"The Party" Can't Stop Trump, But Maybe Marco Rubio Can

The award for juiciest reporting of the day goes to this New York Times article by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Martin, describing the slow-motion horror that has descended on Washington Republicans at the prospect of a Donald Trump nomination. Despite the apparently widespread sentiment that Trump would be a disastrous nominee—the public spin that Trump might unlock new sources of popular support for the Republican Party does not seem to be echoed in private—no concerted, resource-rich effort to block Trump's ascension has yet emerged; as the authors describe, "a desperate mission" by a few anti-Trump political consultants has "sputtered and stalled at every turn."

These and similar journalistic accounts provide valuable evidence to scholars of American party politics, who are currently attempting to ascertain whether party elites maintain the capacity to steer presidential nominees toward or away from favored or disfavored candidates. According to the article, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though aghast at Trump's front-runner status, has responded by simply assuring members of his own caucus that they can separate themselves from the top of the ticket if necessary when seeking re-election this fall. Former Utah governor Mike Leavitt is quoted as saying that "there is no mechanism" by which party officials can stop Trump's candidacy. "There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will."

If "The Party" truly held the power to unilaterally prevent a Trump nomination, presumably people like McConnell and Leavitt would not only know about it, but be active participants themselves. It is more likely that Republican leaders feel as if they are largely constrained by a nomination system in which party voters exercise ultimate control, influenced by candidate strategies, media coverage, and the idiosyncratic characteristics—electoral sequence, delegate allocation rules, party caucuses—of the process itself. 

To the extent that party leaders do claim to believe that some in their ranks could indeed shape the outcome of the race, they seem to be merely passing the buck with a healthy dose of motivated reasoning: it's always someone else's responsibility or someone else's fault. Hence the grousing in the article about Chris Christie's endorsement of Trump, Jeb Bush's continued neutrality, and John Kasich's persistence in the race—as if any of these individuals, who spectacularly failed at convincing Republicans to support their own candidacies, could nonetheless sway the party electorate away from Trump's much more appealing campaign.

That said, it seems as if the conventional wisdom this weekend has overstated the strength of Trump's position in the race a bit—perhaps because the press, too, is exaggerating the "game-changing" influence of Christie's endorsement. Yes, Trump can still be stopped, but it will take another candidate to step up and defeat him. At the moment, Marco Rubio seems like the only plausible competitor with the capacity to do so. 

It has finally dawned on Rubio over the past few days that he will need to cut into Trump's support in order to win, and he has abruptly shifted into attack mode. Not all of Rubio's punches may land, but at last Trump is being targeted by a sustained negative broadside. It may be too little, too late, or Rubio himself may not prove a sufficiently capable candidate to prevail over Trump, but if Trump is to be stopped, Rubio is the man who needs to stop him.

Debate Recap: A New Phase

The biggest development in last night's debate was that Donald Trump was treated like the front-runner he has become. Rather than fight among themselves to claim status as the #1 alternative to Trump while letting Trump himself off easy, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were much more aggressive in aiming fire at the race's leading candidate. Rubio in particular opened up new lines of attack on Trump, citing his previous employment of illegal immigrants, the foreign manufacture of his signature menswear, and the lawsuit in progress over "Trump University." Cruz mounted more familiar attacks on Trump from the ideological right, repeatedly portraying him as a phony conservative.

The change in approach reflected a new urgency in the Republican race, as the other candidates have suddenly realized that they can no longer wait for Trump to go away on his own. There is always risk in making attacks in a multi-candidate contest (John Kasich, who conspicuously declined to join in, obviously hopes to gain support from conflict-weary voters by remaining above the fray), but Cruz and Rubio have both concluded that Trump has become a serious threat to their candidacies. Though they may still view each other as one another's chief rival for votes, a Trump sweep over the next three delegate-rich weeks would put them both out of the running. At this stage, simply playing for time is a sensible strategy.

The collective joy expressed by the news media when Rubio went on the attack reveals the pent-up frustration within the political world with the lack of obstructions that have been placed between Trump and the nomination. But it will take more than one debate to derail Trump's candidacy. In fact, if both Rubio and Cruz turn out to benefit from the debate, the prospect that one of them will soon fold his campaign grows slightly dimmer, to Trump's strategic advantage. The race is by no means over, but the anti-Trump case will have to be made more forcefully—perhaps via some negative ads?—than it has so far.

No, Political Scientists Didn't Make Trump the Front-Runner

In a blog post this morning, political scientist Dan Drezner floated what he called "a very peculiar and speculative theory" in order to account for Donald Trump's continued electoral strength despite little support from Republican elites. "Basically," writes Drezner, "I think the fault lies with political scientists."

