue Lowden were upended by Tea Party opponents.

Republicans in Washington may feel as if they have enough trouble convincing GOP voters to support their own campaigns without attempting to influence the outcome of the presidential contest as well. And a failed intervention into presidential politics comes with a serious potential cost, risking future retribution from supporters of disfavored candidates—or even the candidates themselves. Moreover, while in other contexts it is rational to attempt to prevent a potentially disastrous event even if the chance of victory is low, most politicians do not like to risk looking ineffective by throwing their influence around unsuccessfully unless they believe that they will be rewarded for doing so. Regardless of what our parents may have told us, in politics it can be worse to try and fail than not to try at all.

In the roiling, chaotic state of the contemporary Republican Party, officeholders face more than the usual amount of risk in taking sides in internal disputes. Though one might assume that the viability of the Trump and Cruz candidacies would prompt party leaders to act immediately in order to attempt to steer the race to a superior rival, the proportion of top Republicans making formal candidate endorsements is lower this year than in elections past. If the race ultimately comes down to either Trump or Cruz against a more conventional alternative candidate, and if the alternative appears to have a serious chance of prevailing, we might see an coordinated effort at that stage by Republican members of Congress, governors, and other well-known figures to nudge the race in their favored direction. Until then, the risk-averse calculus of politics suggests that personal interests are often better served by staying on the sidelines, even if the result is a battle between Trump and Cruz or an unobstructed Trump march to the nomination.

It Sure Looks Like Bernie Sanders Thinks He Can Win

Since he entered the Democratic presidential race last year, Bernie Sanders has been described by most media observers as a protest candidate pursuing a symbolic campaign rather than as a plausible nominee actually running to win. Naturally, the decision of an avowed socialist to challenge prohibitive favorite Hillary Clinton at the age of 74 for the nomination of a party of which he is not even a member did not appear to be the product of calculated presidential ambition. Portraying Sanders as an idealist merely attempting to use the spotlight provided by a national campaign to gain some attention for his views on Wall Street and entitlement programs, and to thereby achieve a modest influence over the Democratic Party's economic policy, was arguably treating him more charitably than to suggest that he actually harbored delusions of victory.

Recently, however, the tone of media coverage has begun to change. Sanders has attracted a sufficient level of support that he appears to have a good chance of placing first in at least one, and possibly both, of the two earliest contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. He has achieved unexpected success in fundraising, performed credibly in debates, and exposed a visible limit to the enthusiasm among Democratic voters for another Hillary Clinton candidacy. With journalists perennially hungry for a real horse race—and often liable to be somewhat ungenerous to Clinton—the media have started to treat Sanders a bit more like a serious contender, even if his actual chances of nomination remain fairly remote.

Of course, more coverage means more careful scrutiny, as well as a more extensive series of questions about the entire range of subjects that a presidential nominee is expected to command. For Sanders, who often appears uncomfortable when the topic of conversation drifts from his comfort zone of economics and political reform, this development carries a new set of risks, as several events over the past few days demonstrate. First, a group of Democratic-aligned foreign policy experts released a statement via the Clinton campaign blasting his comments about Iran and ISIS in Sunday's debate. Next, widely-read author and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic criticized Sanders for opposing reparations for African-Americans, charging him with failing to live up to the same level of left-wing idealism on racial justice as he does on health care and financial regulation. Yesterday, Sanders characterized Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, both of which endorsed Clinton for president, as "part of the [political] establishment" that he is "taking on" with his candidacy, provoking negative comments from feminists online and a critical response from Clinton herself.

We'll probably hear a lot more about this last controversy, as Sanders has handed a Clinton campaign desperate to convince Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats of its liberal bona fides an easy opening to portray him as neglecting social issues in his crusade against economic inequality. Off-the-cuff remarks can be overanalyzed (though the Sanders campaign is standing by them today) but the most revealing aspect of Sanders's comments might be the obvious annoyance they conveyed. If Sanders were in fact merely running a narrowly-focused protest campaign to direct public attention to the plight of the economically underprivileged and the need for a more stringent banking regulation regime, one would think that he wouldn't care much about the fact that these groups, concerned with a different set of issues altogether, would endorse Clinton over him.  

But Sanders instead seems genuinely upset that he failed to receive their support. Maybe, in fact, he thinks that he can win after all. If so, he may wind up running a more aggressive campaign against Clinton than a candidate would who simply wishes to promote his issue agenda.

Debate Recap: Who's the Better Liberal? Who's the Better Democrat?

Hillary Clinton remains the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination, and nothing that occurred during last night's debate threatened her overwhelming lead in the race. Yet the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a genuine threat to win Iowa and New Hampshire, according to recent polls, serves as a visible symptom of a latent problem that her campaign seems to be facing this year. Opinion polls show that Democratic voters almost uniformly view Clinton favorably and are impressed with her accomplishments, yet there seems to be a limit to the party's collective enthusiasm for her campaign. Sanders has emerged as a convenient vehicle for many Democrats to register this sentiment; one gets the impression that a significant share of his supporters do not expect him to win and may not even wish to see him nominated, but have temporarily seized on his candidacy as a means of raising a little hell at the expense of Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party.

