Byron York talks to right-wing billionaires to try to ascertain why they aren’t coordinating to take Donald Trump down. He comes up with five categories of explanation:
First, creating an organization and spending millions of dollars to carpet-bomb Trump with negative ads in key states isn’t easy; there aren’t many people who could pull it off. Second, some donors think an anti-Trump offensive not only would not work but would backfire on an already unpopular GOP establishment. Third, some who do believe it could work think it should not be attempted until Trump’s critics have agreed on an alternative candidate — which they haven’t. Fourth, the anti-Trump opposition can’t decide who should lead such an effort. And fifth, most GOP strategists and money movers continue to believe Trump will ultimately fail on his own, that in the end he will not be the Republican nominee.
I think we can safely ignore the first and fifth answers because they’re basically unresponsive. On the first, the premise of the question is that these billionaires could pull off a carpet-bombing of Trump but simply aren’t doing so. On the last, if a carpet-bombing is unnecessary, then what are we even debating?
The real explanation can be found in the second, third and fourth points. I am going to discuss them out of order.
The single biggest problem is that there are no acceptable alternatives to Trump. Jeb was supposed to be their guy but he just can’t get any traction. Scott Walker and Rick Perry have already dropped out. Ben Carson’s campaign is in free-fall. Chris Chistie was once a hot commodity with the billionaires, but the closing of the George Washington Bridge put an end to that romance. Marco Rubio has his Miami Vice problem, and if there is one thing that Jeb campaign has been largely successful at in this campaign, it has been warning big donors about the skeletons in Rubio’s closet. Other than Ted Cruz, that leaves no one with the finances, polling numbers, and potential to win that billionaires need to see before they get invested.
But Ted Cruz is so loathed by his colleagues in Congress and particularly in the Senate, that the billionaires would alienate the most powerful Republicans in the country if they started supporting him. To be sure, a handful of these Daddy Warbucks characters don’t care and are giving Cruz money, but they aren’t about to do it as a class.
When York talks about the billionaires’ inability to decide on someone who would lead the effort against Trump, part of that is that they can’t agree on who the effort should benefit.
The last piece of the puzzle is that these billionaires are at least self-aware enough to realize that they’re partly responsible for the Republican base turning to political outsiders and neophytes in this election cycle. The base is irate with the Establishment and any obvious effort by the Establishment to crush Trump or Cruz or anyone else could easily wind up doing the exact opposite and giving them a big boost.
I think what’s actually broken here is that the mainstream media isn’t trusted and the right-wing media is too diffuse to control. Even relatively controllable outlets like Fox News have created a credibility problem for themselves that inhibits their ability to prop up the Establishment and savage outsiders and insurgents.
The people voting in the Republican primaries aren’t receptive to messaging from even Fox News and they find the more rabid outfits more trustworthy and true to conservative principles.
That leaves saturation political advertising as the only alternative, but if that approach were still effective, Jeb would have seen some positive movement from all his ad buys.
The bottom line is that there are no alternatives to Trump who are obviously better bets. There’s no way to convince the base to go with a safer more electable choice because that choice doesn’t even exist. The base cannot be reached because no one controllable has credibility with them. And political advertising doesn’t work the way it used to.
There are no tools in the toolbox.
Yet, even if they had some tools, all this talk about stopping Trump is kind of irrelevant because no one better is standing in the wings.
The party has basically come apart.
Well, I mean…Trump’s a tool.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I was assured by my betters in the Infotainment Mediums the GOP were in a superior position coming into the 2016 election because they had a deep bench of candidates. So all that is needed is for one of those candidates to receive the required financial and organizational backing and he will sweep to victory.
The alternative is the people in the Infotainment Mediums don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground and, Shirley, that can’t right.
OTOH at the national (presidential) level, the GOP has never had a “deep bench.” For its first fifty years it didn’t need on because whoever the party selected as its nominee almost always won.
Harding didn’t even want the job, but looked the part. They often nominate inexperienced and/or lightweight politicians or people that have no elective office experience at all. In 1944 Dewey had as much experience as Gov of NY as Palin had as Gov of AK in 2008.