His argument is as follows: One popular theory of presidential nominations, which we can call the "Party Decides" theory after the book that introduced it, holds that nomination outcomes are the product of elite coordination. According to this theory, party elected officials and interest group leaders identify a candidate during the "invisible primary" period before Iowa and New Hampshire whom they view as both loyal to their policy priorities and electable in a general election. These elites steer endorsements, money, and other resources to the candidate, who therefore enjoys a prohibitive advantage in the nomination race. Party voters ostensibly hold the power to decide nominations via the primary process, but are in fact ratifying the choice already made for them by the party leadership.

Drezner says this theory "seemed to explain nomination fights of the recent past quite well." I disagree with that assessment, but nobody denies that Trump's current ascendancy represents a serious challenge to the theory's validity in 2016. Drezner argues that the theory's very success might have paved the way for Trump by lulling party leaders into complacency about his inevitable defeat, which has left them ill-equipped to stop him now that we're a week away from Super Tuesday. In other words, the very act of publishing an analysis of party nominations has implicated political scientists in its apparent real-time refutation—a conclusion judged "surprisingly plausible" by Matthew Yglesias of Vox.

I don't find it plausible. Among the reasons why:

1. You don't need to believe that "The Party Decides" in order to have deemed Trump an unlikely nominee up until a few weeks ago. (I know because I don't, and I did.) Trump's candidacy is more or less without precedent in modern politics, and given the well-documented instability and lack of predictive power of pre-nomination polling, there was little reason for anyone to believe based on previous experience that a candidate with his profile would sustain his lead from last summer and fall into the early stages of the nomination season itself. Those who predicted Trump's demise did not necessarily assume that it would occur due to the united opposition of Republican elites; many pundits—and, no doubt, politicians—concluded that he would lose attractiveness to the electorate as he was subjected to more scrutiny and citizens became more serious about making up their minds. Alternatively, commentators expected that Republican voters, again with some justification, would reject Trump once they learned about his previous non-conservative issue positions and support for Democratic candidates.

2. Drezner says that "Even as the media covered Trump, even as late as the South Carolina debate, pundits were also talking about how his latest transgressive comment would doom his chances." True, but that's because Trump's remarks (such as blaming George W. Bush for failing to stop 9/11) were thought to be likely to offend Republican voters, not Republican leaders.

3. More broadly, Drezner implies that the Party Decides theory has become so well-established as to constitute the conventional wisdom among media commentators. I don't see that. Specialized explainer sites like Vox and FiveThirtyEight have certainly proven sympathetic to the PD argument, but my own sense of the more general type of punditry one would find on CNN, for example, subscribes to a view of nominations that emphasizes candidate strategy, voter preferences, and electoral "momentum"; endorsements and other forms of elite behavior are deemed to matter but are hardly predictive by themselves.

4. Drezner suggests that Republican elites' view of the nomination process has been formed primarily by reading "smart take after smart take" in the press. I doubt very much that this is generally true. More likely, Republican leaders do not perceive themselves as holding determinative power over nomination politics. Instead, they are scared to death of a popular base that they do not fully understand and struggle mightily to satisfy. In a world in which the Majority Leader of the House can be defeated in a Republican primary election after outspending a virtual nobody by 25-to-1, I doubt that Republican officials view the contemporary nomination process as a system that reliably bends to their will even if they do attempt to exercise control over it.

Trump has broken so many iron laws of politics in this campaign that we need to think about the implications of his candidacy for many different facets of the political world, and try to sort out how much of the Trump phenomenon represents a deeper change in the way American politics works. But we should be careful about assuming that a Trump nomination, if it occurs, necessarily represents a failure of The Party to Decide soon enough or decisively enough. Perhaps Trump is simply illustrating the fact that there is no The Party with the power to Decide in the first place.

Nevada (D) and South Carolina (R): Some Things We Learned Last Night

One increasingly popular view of the Republican race after South Carolina is that two potential nominees remain: Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. With Jeb Bush out of the race, Ben Carson a non-factor, John Kasich looking like a regional candidate at best, and Ted Cruz coming in a disappointing third place in a state that he should have expected to win, Trump and Rubio are the only contenders left standing three states into the nomination calendar who retain the apparent capacity to amass the needed number of delegates to prevail on the first ballot at the national convention.