Clinton is not a new face on the national political scene (or even a first-time presidential candidate), her biggest strengths are qualities such as experience and tenacity that do not often inspire passion in the electorate, and she is neither a dynamic orator nor in position to claim the mantle of ideological purity. Her campaign has attempted to whip up excitement among Democratic voters for the prospect of a female president—my impression is that this theme has been explicitly evoked more frequently this time around than it was in 2008—but it's fair to say that they have found only limited success. How, then, can Clinton mobilize the Democratic faithful in Iowa and New Hampshire to turn out in the cold and dark to support her? How can she coax some of the voters now flirting with Sanders back into the fold?

One option would be to stress electability. The Clinton campaign is running an ad in New Hampshire (perhaps Iowa too) that does just that, displaying a series of unflattering clips of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz et al. before warning the viewer that Hillary Clinton is the one Democrat who can keep these scary Republicans out of the White House. She has also suggested at times that she is better equipped than Sanders to actually succeed in enacting her agenda as president. Yet these arguments, however valid, are similarly unlikely to inspire enthusiasm among the most committed Democrats. "Hillary: The Best We Can Do, So Grow Up and Deal With It" is not a tremendously appetizing implicit slogan.

Last night, Clinton started to move toward a somewhat new approach, and I would be surprised if we don't see it continue through the upcoming weeks. In contrast to Sanders's persona as the purest liberal on the stage, she repeatedly portrayed herself as the better Democrat. At several points, she suggested that her policies rendered her the true heir apparent to both Bill Clinton (naturally enough) and Barack Obama, even reaching back to Harry Truman to describe the enactment of the Affordable Care Act as the culmination of a decades-long Democratic commitment to the expansion of health care access that Sanders would be at risk of squandering with his single-payer proposal.

Sanders has had a long career in Congress serving as a lonely left-wing conscience who refused formal identification with the Democratic Party, and his record of directing criticism at past and present members of the Democratic leadership may provide more fodder for the Clinton campaign in the coming days. (Last night, Clinton accused Sanders of supporting a potential primary challenger to Obama in 2012; Sanders responded by insisting that he and Obama had campaigned for each other over the years but did not refute the specific charge.) Clinton and her advisors may decide that, while the candidate herself may not always inspire passion in the hearts of Democratic voters, their best bet is to increasingly associate her with partisan heroes who do engender such enthusiasm—especially the current occupant of the White House.

Debate Recap: Republicans Agree That Trump's For Real

Now that academic winter break is coming to an end (spring classes here at BC start next week!), Honest Graft returns from its hiatus with a look at Thursday night's Republican debate. As usual, I'll leave questions about which candidate "won" or "lost" to others and focus on what the candidates' behavior reveals about their strategic calculations and views of the race. Presidential nominations are among the most procedurally and strategically complex aspects of American politics, which makes them among the most fascinating. I dare say that this particular election confirms that nobody—not even political scientists!—has this process completely figured out.

Last night's debate was characterized by a series of one-on-one exchanges between candidates that clearly demonstrated where the lines of conflict currently stand. Trump and Cruz, now fighting for first place in Iowa, attacked each other early in the proceedings. Trump's recent suggestions that Cruz is constitutionally ineligible to be president guaranteed that the issue would come up, giving Cruz an opportunity to air grievances of his own in response. Among Cruz's charges was that Trump was only starting to raise the question now because Cruz was gaining on him in Iowa—an accusation to which Trump, whose open candor about his obsession with the results of public opinion polls is among his most characteristic features, readily pled guilty. But Trump was ready to throw how-dare-you indignation right back at Cruz over the Texan's dismissal of his "New York values," invoking 9/11 in a politically adept manner that suggested he was prepared for Cruz's attack.

Marco Rubio, meanwhile, continued his two-front battle against both Cruz and Chris Christie, accusing the former of inconsistency on immigration (and of promoting an unfair tax plan) and the latter of RINO squishiness on an array of issues. Jeb Bush and John Kasich did not engage directly with each other, but both attempted to position themselves as the thoughtful alternatives to Trump (leading to yet another half-hearted Bush attack on Trump that failed to draw much blood, seemingly a staple of the Republican debates this election). And then there was Ben Carson, who was mercifully left alone by the other candidates as he continued his quietly fading campaign.

Trump's persistent lead in the polls has been dismissed by some skeptics as a mostly an artifact of his superior name recognition at this stage of the race, or, alternatively, as a product of excessive media coverage of his various hijinks. But the behavior of the other major candidates demonstrates that they believe Trump's support to be based on a genuine attraction among Republican primary voters to his campaign message and policies. The dark rhetoric about an America in danger of disappearing forever, the ad hominem attacks on Barack Obama as a "child" and vows to "kick his rear end," the warnings about the threats posed by immigrants in general and Muslim refugees in particular—these are all elements of Trumpism that have increasingly been adopted by the other Republicans running for president. Whether or not Trump himself ultimately runs a strong race once the actual voting begins, it is already clear that he will have a visible effect on the 2016 election.