The GOP Crime Bosses have lost control of their base. They coddled and cultivated the racism and xenophobia for decades through dogwhistles and the base just isn’t here for that anymore. Nope. Donald Trump is giving the GOP Base what they want and there’s nothing that the GOP Crime Bosses can do about it. The monster they created has grown beyond their control.
It’s been slowly breaking apart since 1994 if not earlier. Or maybe I’m too dumb to see that succeeding in electing lots of crazies to local, state, and Congressional offices will lead to electing a crazy to the WH without the need for the candidate to wear a mask of sanity during the elections (which dates back at least as far as 1968).
On the other side of the coin, Bill Clinton gave his first solo Hillary campaign speech this morning. He was Bill Clinton at his finest, hands down and though I’m sure Trump’s twitter machine is smoking in response, Bill showed he can paint a human side to Hillary simultaneously with giving her big creds for accomplishments.
Bill supports his wife in the family business. Is that some kine of parallel to nepotism? What are those accomplishments exactly?
Seriously!
I mean, who hasn’t served a term or two as a Senator, or ran the State Department for a few years?!?
Seriously? And what did she achieve? What was her input apart from herself? Kerry got agreements with Iran and Cuba. She’d be laughed out of town if she even tried to claim that she was his equal. Her biggest achievement at SoS was the destruction of Libya. Is she proud of it: yes, she sees it as an example of smart power (what then would stupid power look like?). She’s a fraud and people fall for it. Too bad for them (and everyone else too).
Unless you’re a neoconservative or an upper-middle class WASP who’s working in a profession less susceptible to market downturns, don’t expect life to get much better for you in the next 4-8 years.
Does the Democratic Party have Stockholm Syndrome or something?
This is also really a crushing refutation to this bit of silliness from Tom Nichols about how Trump is really the fault of the “PC Police”. The whole thing goes on about how said “PC Police” have effectively silenced “sensible conservatism” through accusations of racism, misogyny and homophobia. So far, so normal, and he hits pretty much all the Stations of the Wingnut Cross on the way[1].
However, he says that this has stoked so much rage among sensible conservatives that they flock to Trump because he gives them a voice, and it’s like, huh? Why can’t they just vote for one of the supposed sensible conservatives? Why can’t that sensible conservative candidate harness their anger and frustration? Appeals to the “Silent Majority” of yesteryear just makes the failure of this argument all the more glaring.
There are two possible answers to Nichols. One is that his stupid theory is wrong, and the other is that the rest of the conservative field is just so bad that they can’t channel frigging anything.
[1] “And here we see Brandon Eich stumbling under the weight of the cross….”
Tom Nichols? The same guy that was Twitter BFF’s with a dick pic sender, until that dick pic sender was revealed as a dick pic sending Glenn Beck-type nutter?
I am very confused. I STILL don’t think Trump has the horses to pull this off. Furthermore, I believe that he DOESN’T WANT to be president. He wants to RUN for the nomination in much the same way 55+ yo people want to run in the Boston Marathon. Not so they can win but so they can brag.
After all is said and done, somewhat less than 40% of the likely R primary voters are for him. To my way of thinking this means that 60% of the likely primary voters are AGAINST him. And by against, I mean, wouldn’t vote for him on a bet. I wish someone would do a poll asking who is the second choice if their candidate gets hit by a bus.
I think that it will be someone else. And I think that someone else will be bent, spindled and mutilated by the D presidential nominee.
My $$$ (about 10 cents worth) is on Cruz.
Other than Warren Harding, doubt anyone has run for POTUS that didn’t WANT to BE President. That WANT can be subdivided into EGO want (TO BE) and TO DO want. (Forget all the agendas written by the help that candidates issue during a campaign; that’s generally nothing more than a gimmick to make the candidate look serious.)
For most candidates it’s a mix of the two, but EGO predominates. Trump is close to 100% ego. But it’s difficult to set that percentage much lower than that for the other 2016 candidates, other than Sanders. OTOH, if EGO want is extremely low, such a candidate wouldn’t be effective on the TO DO part. So, near a 50:50 ratio is probably good.
I wouldn’t say Trump is nearly guaranteed to get the nomination, but 40% of voters is plenty in such a crowded field. You can’t say it’s impossible at this point.