In some respects, this state of affairs favors Rubio. Public polling suggests that a significant share, and perhaps even a majority, of the Republican electorate is resistant to a Trump nomination, while Rubio appears to be broadly acceptable across party factions. As the other non-Trump candidates fold their campaigns or reveal themselves to be non-viable, Rubio can expect to receive a substantial boost in support. Party leaders and other conservative elites may begin to rally around Rubio in the coming weeks, attempting to persuade the Republican faithful to do likewise. Conventional wisdom has long suggested that Trump would falter once his opposition within the party united behind a single alternative candidate, and we seem to have reached the point in the race when that alternative has clearly emerged.

The main difficulty with this otherwise very plausible perspective is that it fits only imperfectly within the actual mechanics of the nomination process. First, Cruz, Kasich, and Carson all remain in the race (at least for now), and can therefore allow Trump to continue to win states without receiving an overall majority of votes even if they face diminishing odds of victory themselves. Second, Trump's back-to-back decisive victories in the otherwise sharply dissimilar states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, winning consistent levels of support across ideological and demographic categories, suggests that he cannot easily be contained geographically to a limited number of states. Third, Rubio has not yet managed to win—or even nearly win—a state himself, and it is not yet clear whether he can be considered a presumptive favorite in any of the 24 states that vote before his home state of Florida on March 15.

Unless the dynamics of the race change significantly over the next two weeks, Trump will start to build a clear lead in the national delegate count. Fortunately for Rubio, Republican Party rules allow states voting on March 15 or thereafter to apportion their delegates in a winner-take-all fashion. If he can hang in until then, Rubio can make up ground later in the race if the other candidates drop out and he starts beating Trump one-on-one in populous, winner-take-all states. But that may be what it takes to defeat the man who is now clearly the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

A few other observations from the voting on Saturday:

1. Rubio received the endorsements of South Carolina's popular governor, Nikki Haley, and senator, Tim Scott, while the state's other senator Lindsey Graham backed Jeb Bush after dropping out of the presidential race himself. Endorsements probably help candidates to a degree (and Rubio might well have placed third without the support he received from Haley and Scott, given his modest margin over Cruz), but their influence, at least in this campaign, appears to be limited. (Trump, of course, is backed by no sitting Republican governor or member of Congress.)

2. The Nevada caucus is fairly trivial in terms of delegates allotted, and Hillary Clinton remained the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination regardless of the outcome there on Saturday. Even so, her victory satisfied or even exceeded media expectations and therefore guaranteed her a week of positive press coverage—or, at least, a week without negative coverage—heading into the Democratic primary in South Carolina next Saturday. With little sign so far that Bernie Sanders has succeeded in making significant inroads among non-white Democrats, she is poised to win South Carolina easily and rack up a sizable delegate lead in the southern-dominated Super Tuesday vote on March 1. Sanders, for the first time, was the victim of the expectations game given his landslide victory in New Hampshire and tightening pre-caucus polls in Nevada. He remains likely to win a substantial share of delegates—who are always awarded proportionately in Democratic contests—but faces a very difficult path to the nomination.

3. The turnout rates in all three Democratic contests so far have been substantially lower than they were in 2008. While Sanders has staked the rationale for his candidacy on the emergence of a political "revolution" built on the participation of previously disaffected citizens, little evidence exists of his capacity to mobilize large numbers of these voters to support him.

Mitch McConnell Knows What He's Doing

Within hours of the news that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement in which he asserted that "this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President" because "the American people should have a voice in the selection of their new Supreme Court Justice." The political world has been consumed ever since with a debate over this claim, with dueling citations of applicable norms, constitutional provisions, and historical precedents flying back and forth over the Internet.

Some observers—not just liberals—have expressed surprise over McConnell's statement itself. Why, they ask, would McConnell publicly commit to such a strong position immediately after the Court vacancy appeared? Doesn't it open him up to the charge of engaging in partisan obstruction in violation of constitutional expectations? Even if he did wish to block Obama's selection, wouldn't it be smarter to wait until Obama made a nomination and base the case for opposition on a perceived flaw in the nominee?

My own conclusion is that McConnell's actions are quite rational, and probably the smart move. Here's why:


1. Democrats have been warning for 20 years or so that voters would punish congressional Republicans for their obstructionist ways. Yet the Republican Party stands today with a decided majority in both houses of Congress, having gained a net 13 Senate seats and 69 House seats since the start of the Obama presidency. House Republicans have not held this many seats since the 1920s. If you were advising McConnell, what evidence would you cite in order to argue that he was taking a big risk here?

2. It's rhetorically easier to fight over a principle than a person. McConnell doesn't want to get bogged down in a debate over the qualifications of individual candidates if he can hold to a more general position in opposition to the entire idea of a nominee in the first place.