A Trump-Cruz Race? Not If the Media Can Help It!

The unexpectedly stubborn persistence of Donald Trump's lead in polls of Republican voters—both nationally and in virtually every state except Iowa, including New Hampshire—has begun to produce a perceptible change in the news media's coverage of the presidential horse race. While most analysts still don't believe that Trump will actually be nominated, the conventional wisdom has started to coalesce behind the notion that the competition will ultimately narrow to a two-candidate race in which Trump is one of the remaining contenders. At that point, whether because Trump finally reaches a limit to his appeal or because the entire Republican institutional apparatus mobilizes furiously to stop him, the remaining viable non-Trump candidate will, supposedly, be in good position to consolidate enough support to outdistance Trump in the delegate count.

Ted Cruz has been gaining over the past two months or so in national polls and, crucially, in Iowa, which is favorable terrain for his candidacy and probably a must-win state for him.  More than at any other point in the race so far, Cruz now looks like a serious contender for the Republican nomination. The prospect of the Republican professional and organizational leadership, which almost uniformly detests Cruz personally and views him as ballot-box poison in a general election, being forced to gamely fall in line behind the Texas senator in a desperate attempt to block an even more unthinkable Trump nomination has simultaneously led to expressions of horror among pragmatic conservatives on the right and outright chortling among some observers on the left.

There are reasons to conclude, however, that the race will not easily evolve into a showdown between Trump and Cruz. One important factor is the role of the news media in interpreting the results of early state contests. Candidates deemed to have "exceeded expectations" in Iowa and New Hampshire tend to gain a burst of positive media coverage that inflates their popularity in the next states to vote, even if they do not win outright (examples include George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008). Would-be nominees benefit from looking as if their campaigns are gaining momentum, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if the media are giving them large helpings of positive coverage just as voters in subsequent states are tuning into the race and making up their minds.

It's fair to say that most members of the political media are uncomfortable, at best, with the prospect of a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. For the center-left mainstream press, both candidates are highly objectionable on grounds of policy, rhetoric, qualification, character, or all of the above. For much of the conservative media (Fox News in particular), as well as the Republican consultant class that influences Washington-based interpretations of Republican politics, a Trump-Cruz race is like being asked to select one of two passenger cabins on the Titanic. Even if they don't intentionally slant their coverage to attempt to influence the outcome, many journalists and commentators will be unconsciously open to any evidence that a third candidate remains viable and is gaining strength.

Let's say, for example, that Marco Rubio places third in Iowa, behind Cruz and Trump, with 18 percent of the vote. This was Howard Dean's showing in 2004, and was widely deemed such a disappointment that it proved fatal to Dean's campaign. In today's context, though, I think a large share of both the conservative and mainstream media would choose to interpret Rubio's performance in a very positive light. Stories about how Rubio was starting to catch on would start to appear. Voters in New Hampshire and other states would be told that Rubio was gaining traction. He and his campaign staff would suddenly receive a lot of Fox News bookings. Pundits would openly breathe sighs of relief that someone had appeared in time to save the Republican Party from itself. In such an environment, it's easy to see how Rubio could benefit more from coming in third than Cruz could from winning Iowa—especially if Cruz's margin of victory is smaller than the pre-caucus polls predict, thus failing to meet expectations.

None of this is guaranteed—Rubio has to put together an effective campaign to be in position to capitalize on any potential advantage, and the latest round of warnings about the health of his campaign organization are worth paying attention to. But the fact remains that a lot of people with direct access to voters' eyes and ears will be rooting against a Trump-Cruz race early next year, and will be quite likely to reward any other plausible nominees by advancing a generous interpretation of their electoral performance.

Debate Recap: Trump Coasts as Cruz and Rubio Tussle

The latest round of polls shows Donald Trump in as strong a position as he's ever been among national samples of Republicans, although Ted Cruz appears to have caught up to him in Iowa, home of the nation's first delegate selection event. One might expect that Trump, as the leading candidate, would therefore attract the bulk of attacks from rival candidates in Tuesday's debate—and that Trump might in turn direct fire at Cruz, who now represents a major threat to his chances in the Iowa caucus.

Instead, Trump sailed through the debate without becoming the target of sustained criticism from the rest of the field. Jeb Bush and Rand Paul took shots at Trump—Bush in particular cannot contain his open exasperation with Trump's antics, and clearly finds Trump's ascendance to be maddeningly incompatible with his own theory of the universe—but neither man has the popularity or credibility with the conservative base of the Republican Party to draw much blood, and Trump simply swatted them away. But Cruz, and to a lesser extent Marco Rubio, passed up several opportunities to attack Trump (Cruz was openly invited to do so by the moderators near the end of the debate), even though they are currently Trump's main rivals in the race. For his part, Trump returned the favor by disowning his own previous description of Cruz as a "maniac" when it was raised by a questioner.