At this point I’d say Cruz is about the only one who can shut him out. Cruz will likely win Iowa; if Trump “disappoints” in NH then a lot of Cruz-friendly southern states through Super Tuesday could put him in the lead. Otherwise it’s likely a crazy melee with a bunch of candidates continuing to pull some votes, leaving Trump with an excellent shot at the nomination with his 35-40% plurality. There are enough winner-take-all and solo-20%-plurality-takes all to give him a majority of elected delegates in that scenario.
So, you’re saying that if it were a two person race, Cruz and Trump, that Cruz would win? That somehow given that much media exposure, a majority of GOP primary voters would like a guy that almost all his DC colleagues have come to loathe?
Right or wrong, Marie, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Of course, in this alternate universe where a choice between Cruz and Trump actually makes sense, who knows what the final result will be?
OTOH, good or bad, the Senate hasn’t had the responsibility or ability to nominate a candidate in a long time. Somehow, I doubt that the TurtleMan will go out on a limb and risk pissing off people just so that OrangeHair can win a pyrrhic victory.
Just sayin’.
Cruz is actually quite popular with evangelicals – he recently got a supermajority endorsement from a big group – and fully acceptabel to the TeaBaggers. Pols may hate him but voters like him. If it’s Cruz or Trump winning the first 10 or so contests, with Cruz winning the majority , I think the others will fade to irrelevance and give Cruz a chance to unify the non-Trump vote.
In addition, as much as most Republican pols despise Cruz, many have said he’s less bad than Trump.
Evangelicals may like him — but that’s not enough. Which is why he’s also been courting the teabaggers for the past few years. However, in Iowa and nationally through October, the fundies preferred Carson to Cruz and baggers preferred Trump. The “Mod”/traditional” Republicans seem to be totally confused as they search for someone like McCain or Romney that has more than a slim to none chance to win the general election.
It’s quite depressing when one surveys the “field” of GOP contenders and rues the day that there is no McCain or RMoney to take the lead. Confronted with the choices this go-round, McCain or RMoney almost look, er, credible?
Sad. The D party is pretty bad, but this crew is insufferable.
I’m too afraid to ask my RWNJ fundie family who they support. I don’t want to hear their answer.
If Trump doesn’t get the nomination, I shudder at the prospect of who will. Of course, I shudder any way it goes. ugh.
Personally, I’m very surprised that everyone except Rubio and Bush is still there. If I’m right, your crowded field isn’t by the time they make it to SC.
I also agree that Cruz seems to be the only one who can stop him at this time.
Of course, I only got 2 out of 27 predictions right in the 2012 elections.
Better buy more salt for the popcorn.
In the top one or two tiers in the polls, Cruz looks to be the only one with a competent campaign and talented campaign staff – probably he will outperform his polling in the voting, especially in caucus states.
“Trump is the biggest gainer since our last national poll in mid-November, going from 26% to 34%. He’s also become more broadly popular with GOP voters, with his favorability rating going from 51/37 up to 58/34. “
The poll is two weeks old, but the picture is the same:
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/republican-presidential-primary-2016/
Maybe George Pataki got out too soon. /snark
“There Are No Better Alternatives to Trump?”
The trick here is to define “better alternatives”, Booman. If the RatPublican Party’s controllers want a kinder, gentler, more malleable candidate there are quite a few. But…if they want a candidate who can win against Hillary Clinton, there is no one but Trump. No one. Not Cruz, not Rubio, n0t Bush III…none of them. And they are scared shitless of loose cannon Donald.
If one prefers the DemRat Party, this is possibly good news. If the RatPubs somehow hustle Trump out of contention at the convention they look to be dead in the water, and that might result in some heavy coattails for Hillary. But if Trump manages to win? HOO boy!!! there’s gonna be hell to pay before it’s over.
Watch.
My bet?
Sure.
He wins the presidency after a truly nasty campaign and a whole lot of heretofore repressed shit hits the fan within months.
Watch.
My hedge bet?
They manage to get rid of Trtump some way, HRC wins going away and the U.S. settles into yet another term of neoliberal bullshit and mediocre survival.
Watch.