3. If the Senate rejects a nominee based on a personal deficiency, Obama can counter by naming a replacement nominee who lacks that deficiency. The underlying obstructive impulse is actually exposed more by shooting down a diverse series of individual candidates than by holding to a single blanket objection to the process itself.

4. The Supreme Court is a sore spot for many conservatives, who complain about the insufficient conservatism even of previous Republican nominees like Souter, Kennedy, and Roberts. No justice nominated by Obama will be acceptable to the Republican base by definition. Why wait for months to assure conservatives that you will block a nomination when you can do it right away?

5. A "we'll reserve judgment until the hearings" approach would also predictably arise as an issue in the presidential nomination race, to the detriment of the Senate Republicans. Imagine Ted Cruz productively blasting away at McConnell on the campaign trail for failing to vow that any Obama nomination is unacceptable. It is likely that McConnell is not terribly interested in helping Cruz win the Republican nomination.

6. Most Republican senators are more worried about losing a primary election than a general election, and their behavior is understandable given these electoral incentives. Six-term incumbent Richard Lugar of Indiana lost a Republican primary by 20 points in 2012 after supporting both of Obama's previous Court nominees—even though they had occurred years before and did not change the ideological balance of the Court.

7. Democrats warn that a blockade of Obama's nominee will boost enthusiasm and turnout among Democrats in the next election. I'm skeptical that marginally participatory voters care that much about the Court, but even if they do, the issue works on both sides. Republicans will be equally—and perhaps more—motivated to protect the Court's conservative majority as Democrats will be to overturn it.

8. Might McConnell's move hurt vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents running for re-election this fall in purple or light-blue states? Perhaps—though I'm skeptical, and several such senators (Ayotte, Johnson, Toomey) have already endorsed his position—but even if they are, they can announce their support for a vote after winning their primaries.


We're likely to have an eight-member Court for a while. At the least, the Senate blockade is almost certain to hold through November, and a partisan split between the presidency and Senate majority in the 2016 general election will prolong the standoff even further. Republicans may be taking on some political risk with their hardball tactics, but that must be weighed against the risk faced by a Republican senator who provides a decisive vote in favor of a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. In the current GOP, such an act is tantamount to throwing one's career away.

Debate Recap: Clearing the Decks

The past few Republican debates had featured what a certain rival candidate's father might have called a "kinder and gentler" Donald Trump (that is, when Trump appeared at all). Perhaps, it was suggested, Trump had reined in his trademark pugnaciousness in order to broaden his popular appeal or position himself for a general election campaign. It certainly didn't seem to hurt him to remain above the fray as the other candidates scrapped with each other over immigration, foreign policy, or their qualifications for the presidency.

But the Trump who showed up last night in South Carolina was ready for a fight. He raised his voice frequently and verbally plowed right over other candidates and moderators, interrupting them repeatedly until he got his point in. The entire debate was held within a rhetorical gravitational field warped in unfamiliar ways by the massive orange-tinged star at its center.

The most remarkable moment, as many other accounts have noted, was Trump's explicit, impassioned attack on the George W. Bush administration. Trump not only criticized Bush's invasion of Iraq, but also claimed that Bush knowingly lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction there. He even held Bush responsible for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks—a charge that some liberals, but relatively few prominent elected Democrats, have made in public.

The airing of these views by a major candidate in a Republican primary is unprecedented, and it's very difficult to predict the political consequences. Do Republican voters—who generally express approval of Bush, even if they are more ambivalent about his policies—punish Trump for his partisan disloyalty? Or are they more concerned with other, more immediate subjects? Trump's entire campaign is such a departure from the normal political playbook that analysts are having a difficult time making sense of the connection between his behavior and its likely effects.

It is clear, though, that Trump subscribes to a worldview that recognizes no recent achievements in governing by either major party. He is equally caustic about Democratic and Republican leaders, about Barack Obama and George W. Bush, about the Affordable Care Act and the Iraq War. And when the parties engage in now-rare cases of cooperation across the aisle—on international trade, foreign policy intervention, attempted immigration reform—Trump blasts them for selling out the national interest.

Trump's specific views may not align with a majority of Republican voters, and he took more than the usual amount of return fire last night from Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. But he's offering the Republican electorate an unmatched vehicle to register its dissatisfaction—not just with Obama (you can do that by voting Rubio), not just with liberals and the Republican squishes who supposedly enable them (you can do that by voting Cruz), but with the entire political class across both parties. Any voters who are sick of picking and choosing targets and just want to clear the decks entirely now have the opportunity to support a candidate who loudly and aggressively speaks for them.