Rubio and Cruz preferred to train their fire on each other. Cruz criticized Rubio on immigration (from the ideological right), while Rubio criticized Cruz on surveillance and military policy (ditto). As these policy stances represent each candidate's most notable departure from conservative doctrinal purity, the attacks were hardly a surprise, and these issues will probably continue to be raised as long as Cruz and Rubio remain in the race.

It seems likely that Rubio and Cruz subscribe to a similar strategic view of the nomination contest as it currently stands. If Trump is destined to fade, they reason, there is little advantage in attacking him now, since he will leave a large chunk of Republican voters up for grabs who will likely be reluctant to transfer their support to a candidate who had criticized their former hero. If Trump is not destined to fade, then both Rubio and Cruz want to be left standing as the primary non-Trump alternative in the race as the field narrows after Iowa and New Hampshire. Under either scenario, strategy dictates that they attack each other rather than the front-runner, who thus winds up getting something of an easy ride even as he continues to top the field.

At some point down the road, the strategies of Rubio and Cruz may diverge. The chief difference between their positions is that Iowa is probably a must-win state for Cruz, whereas Rubio only needs to finish respectably there. If Cruz is unable to pull away from Trump in Iowa, he may be forced to revoke his current non-aggression pact with Trump (and, if Cruz does start to pull away, Trump may abandon it himself). For now, however, we are left with a leader in the polls who is facing attacks not from the other top-tier candidates, but from those who are struggling to gain any traction whatsoever. As Trump remarked contemptuously on Tuesday in response to Jeb Bush's gibes, "I'm at 42 [percent], and you're at 3." A mean thing to say, perhaps—but not an inaccurate one.

Will Trump Realign the Republican Party?

Matthew Continetti argues today that the potential nomination of Donald Trump would likely result in a wholesale realignment of the Republican Party. "The future of the GOP as we know it is in question," he writes, and Trump as nominee "would alter the character of the Republican Party in a fundamental way." In Continetti's view, Trump would replace the free-market, free-trade, pro-immigration conservatism of Ronald Reagan with a more nationalistic, isolationist, protectionist brand of politics that placed less emphasis on reforming or cutting domestic entitlement programs.

I think the article probably overstates the degree to which Trumpism is inconsistent with existing conservatism rather than an amplified form of its populist side, but I'm more interested in addressing the question of whether Trump's nomination would produce a wholesale, long-term change in the Republican Party. There are reasons to be doubtful.

Continetti makes his case by citing three historical parallels of presidential candidates who, he says, produced an ideological and coalitional change in their parties: Barry Goldwater in 1964, who led the takeover of the GOP by the modern conservative movement; George McGovern in 1972, who reflected the rising clout of racial minorities, feminists, Cold War doves, and cultural liberals within the Democratic Party; and Reagan in 1980, who benefited from the newfound political mobilization of the religious right and who established supply-side economics and moral traditionalism as essential components of the Republican creed.

But I'm struck by how different these examples are from Trump. Goldwater, McGovern, and Reagan were all the products of much broader movements that spent years pressing for influence within their home parties—laying intellectual groundwork, recruiting activists, gaining control of party institutions, persuading party-aligned voters. The presidential candidacies of these three men, while historically important, represented the flowering of a wider political mobilization that predated them and, crucially, had the capacity to survive the loss (in the first two cases) or departure from office (in the third case) of their presidential champion. (Democratic national leaders also moved away from McGovernism almost immediately, reverting to a strategy of attempting to contain the influence of liberal ideologues within the party.)

The Trump movement, in contrast, is all about Trump. His followers are devoted to him personally more than to any particular ideological tradition. They were not well-organized politically before his arrival, and they are unlikely to remain so after his defeat. There is no "Trump faction" among Republicans in Congress or in the party organizations that could take up the mantle if Trump himself is not elected, nor is there likely to be. Trump is certainly an important factor in this election, and is useful in revealing the political predispositions of a large portion of the Republican popular base, but he does not represent the mobilization of a political movement so much as the culmination of right-wing media influence over the Republican Party at the expense of its elected and organizational leadership.

If he were to be nominated, most of the GOP would make temporary peace with him, but he would be likely to lose (perhaps badly), giving the rest of the party leadership an easy way to write him off and return to their existing political objectives once the election is over. Perhaps a better historical comparison for Trump is Ross Perot, another rich businessman and political outsider who tapped into a significant popular sentiment and, for a time, appeared to some as a potentially revolutionary political figure, but whose "movement" was ultimately more about himself than the ideas on which he ran, and who showed no interest in doing the hard work and building the relationships with other actors necessary to sustain a lasting influence in politics.

Conservatives Take Another Angle: Blame The Donald on Obama

Yesterday, I addressed the ways in which the consensus self-definition of the Republican Party as a vehicle for conservative principles complicates the attempts by anti-Trump party members to beat back his candidacy. Simply calling Trump an extremist implicitly suggests that he stands to the ideological right of his critics, but few Republican leaders or conservative commentators want to be caught to the left of anybody—especially during the party's current, Tea Party-roiled state in which more-conservative-than-thou arguments often seem to carry the day. (It would also make them sound an awful lot like the liberals who are currently bashing Trump over his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim proposals.)