AG
Nah. At a minimum, a sizeable minority (20%? 30%) of current republican likely voters (note that I didn’t say current republican PRIMARY voters) can’t stand the sight or sound of Trump because:
I’m not about to say those people would vote for HRC or Bernie, just that they won’t vote for TRUMP. Essentially I’m predicting a Republican Split Ticket: Repbulican in the local and state races, no one for the Pres.
I don’t do much betting, but you can take that one to the bank.
It is the recent non-voters who are going to push Trump over the top, DF. Millions of them.
Not the habitual clomp-clomp-clomping Romney/Bush/Reagan voters…although many of them will sign on too.
Not the so-called “disaffected DemRats.” Too few of them to make much of a difference, I’m thinking.
The vast, heretofore silent (in a voting sense) majority. And I do mean “majority,” or damned near when split up into those who will vote for Trump and those who will not but also won’t vote for HRC.
These people are going to come out in droves. Not in the primaries, but most definitely in the election itself. They haven’t voted (most of them, if my conversations with non-voters are any indication) because they no longer trust the establishment politicians. They trust Trump, if only to be an untrammeled, uncontrolled Donald Trump rather than some cobbled-together-by-poll-results-and-political-handlers hologram of a political leader.
Watch.
2016 threatens to be a Reaganesque landslide. Trump would have to either fuck up royally (Which… on the evidence of his last several months…he is not going to do.), get caught in some truly dirty business from his undoubtedly truly dirty past or be eliminated in some other way…wet work or dry, as the spooks like to say…to lose against HRC.
Sorry, but there it is.
Watch.
AG
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been hearing about these “millions and millions” of disaffected voters since the Silent Majority in the mid-60’s.
Ya know what? They don’t exist. Hatred is propelling Trump. Hatred propels voters. The haters been voting since I was a kid. The haters are still voting. The haters are still getting counted by the polls.
Same tune, same words. Bet on THAT.
Don’t sweat AG. He likes the idea of Trump winning. The threat/prospect allows him to use the Frog Pond and other arenas to browbeat Americans- “your rottenness brought the fascist to the White House.” Unfortunately for him, Arthur’s belief that Trump is the New Reagan is poorly supported by the full biographies of the two men.
Arthur pretends to be concerned about voter turnout while supporting voter ID laws which suppress the vote in ways that disproportionately hurt progressive candidates, then has the gall to lecture progressives that we’re not doing it right. What a fraud.
Book Review — Superforecsting: Predicting the future by being objective
The title of the book Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction is more accurately descriptive than the diary title. A decent enough review, but didn’t get the sense that the diarist fully understood “System 1” and why it is of equal if not more importance to “System 2.” Data/info/etc absent art may outperform an ideologue but so too does a coin toss.
In other words, don’t believe your own press.
Not quite. In elections where there are rarely other than outcome A or B, either partisan press A or B always gets it right in any individual race. The question when they get it right or wrong is the quality of what went into their projection. Would a coin toss have been as good?
Back in 2004, I did the simplest test of all for six Senate races. Didn’t know anything about either the Democratic and Republican nominees, but I did know which candidate was a D and R. I watched fifteen to thirty minutes of their two-person debates with the sound off. The only question I answered was which of the two had more visual charisma. In five of the six, didn’t have to struggle for an answer. The sixth one I couldn’t answer because both were equal charisma sinks.
Charisma won in all five races. (iirc four were Republicans and one was a Democrat.) It was all a ‘System 1’ evaluation (maybe a touch of ‘System 2’ turning off my D bias). Didn’t bother to share this (or my read of the polls that year) publicly because I don’t hang out at GOP or rightwing sites, and I get enough grief as it is for not wearing partisan DEM glasses.
Trump is ALL “charisma,” marie. And HRC is all wonk.
Trump in a landslide…God help us all.
AG
Trump is ALL “charisma
Compared to whom?
Maybe I didn’t explain my personal experiment very well. Knowing nothing but the political party, was there any noticeable charisma difference between the candidates at the pure visual level. Charisma – so difficult to define but easy to recognize and often only at a non-verbal/non-cognitive level. (We could also call it personality that appeals to others.) At pure or base level, only a naive observer can reasonably perform such a task.
(Since I did know the political party of the candidates, I wasn’t a completely naive observer. And as some here claim that I only criticize, and unfairly so, Democrats, it’s unknowable if I was biased for or against the Democratic candidates.)