Debate Recap: Clinton Bets on the Democratic Coalition

Is the Democratic Party properly a coalition of multiple social groups, each with its own separable set of concerns and interests, or should it be an ideological vehicle that is dedicated to a single primary objective: breaking apart amassed wealth and its associated economic (and political) power?

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton argued over a number of things in Thursday night's debate, from the legacy of Henry Kissinger to their support for the policies of Barack Obama. On several other issues, they largely agreed with each other. But seldom has the fundamental difference between their conceptions of politics in general, and Democratic politics in particular, been as effectively revealed as it was on the stage in Milwaukee.

For Sanders, the solution to nearly every domestic policy challenge resides in reforming the campaign finance system and restricting the influence of wealthy and corporate interests. Even ostensibly non-economic issues like drug abuse and criminal justice are, for Sanders, closely connected to capitalist exploitation. Clinton implicitly criticized him as a "single-issue candidate" in her closing statement, but it's more accurate to characterize Sanders—at least on domestic policy—as a candidate who cares about many issues but views them as manifestations of a common root cause.

While she has responded to Sanders's rise by insisting that she, too, is dedicated to regulating campaign money and taking on Wall Street, Clinton rejects the claim that these measures will effectively address other social problems, as she stated explicitly in the final moments of the debate:

Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests, along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You’re right. But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday. And we would still have governors like Scott Walker and others trying to rip out the heart of the middle class by making it impossible to organize and stand up for better wages and working conditions. So I’m going to keep talking about tearing down all the barriers that stand in the way of Americans fulfilling their potential, because I don’t think our country can live up to its potential unless we give a chance to every single American to live up to theirs.

There is strategy at work here: Clinton is assuming that African-Americans, Latinos, feminists, union members, gays and lesbians, and other groups under the Democratic big tent do not simply view their own concerns and perceived injustices as limited to, or merely the consequences of, economic unfairness. But there's little reason to believe that her stated views on this particular matter aren't as genuine as are Sanders's, especially since they are consistent with the Democratic Party's traditional coalitional character; Sanders, of course, did not join the Democratic Party until he launched his presidential candidacy last year. (Observers looking for true moments of insincerity during the debate should consider the strong likelihood that both candidates significantly exaggerated the degree of their actual admiration for Barack Obama and his presidential administration.)

Sanders, as he repeatedly suggests, is staking his candidacy on the success of a political revolution. This is commonly understood as a transformational change in the broader electoral environment that would make previously unattainable goals (such as single-payer health insurance) possible. But Sanders is also seeking to redefine the Democratic Party, giving it an ideological foundation that it has never previously had in its 200-year history. Clinton, on the other hand, is betting her own ambitions on the same multiplicity of group interests enduring for yet another election.

Don't Expect the Superdelegates to Stop Bernie Sanders

Under Democratic Party rules, all sitting Democratic governors, members of Congress, and members of the Democratic National Committee, and all sitting or former Democratic presidents, vice presidents, congressional leaders, and DNC chairs, enjoy automatic delegate status at the national convention. The creation of these "superdelegate" positions in the 1980s was designed to give the party's leaders some potential influence in the selection of the presidential nominee and approval of the party platform, as well as a formal participatory role in the convention every four years.

In 2008, the margin between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the pledged delegate count (those delegates allocated based on the results of primaries and caucuses) was sufficiently narrow that the superdelegates could have decided the nomination, mathematically speaking. In practice, however, any suggestion that the outcome among pledged delegates (which favored Obama) be reversed by the superdelegates was met with concerns—and even threats—that denying the nomination to the pledged-delegate winner would fatally split the party. Then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi went on record in March 2008 as questioning the legitimacy of such a turn of events, and enough superdelegates endorsed Obama on the last day of the primary calendar that his path to the nomination was cleared—prompting Clinton to quickly concede the race.

This time around, Clinton's massive lead in superdelegates over Bernie Sanders initially suggests a built-in advantage for her campaign, forcing Sanders to win a supermajority of pledged delegates in order to make up the gap. In the wake of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, some news outlets even reported that Sanders's landslide victory only netted him a tie in the state delegate count after factoring in the New Hampshire superdelegates (such as Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Governor Maggie Hassan) who have publicly endorsed Clinton.

But it's once again difficult to imagine the superdelegates actually working to deny Sanders the nomination if he places first in the pledged delegate count—even if most of them prefer Clinton or view her as a superior general election candidate. The norms of internal "democracy" within the party organization are sufficiently strong that the legitimacy of a Clinton nomination under such conditions would be widely contested. A firestorm would ensue that would extend all the way to the convention itself, if not beyond, tearing the party apart and significantly weakening the eventual nominee.