One alternative tactic, adopted yesterday by Paul Ryan, is to suggest instead that Trump is not a true conservative at all. According to this view, Trump and his policies are therefore by definition ruled out as deserving of the party's support. This argument has yet to show much promise, however, in stopping Trump's rise among Republican voters.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial page takes another tack. The meat of the piece is a direct criticism of Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from traveling to the United States, which the Journal finds both counterproductive to the fight against terrorism and, euphemistically, certain to "face constitutional scrutiny." But this volley against Trump is wrapped at both ends inside a denunciation of Barack Obama's administration, which the Journal holds directly responsible for Trump's rise. "The oldest truism in politics," says the Journal, "is that demagogues flourish in the absence of leadership."

This particular anti-Trump argument is echoed by Ben Domenech at the Federalist, who treats Trump's candidacy as the "greatest political legacy" of Obama's presidency, such that a piece critical of Trump is entitled "Welcome to Barack Obama's America." Domenech views Obama's failures as extending beyond foreign policy and the war on terror to encompass the erosion of faith in government and even the rise of political correctness—a line of argument extended further in the same publication by Rubio advisor Paul David Miller, who accuses "progressivism" itself of provoking a Trump-led backlash that Miller sees as threatening the health of the Republican Party.

[UPDATE: Even Jeb Bush got in on the fun this afternoon:]

Jeb Bush calls Donald Trump "basically Barack Obama - the other version of it" -- trying to make point that Trump is a divisive force

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) December 9, 2015

If you want to trash Trump but don't want to sound like a lefty, the "blame The Donald on Obama" approach has an obvious appeal, regardless of its underlying validity. One pictures a group of anti-Trump Republicans at the White House gates, shaking fists that clutch Trump's current poll numbers, yelling "Look at what you're making us do!" at the president inside.

Why the "Trump's Not a Conservative" Gambit Is Getting Another Try

Matt Grossmann and I have a research project (book manuscript in progress!) in which we argue that the Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally different kinds of parties. We view the Republican Party as the vehicle of an ideological movement—the conservative movement—while the Democratic Party is instead a coalition of discrete social groups, in which ideology plays a role but is not the party's defining purpose.

One of the many manifestations of this asymmetry is the shared assumption by virtually all of the Republican Party's leaders—including both elected officials and unelected activists, interest groups, and media figures—that the party exists to advance conservative principles. If a policy position, initiative, or political candidate is conservative, Republicans should properly be for it/him/her; if it/he/she is not conservative, all Republicans in good standing should rise in opposition. Republicans may sometimes disagree among themselves about which policies are conservative, or about which strategies and tactics are most appropriate for furthering conservative principles in a given situation, but the party has reached a virtual consensus that the advancement of conservatism is its fundamental reason for being.

This attribute of Republican politics has allowed the conservative movement to achieve a great deal of political success over the past 50 years of American history. But there are drawbacks. Venerating conservative principles can make it difficult to define limits to any rightward push within the party. The most popular play in the Republican primary playbook is always to label your opponent as insufficiently conservative, which creates an incentive for politicians worried about being attacked from their right flank to maneuver themselves further and further towards the conservative pole—or risk losing to more extreme opponents who may be vulnerable to defeat in general elections, like failed Republican Senate candidates Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Richard Mourdock.

For those Republicans who view the rise of Donald Trump with alarm or outright panic—whether because they disagree with his views, because they believe him to be an unqualified and potentially dangerous president, or because they worry that his nomination will prove disastrous for the party—one of the biggest challenges so far in the campaign has been the identification of a line of attack that effectively punctures Trump's popular appeal within the mass base of the GOP. Instinctively, many Trump critics within the conservative movement have attempted to claim that Trump is not a true conservative—and is therefore by definition undeserving of Republican support. The advantage of this line of argument is not only that it might prove effective in dissuading Republican voters from backing Trump, but also that, whether ultimately convincing or not, it preserves the critic's position as a conservative in good standing, while a "Trump's too far to the right" message renders the speaker vulnerable to the charge that he or she is merely a squishy moderate.

Today, House speaker Paul Ryan was asked about Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from travel to the United States. Ryan surely views Trump as a horror show for the GOP. Tellingly, however, he chose to characterize Trump's plan not just as extreme or un-American but also as "not conservatism." This argument has not yet succeeded in persuading Trump's supporters, but in Republican circles, it's the most damning attack one can make on a policy—or a candidate.

The "Vote No, Hope Yes" Caucus Gets a Scolding from House Leadership

In a development that should shock no one, new House speaker Paul Ryan has inherited exactly the same dilemma that bedeviled now-former speaker John Boehner: how to keep the government running without Republican hard-liners poking him with pitchforks. Congress must appropriate money in order for the government to function, but Republican members of Congress don't like to vote for appropriations bills because they're full of things that a potential primary challenger can attack them for supporting—especially since any legislation must be acceptable to Barack Obama in order to be signed into law. This dynamic repeatedly forced Boehner to bring up spending bills at the last minute, often under threats of imminent shutdown or default, and pass them with most Democrats voting yes and most Republicans voting no—a violation of the "Hastert Rule" norm restricting floor access to measures with a support of a majority of the ruling party.