While there’s nothing I can do about not being naive and I did have the sound on during a GOP debate, it didn’t seem to me that Trump won any base charisma comparison. (On some objective scale, politicians in general don’t rank highly and none of those on that stage were an exception to that.)
wrt HRC is all wonk. That’s some reputation someone attached to her (don’t know if it was supposed to be a plus or a negative) that you’re repeating. I personally don’t think she’s a wonk at all. Well Mitt Romney is a definition of a wonk; then Clinton would also be a wonk.
No, Marie, she really IS a wonk.
I have reason to know that personally.
Perhaps we define wonk differently. For example, if one is interested in economics but only reads/studies the austerians and their critiques of the other schools of economic thought, one could spout all the minor details the autsterians present, but not know much about economics in general.
Compared to whom?
Compared to his opposition…and of course, in the eyes of his supporters.
“Charisma”
I’ll take the Merriam Webster definition.
Close enough for me.
Of course, one person’s admired charismatic personality is another’s Hitler.
HRC?
She’s a government wonk. She knows where all the bodies are buried…she buried some, herself…and she knows (or at least she thinks she knows) which PermaGov levers to pull to get the results she wants. What she does not know is how to create a charismatic image of her own. Obama…or at least his handlers…handlers…knew.
Bet on it.
HRC and her handlers?
Not so much.
It’s branding, Marie.
Public relations.
Advertising.
it’s a beauty contest, and although you and I both would almost certainly more comfortable having a friendly drink with HRC than with Trump, its all about the numbers.
Watch.
AG
Again, I’m speaking of unconscious perceptions of charisma that filter into a sense of a person. What the Trumpsters like is that he is a bully and makes racist, sexist statements without apology. That’s a conscious appreciation of him — that they could describe as dynamic and tough — and absent competition over-rides any unconscious perception of charisma.
For a while there, Carson was riding high in the polls and a portion of that support had nothing to do with having listened to him or even that he’s a Xtrian fundamentalist. While I’m not a naive observer, I could recognize that he does possess a level of charisma that’s higher than most politicians. Then he started speaking — and in a field of whackjobs he is even more off-the-wall.
What if a few of those billionaires decide to get on the Trumpvagen?
It is interesting how invested the left blogsphere is in the GOP is coming apart theme.
Given that they hold the House, the Senate and most of the Governorships the idea is a very tough one to take seriously.
It is a symptom of how little hope liberal bloggers have. Clinton will do nothing even if she wanted to – and she doesn’t.
So there is no reason to think progressive ideas are closer to realization than they were in 2007.
I think the passivity about Clinton and obsession about the GOP is really despair in disguise. A bit of Schadenfreude to distract from the reality of another DLC term in office.
In politics as in economics, everything happens on the margins, so I have to agree with you because I don’t see the margins moving much in 2016.
The GOP has done a bang-up job of leveraging their domination of the rural side of the rural-urban political divide, plus the Constitutional over-representation of rural areas, into a strong position at the state level and below, and in Congress. Every presidential election they have their own moment of angst because their 47% presidential vote ceiling stops them from winning the whole enchilada. But they have hit their ceiling. Their angst will pass, and they’ll got on with the job of obstructing the Democratic President. Things aren’t going to change until they alienate a lot of voters and get well below their ceiling so they lose downticket races.
Unless a gridlocked Democratic administration leads to disillusionment and malaise. Even during years where the New Deal Dems were all-but-unstoppable the GOP still had an ‘in’ if the public was sufficiently dissatisfied with Democratic performance: see 1938, Eisenhower, and Nixon 1960.
I really wouldn’t be so sanguine about the Democratic Party’s long-term chances. We bled the youth like crazy going from 2008 to 2012 Obama. And those projections about demographics allowing the party to coast to victory is based on the assumption that voter preferences don’t chance in the next 2-4 cycles.
UH HUH
UH HUH
Trump takes mainstream tone, no longer too fringey for GOP
Rachel Maddow looks back at the 2012 Republican primary in which Donald Trump had a strong start but was ultimately too embarrassingly fringey for mainstream Republicans, compared to 2016 when Trump, still of-the-fringe, is the Republican front-runner and redefining the party’s mainstream.