It's worth remembering that the current nomination system is itself the product of a crisis of legitimacy. After Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 presidential race, the Democratic primaries were dominated by anti-Vietnam War candidates Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but Hubert Humphrey captured the nomination on the first ballot amid protests and violence both inside the convention hall and on the streets of Chicago (Kennedy had been assassinated by the time of the convention, but still would not have been nominated had he lived). The requirement that most delegates be selected by party voters rather than organizational leaders was adopted in response to the criticism that Humphrey's nomination did not reflect the anti-war sentiment of the Democratic rank-and-file that year.

So I would argue against paying too much attention to the superdelegates, whether you're a Sanders supporter angered by their lack of support for your candidate, a Clinton backer who views them as a reassuring backstop to your candidate's currently shaky campaign, or a neutral observer just trying to make sense of the process. The winner of the pledged delegate count will almost certainly be the 2016 Democratic nominee—or else the Democratic Party will really feel the burn.

New Hampshire: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. The importance of televised debates in presidential nominations, a distinctive characteristic of the 2012 Republican race, has reasserted itself this time around. It is likely that any non-disastrous debate performance last Saturday by Marco Rubio would have guaranteed him at least a third-place finish in New Hampshire and might have put him in the position to battle John Kasich for second place behind Trump. In either case, a sympathetic press corps would have given him positive coverage heading into the next stage of the race while buzzards would have circled around the Jeb Bush campaign. Instead, Rubio wound up placing fifth—albeit only one percentage point behind both Bush and Ted Cruz—and will face serious pressure to bounce back in South Carolina, while Bush lives on to fight another day.

2. The ideologically and stylistically moderate Yankee Republican vote has not completely disappeared in New Hampshire, to Kasich's temporary advantage. However, it will be difficult for Kasich to replicate his performance in the very different electorates of South Carolina and Nevada.

3. Trump continues to be a polarizing figure within the party, with significant proportions of Republicans voicing a dislike for him or reluctance to support him if he were to be the nominee. Yet Cruz and Bush also face resistance from a substantial fraction of Republican voters, and less than half of New Hampshire Republicans told exit pollsters that they would feel satisfied with a Rubio nomination. At the moment, none of the leading Republican candidates engenders broadly positive feelings within the party electorate.

4. Bernie Sanders's bigger-than-expected victory on the Democratic side does not dislodge Hillary Clinton from her position as the heavy favorite for the nomination. Yet it does signal that Sanders will be a serious competitor, perhaps extending the nomination race far into the spring. It is likely that the Clinton campaign will retool its message—Clinton's concession speech in New Hampshire appeared to foreshadow exactly such a development—to echo Sanders's anti-Wall Street themes while simultaneously appealing much more directly to the major social groups within the Democratic coalition, especially racial minorities.

5. Relatedly, Clinton is also likely to hug Obama even tighter (rhetorically speaking, that is) in the coming weeks. The Sanders campaign would be wise to prepare for repeated accusations that it represents a rebuke to the policies—and even the character—of the current incumbent. A race that turns into a referendum on Obama would not be in its strategic interest.

6. The Democratic Party is probably only a few years away from becoming a majority-minority party (about 45 percent of Obama's votes in 2012 were supplied by non-white citizens). After this election, there is likely to be a serious internal challenge within the Democratic National Committee to the privileged status enjoyed by Iowa and New Hampshire in the presidential nomination process, on the grounds that the heavily white electorates of those two states do not adequately represent the party as a whole. This effort may not succeed (Iowa and New Hampshire have beaten back threats to their dominance before), but it's hard to believe that the issue won't be raised. Even some Republican leaders may be sympathetic to a reform of the calendar, given the victories of outsider candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the first two events of the nomination season this year, though changes to Republican party rules are much more procedurally difficult to implement.

Debate Recap: The Press Piles on Rubio

I'm not going to say that Marco Rubio turned in a great debate performance on Saturday, but the tone and volume of the media coverage might lead one to believe that he showed up drunk, kicked over his podium, and screamed that the Old Man of the Mountain got what was coming to him. Sure, Rubio's repetitive recitation of his memorized anti-Obama spiel was a strange and strategically unwise response to Chris Christie's accusation that Rubio was overly dependent on the repetitive recitation of memorized spiel, but the collective press judgment that this mistake could be—and, what is more, rightfully should be—severely damaging to Rubio's entire presidential campaign merely reinforces my view that debates are, on the whole, lousy ways to judge candidates.