The result is a textbook case of a collective action problem. Most Republicans agree that a government shutdown is a bad idea that will hurt their party. Individually, however, they believe that opposing the bill is good politics for themselves. Thus the rise of the "vote no, hope yes" caucus—or, in the words of Homer Simpson, the "Can't Someone Else Do It?" coalition—of Republicans who want these bills to pass even as they personally refuse their support. Of course, this is free-riding to a degree; if no Republicans voted in favor, the bills would fail, so the vote-no-hope-yes group is receiving the benefit of averting a shutdown while letting any political cost fall on their yea-voting colleagues. This behavior prompted a scolding from House Republican whip Steve Scalise, who recently circulated a memo to House Republicans complaining that “Too many in our conference are falling into the pattern of voting no on tough bills while actually hoping the bill passes because they know that the outcome will be even worse if the bill fails.”

Ryan ascended to the speakership while pledging a return to regular order and by assuring the House Freedom Caucus that he would not cut them out of policy-making. He's arguing now that these promises shouldn't apply to the current spending bill, which executes the overall budget plan negotiated by Boehner on his way out the door. On the other hand, the arch-conservatives aren't making things easier for him either, as they are proposing and supporting a number of policy riders that would cause Democratic support to disappear if they were actually included in the law—even though many of them will vote against the overall bill whether or not the riders are included. Ryan clearly enjoys much more good will among the hard-liners that Boehner had by the end of his speakership, and it's likely that he will resolve these matters before the government is scheduled to shut down. Clearly, however, the basic dynamics that caused Boehner such grief have not been fundamentally affected by his departure.

Voters Won't Care About Trump's Truthfulness Unless Politicians Care

Jay Rosen has written a thoughtful analysis regarding the apparent invulnerability of the Trump campaign to the traditional gauntlet of media fact-checking. Rosen argues—in response to other journalists quoted at the beginning of the piece—that the press has not necessarily become less powerful than before; instead, he contends, the existing limitations of the media's ability to shame politicians and campaign consultants into remaining (relatively) truthful have been exposed by a candidate who uniquely violates the standard norms of campaign conduct. Attempts by journalists to referee Trump's claims have, says Rosen, simply failed to breach a brazen indifference to reality that is without precedent in modern politics. Because Republican voters are already unlikely to trust the "mainstream media," efforts to fact-check Trump simply seem to validate his accusation that he is the victim of hostile journalists.

This seems fairly convincing, but I think there's another angle here that's important. It's difficult for journalists to successfully call politicians on their incorrect or misleading claims in the absence of political opponents who are doing the same. If prominent members of the opposite party (or, in a primary election, rivals within the same party) are not either leading or echoing any public charges of insufficient veracity, such accusations are unlikely to stick—especially because journalists soon become uncomfortable with banging on about an issue that even a politician's natural enemies don't seem to treat as damning. (The standard manner of structuring these news stories is the form "X's Behavior Raises Questions," which requires the authors to specify in whose minds these questions are being raised—preferably, not just their own.) On the Republican side, some conservative media figures may enjoy sufficient credibility with their audience to inflict damage on a candidate in the absence of criticism from fellow politicians, but it is unlikely that the "mainstream" press has such influence within the GOP.

To me, what makes Trump different is not that he is less truthful than other candidates but that he has attracted remarkably little direct criticism from other Republicans despite his consistent lead in the polls (with the exception of Carly Fiorina and John Kasich, but neither is prominent or popular enough to generate much attention at this stage). In part, this is because some of his statements would be politically inconvenient for other Republicans to dispute without calling their own conservative credentials into question (e.g. his negative characterizations of immigrants and Muslims). His rivals also appear to view his candidacy as likely to fall of its own weight, and they want to be in position to corral his supporters for themselves when it does—which would presumably be harder to do if they antagonize him now. Though Trump's behavior reliably scandalizes commentators and activists on the left, even elected Democrats have mostly held their fire so far—after all, it's not in their party's interest to puncture the Trump bubble before he actually becomes the Republican nominee.

In the competitive world of politics, it is rare for a candidate to rise as far as Trump has in the polls without withstanding a sustained line of criticism from other politicians. But here we are. Trump may be an unusual case, but so is a strategic environment in which few trailing candidates perceive an incentive to aim sharp attacks at the leading contender. If he is still ahead in January, however, desperation will set in among the rest of the Republican presidential field (to say nothing of the vast majority of the national party leadership). At that point, voters may start to hear a lot more about his apparent problems with the truth.

How Do You Attack Ted Cruz in a Republican Primary?

A month or two ago, Marco Rubio became the hot, in-the-know pick to win the Republican presidential nomination. This week, it's Ted Cruz's turn to graduate from also-ran to leading contender in the collective judgment of the news media. He seems to be rising in the Iowa polls, apparently at the expense of Ben Carson, and a number of analysts have started to take him seriously as a potential nominee (see Jamelle Bouie in Slate, Paul Waldman in the Washington Post, Rich Lowry of the National Review in Politico, and Andrew Romano at Yahoo News). As I explained last week, Cruz probably needs a strong Iowa performance in order to have a shot at the nomination, which makes his rise in Iowa particularly welcome news for his presidential ambitions.

These analyses do a good job of cataloguing Cruz's various political and organizational strengths. One of his most formidable assets in a riled-up Republican Party is a well-cultivated reputation as the purest of the pure conservatives. Most of Cruz's energy since landing in Washington has been devoted to creating rhetorical and procedural mayhem, incessantly charging the leadership of his own party with ideological infidelity and political cowardice in the face of the Obama-led Democrats.

For Cruz's rivals, his current bump in the polls presents an unusual challenge. Some Republican elites, and undoubtedly most of the party's strategists and consultants, view Cruz as too conservative or too divisive to win a general election, but many other Republicans deny the existence of a tradeoff between ideological purity and electability. (After all, didn't conservative hero Ronald Reagan win two national landslides?) The most common go-to move in Republican nomination politics is to attack your opponent for being insufficiently, not excessively, loyal to the conservative cause. But that's a difficult charge to make stick in this case, given Cruz's persona and record in office.

This Politico article about an anti-Cruz ad run by a 501(c)4 aligned with Rubio suggests that Cruz's opponents may try anyway. The Rubio backer funding the ad campaign, a man named Sean Noble, explains to reporters that he views Cruz as unelectable, presumably because of Cruz's hard-line, confrontational style of politics. But this argument is not contained in the ad itself, which instead attacks Cruz for voting to restrict bulk data collection by the NSA and therefore "leading from behind" in the war on terror à la the hated Barack Obama. In today's Republican Party, apparently, even Ted Cruz will be forced to answer to the charge that he is just not conservative enough.

Iowa: The Cruz-cial State

(I'm sorry about the headline. Well, a little bit sorry. Maybe.)

Politico reports today on the efforts of the Cruz campaign to build a strong organizational infrastructure in Iowa, drawing heavily on existing networks of evangelical Christian churches, leaders, and activists. With Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal now out of the race, and with Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee—who each rode strong support among Iowa social conservatives to victory in 2012 and 2008, respectively—struggling to break through this time, the Cruz campaign recognizes an opportunity to consolidate the evangelical vote behind its candidate. Ben Carson is a current favorite of many Iowa evangelicals, but Cruz is hoping that Carson's campaign will fade as the caucuses approach, and that his relative lack of organization on the ground in Iowa will prevent him from turning out his vote effectively.

Cruz is being smart here. Aside from the aforementioned Huckabee and Santorum (who don't appear viable in any event), no other current Republican candidate needs to do well in Iowa as much as Cruz does. Cruz's brand of aggressively conservative politics, with a strong emphasis on social traditionalism, is not a natural fit for the non-evangelical, relatively secular New Hampshire Republican electorate—the article reports that he is forming a "national prayer team," for example, which I don't recall the Romney or McCain campaigns doing—and the New Hampshire primary is thus one of the biggest obstacles standing between Cruz and the nomination. Huckabee and Santorum, like Pat Robertson before them, exceeded expectations in past years by performing well among the evangelicals of Iowa, only to stall out once competition shifted to the very different political culture of the Granite State.

Cruz has advantages that these other candidates lacked—he is less reliant on social conservatism as the primary basis of his popular appeal, and he will undoubtedly be better funded, better prepared, and better organized—but it is hard to see how he runs strongly in New Hampshire unless he does very well in Iowa, and if he doesn't do well in either state, history suggests that he has little shot at the nomination. His main rivals—Rubio, Bush, Christie, Kasich, and even Trump—could all conceivably bounce back in New Hampshire after a loss in Iowa, but a bad night for Cruz in Iowa would severely, perhaps fatally, damage his campaign. Thus Cruz is right to invest heavily in Iowa; it's a crucial test of his presidential chances.

Why Ted Cruz Wants to Fight Barack Obama

While overseas at an international summit, Barack Obama made some dismissive remarks yesterday about Republican presidential candidates' positions on the admittance of Syrian refugees to the United States in response to the Paris terrorist attacks. "Apparently they're scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion," Obama said. "At first they were worried about the press being too tough on them in during debates. Now they're worried about three-year-old orphans. That doesn't sound very tough to me."

Obama was clearly referring to multiple Republicans; if his remarks responded to any particular candidate, it was Chris Christie, who had earlier explicitly ruled out accepting "orphans under the age of five" for resettlement in America. Today, however, it was Ted Cruz who acted as if Obama had attacked him personally. "Mr. President, if you want to insult me, you can do it overseas, you can do it in Turkey, you can do it in foreign countries," Cruz said. "But I would encourage you, Mr. President, [to] come back and insult me to my face."

It seems clear from his statement that Cruz was ready to jump on any opportunity to start a fight with Obama, even if Obama had failed to do him the favor of mentioning him specifically. I have previously suggested that the popularity of Donald Trump and Ben Carson in the current Republican nomination race is a reflection of the formidable power of anti-Obamaism in the contemporary GOP. Cruz's potential path to the nomination almost certainly requires attracting a significant fraction of the Republican vote that is currently parked behind Trump and Carson, so it is in his particular interest to distinguish himself as an Obama antagonist in order to appeal to those voters if and when the Trump and Carson candidacies fade. 