But media coverage can have a self-fulfilling dimension, especially in primary elections. The fact that Rubio's public persona, as transmitted by reporters to voters, has turned on a dime from "charismatic savior of the Republican Party" to "out-of-his-depth automaton" (both dramatically exaggerated statements, though in opposite directions) three days before the New Hampshire primary is likely to damage Rubio's popularity among the Republican electorate. At the very least, it will be more difficult for him to sustain the "momentum" that he received from the Iowa caucuses—momentum that itself is principally the product of the highly favorable media interpretation of his third-place finish there.

On the other hand, expectations will be sufficiently lowered for Rubio's performance on Tuesday that if he merely runs a close third once again—and certainly if he does better than that—he will be able to claim a comeback that will likely return positive coverage to his campaign. He also benefits from the lack of a consensus alternative choice for those Republicans who are in the "ABCD" camp (as in, "Anybody But Cruz or Donald"). If Bush, Christie, and Kasich all finish within a few points of each other in New Hampshire, as polls now suggest is very possible, none of these candidates will have the standing to assert strong momentum of their own as the race moves to South Carolina.

Meanwhile, it seems ever more probable that the winner of the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary will be one Donald J. Trump. That this isn't the major story of the weekend tells you all you need to know about what a crazy campaign we're in.

Debate Recap: Who, Exactly, Is The Democratic Establishment?

Bernie Sanders subscribes to a simple theory of politics: the chief—if not sole—impediment to leftward political change is the power of moneyed interests, which have used their influence (primarily via campaign contributions and super-PACs) to compel members of Congress and other elected officials to block what would otherwise be common-sense policies. The popularity of this view among Democrats, especially liberals, accounts for much of Sanders's unexpectedly successful presidential candidacy. If you hate Wall Street, oil companies, and the insurance industry, and blame them for the growth of economic inequality, the failure of climate change legislation, and the absence of single-payer health care, says Sanders, you can best fight back against these enemies by supporting me.

Because Sanders is running in a Democratic primary, however, it is natural to ask whether his theory—which he repeatedly cites as an explanation for Republican extremism and intransigence—applies to the Democratic Party, and, if so, how. This is a more delicate matter, politically speaking. Since Sanders's worldview leaves relatively little room for honest disagreement over what he sees as obvious truths, it is only natural to conclude that he views the majority of Democrats arrayed to his ideological right as similarly co-opted by Wall Street donations and super-PAC dollars. On the other hand, he understands that many of those Democrats are popular within the party and its primary electorate, so it behooves him to talk in generalities about the flaws of the political system rather than specifically question the integrity of every Democratic politician or group that accepts Wall Street money, votes in a moderate fashion, or refuses to support his ideas and candidacy—even if his campaign is inherently implying that these other party actors are stooges or sellouts.

The Clinton campaign has been circling around this implication-but-not-accusation for a few weeks, looking for a vulnerability to attack, and it is clear from last night's debate that they have decided to try to box Sanders in. First, Clinton accused him, with no little personal pique, of questioning her own integrity via "innuendo" and "insinuation," engaging in an "artful smear" without having the guts to come out and accuse her of having been personally corrupted by wealthy interests. Sanders fought back by relying on his familiar analysis—financial deregulation and other measures were the result of a compromised political system—while refusing to take the bait to attack Clinton personally.

Second, Clinton wanted Sanders to name names. Who, exactly, are the corporate shills in the Democratic Party who, by implication, share the blame for blocking his favored policy agenda? Barack Obama? Joe Biden? Paul Wellstone? Jeanne Shaheen? Once again, Sanders knew better than to answer directly—Obama, he said, had done an "excellent job" even though "I disagree with him on a number of issues," and he returned to a more general systemic analysis rather than get drawn into an argument about exactly who was or wasn't politically compromised.

As both campaigns remember well, the biggest mistake made by Sanders in this race so far was his previous characterization of Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign as "part of the establishment" when he was asked why they had endorsed Clinton. The tension within the Sanders campaign between a general attack on a "rigged system" and a reluctance to criticize specific figures and groups within Democratic ranks reflects a recognition that Democratic voters might well share Sanders's general antipathy toward the "establishment" and corporate interests while resisting the acknowledgement that well-liked party figures—Clinton, Obama, prominent liberal interest groups—are guilty of being part of this "establishment." Last night's debate suggests that he will need to maintain this approach in the face of increasingly insistent attempts by Clinton to pin down the implications of his argument.

Most Democrats Aren't Liberals...Or "Progressives"

Yesterday, the political press took a temporary break from making fun of Jeb Bush to monitor a Twitter feud between (the social media staff of) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over who could claim the most authentically "progressive" record—a dispute that was also briefly raised in the CNN-sponsored town hall in New Hampshire attended last night by both candidates. Sanders accused Clinton of having previously accepted the label of "moderate," arguing that "you cannot be a moderate and a progressive." The Clinton campaign responded by attacking Sanders's voting record on guns while accusing Sanders of a "low blow" in criticizing Clinton's credentials.