Of course, Cruz has not exactly been complimentary of Obama before today, but most of his energy since entering national politics has been devoted to fighting other Republicans, not Democrats. It will be interesting to see if today's remarks represent a larger shift in campaign strategy, with Cruz attempting to claim the mantle of the party's most anti-Obama candidate. If Obama wants to increase the probability that Cruz wins the Republican nomination, next time he'll attack the senator by name.

An Unusual Governor's Race in Louisiana

I direct the attention of anyone entertained by political spectacle to the Louisiana governor's race, where the Republican candidate, U.S. Senator David Vitter, has struggled to untangle himself from his implication in a prostitution scandal a few years back. His Democratic opponent John Bel Edwards has not erred on the side of subtlety in attacking Vitter, who is charged in this ad with literally choosing "prostitutes over patriots":

But now Vitter is counter-attacking, accusing Edwards of skipping a debate over family values in order to party at a "risqué club":

New tv ad: Last week, I went to family issues debate, @JohnBelforLA hauled voters from adult NOLA nightclub to polls https://t.co/LyiBTjXkiv

— David Vitter (@DavidVitter) November 16, 2015

On Saturday, Louisiana voters will render their judgment on this critical referendum.

Democratic Debate Recap: Sometimes, Nothing Much Happens

The relatively uneventful Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, occurring amidst a relatively uneventful Democratic presidential nomination contest, left political analysts with a limited supply of hooks upon which to hang their post-game stories. The New York Times account reported that Hillary Clinton was "pummeled" by Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, but if so, it was the most polite political pummeling in history. While Clinton was indeed a target of criticism—naturally so, given her front-runner status—none of it was particularly unexpected or harsh. If anything could interrupt Clinton's march to the nomination, it is unlikely to be an attack from either of her rivals on the debate stage.

Scrounging for a larger relevance to the event, several purveyors of Washington wisdom have suggested that Clinton made some remarks that might haunt her in a general election, including her invocation of 9/11 in response to the charge from Sanders that she is a captive of Wall Street, as well as her expression of sympathy with today's student protestors by noting that she was a child of the 1960s. But it's difficult to imagine either statement having much resonance a month from now, much less a year from now. The Republican Party, unlike Bernie Sanders, is not likely to attack Clinton for being too cozy with the financial industry, and any explicit suggestion that she is too old to be president is certain to backfire. In truth, this debate will come and go without leaving a lasting effect on either the nomination or the general election, and there's no dishonor in saying so.

Dear Conservative Media: Please Destroy Trump and Carson. Love, the Republican Leadership.

This Washington Post article on the state of the Republican race from the "insider" perspective has attracted considerable comment over the past two days. It offers a portrait of nervousness, bordering on panic, among the Republican "establishment" (meaning veteran elected officials, consultants, and fundraisers) about the tenacious polling leads held by Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who are seen as potentially disastrous candidates for the party, if not the entire country:

“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” [an anonymous] strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”

The now-familiar trial balloon of a "draft Mitt Romney" campaign is floated once again, probably an exercise in wishful thinking by a Romney friend or two. (Paul Ryan would actually have been a much more logical candidate for such a last-minute rescue mission, had he not already performed an identical service for the House Republicans. Due to nettlesome constitutional restrictions, Ryan can only save his party in one branch of government at a time.)

The actual probability of a Trump or Carson nomination remains quite low, and the article reflects the fact that many politicos spend a lot of time obsessing about unlikely worst-case scenarios. But the piece does raise a legitimate question: if Trump and Carson are to lose their current perches atop the Republican presidential field, how will their current supporters be convinced to change their minds? With so many Republicans in the race, a serious collective-action problem exists (since any individual candidate launching attacks is likely to face some backlash for doing so, merely benefiting the other contenders). In addition, the "wise old men" of the Republican Party lack the credibility today among fervent conservatives to successfully make a case against the likes of Trump or Carson, which might only reinforce the claims of the outsider candidates that they are being persecuted by an ideologically co-opted Republican "establishment."

The solution to this problem is clear enough: conservative authorities whom Republican voters trust need to explain to them that Trump and Carson are bad news for the party. Since few Republican elected officials currently attract such trust among a suspicious party base, the obvious answer lies elsewhere, among the ranks of prominent conservative figures in the news media. Because conservative media served as the launchpad for the Trump and Carson candidacies in the first place, this is not a guaranteed outcome—thus explaining the nervousness among the Post's interviewees. But as the primaries draw closer, it is very likely that the coverage of Trump and Carson in the right-of-center media becomes increasingly skeptical, reflecting many conservative elites' aversion to the political risk that either man's actual nomination would create.

Post-Debate Analysis at the Monkey Cage

I have a piece up at the Monkey Cage today, explaining why some Republican candidates bashed Hillary Clinton more than others in last night's pair of debates.