Fights over ideological bona fides are commonplace in the Republican Party but rare on the Democratic side. In large part, that is because most Republicans define their party as properly acting as the agent of conservatism, while most Democrats view their own party as representing the interests of one or more social groups. Democrats locked in primary battles may accuse each other of insufficient loyalty to the party, or to a component constituency within its coalition, but usually refrain from describing themselves as progressives (or liberals) or questioning the liberalism/progressivism of others.

Sanders, of course, is an ideologically-motivated politician who had previously declined to affiliate himself with the Democratic Party as a sign of his own independence from its non-liberal factions; the entire thrust of his attack on Clinton—and, by extension, much of the Democratic party apparatus itself—is based on an ideological critique. The Clinton camp, perceiving the popularity of Sanders's message among Iowa and New Hampshire voters, has gingerly attempted to associate itself with the "progressive" label even as it continues to insist that its candidate's more incremental, pragmatic approach is the best way to accomplish Democratic goals. But this is new territory for a party that is unused to publicly debating ideology as such, and it is clear that the Clinton side is wary of making statements on the topic that might prove counterproductive in a future general election.

For Sanders, the problem with getting bogged down in an ideological dispute is that many Democratic voters are unlikely to side with him. The distribution of ideological self-identification within the Democratic primary electorate in 2008, the last contested presidential nomination race, was as follows in the ten biggest states in the country, according to media exit polls:

California: 50% liberal, 37% moderate, 13% conservative
Texas: 37% liberal, 40% moderate, 22% conservative
Florida: 51% liberal, 37% moderate, 13% conservative
New York: 57% liberal, 33% moderate, 9% conservative
Illinois: 48% liberal, 41% moderate, 10% conservative
Pennsylvania: 49% liberal, 40% moderate, 10% conservative
Ohio: 40% liberal, 46% moderate, 14% conservative
Georgia: 47% liberal, 41% moderate, 12% conservative
North Carolina: 42% liberal, 37% moderate, 21% conservative
Michigan: 49% liberal, 41% moderate, 10% conservative

As we can see, self-identified liberals constituted more than half of the Democratic electorate last time around in only two of these ten states—and more than 51% in just one (New York). Even among the party base—voters committed enough to participate in relatively low-turnout primary elections—liberals are in the minority. Moreover, many self-identified liberals are unlikely to also consider themselves "progressives," the preferred term of the Sanders campaign but a label that is not widely used in contemporary American political rhetoric. When Sanders talks about progressivism, in other words, many Democrats either won't be inclined to take his side or won't even know what he's talking about, and his accusatory use of the word "moderate" seems to ignore the millions of Democratic voters who describe their own politics in precisely those terms.

Iowa: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Donald Trump clearly underperformed his poll numbers. Some have suggested that he was hurt by skipping the debate last week, but it's more likely that polls systematically overestimate his support, especially in low-turnout, organization-dependent caucus states. (And don't be misled by all the talk about record turnout—in comparative terms, the participation rate in the caucus was still much lower than in most primaries.)

2. The evangelical-vs.-non-evangelical divide was somewhat overstated going into Iowa. Cruz benefited from the evangelical vote, but did not win it overwhelmingly. Similarly, he was not as dominant in the western, Steve King-represented section of the state as expected, but made up for it by running surprisingly strongly in the eastern cities and suburbs.

3. Ethanol is no longer the "third rail" of Iowa politics. My guess is that American politics has become strongly nationalized in the era of the Internet, national media, and partisan polarization, reducing the electoral importance of parochial interests.

4. Rubio was smart to declare victory after running a close third, and will benefit in the national media from the perception that he's best positioned to actually win the nomination. The unresolved question is whether he gets a bigger media bounce from coming in third than Cruz does from placing first—particularly in the conservative media that most Republican primary voters consume. If so, he could be well-positioned in New Hampshire to consolidate much of the non-Trump vote.

5. There really isn't a "Paul wing" of the Republican Party.  Ron Paul won 10% in Iowa in 2008 and 21% in 2012, suggesting that there was a significant bloc of libertarian-minded, non-interventionist Republicans that might become established as an enduring faction within the GOP.  Rand Paul, though a senator, only got 4% this time.

6. Bernie Sanders is a very talented politician with an attractive message and manner in the eyes of many Democratic activists and voters. Though his chances of actually winning the nomination remain quite remote, it's very surprising in retrospect that he did not seek a national political profile before this election.

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.