I don’t know if John McCain will survive politically, but I know that he’s already lost in an important sense. He’s come to the conclusion that he cannot oppose Donald Trump, a man who mocked him for getting captured by the Vietnamese, and have any hope of winning reelection. You can probably tell what McCain really thinks about Trump by listening to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The two neoconservative warhawks have nearly identical foreign policy views.
Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy but I can understand why he’s not revealing their names.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Question #1 for Trump: Are we sure the guy running the teleprompter has the pages in the right order? #notmakinganysense
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Question #2 — Did teleprompter guy actually write the speech? #notmakinganysense
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Trump speech is pathetic in terms of understanding the role America plays in the world, how to win War on Terror, and threats we face.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Trump’s FP speech not conservative. It’s isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought, demonstrates lack of understanding threats we face
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Final thought on Trump’s foreign policy speech — Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
Yet, John McCain endorsed Donald Trump at the beginning of May, saying that it would be foolish to ignore the will of the voters. To get a full understanding of just how great of a personal defeat this was for McCain, we have to go back to January, when Sarah Palin endorsed Trump. When reporters asked McCain’s daughter Meghan what she thought of Palin’s endorsement, this is what she said:
The daughter of Sen. John McCain, who picked Palin to be his running mate in 2008, said she was specifically pained because of Trump’s past remarks about her father’s prisoner-of-war status in the Vietnam War.
“This has been a hard one for me. It really has been. My father’s campaign was all about character and integrity and I know that a lot of the beliefs that my father has espoused isn’t popular anymore. I understand that. I understand that anti-establishment candidates are taking over,” she said in an interview Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.”
Her father’s advisers and staff remain like “extended family,” McCain added. “It is hard for me to watch her endorse Donald Trump after what Donald Trump said about my father’s service. Just on a personal level, it’s hard for me to differentiate personal and politics in a situation like this.”
Meghan is outspoken, and she’s not as conservative as her father, but I think she spoke for the larger McCain camp when she portrayed Palin’s endorsement as a personal betrayal. Back in January, it would have been hard to imagine Sen. McCain endorsing Trump as well.
But, he’s not willing to lose his Senate seat over the insults that Trump cast his way, nor over their differences on foreign policy, free trade, immigration, or Trump’s temperament, ignorance, or bigotry.
Sometime back in April, McCain was caught on tape at a Republican fundraiser explaining how a Trump nomination would imperil his own reelection.
“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain said, according to a recording of the event obtained by POLITICO. “If you listen or watch Hispanic media in the state and in the country, you will see that it is all anti-Trump. The Hispanic community is roused and angry in a way that I’ve never seen in 30 years.”
Statistics since gathered by the New York Times back up McCain’s political analysis:
An estimated 433,000 Hispanics are expected to vote in Arizona this November, an 8 percent increase from 2012…
…According to an analysis of voter and census data by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, Latinos are expected to account for 17 percent of Arizona’s registered electorate this year, with a voter turnout rate at close to 70 percent. Nearly 45 percent of Latino registered voters are Democrats, the report found…
…Hispanics in the Phoenix area will also be heavily motivated to vote in the sheriff’s election; Joe Arpaio, a Trump supporter who was recently found in contempt of court for willfully violating an order requiring his deputies to stop detaining Latinos, will be on the ballot, trying to keep his seat as Maricopa County sheriff.
Ironically, this means that John McCain has to tie himself closer to Trump rather than alienating his supporters.
It’s true that McCain seems to understand that he needs to do better than Trump with Latinos and young voters in order to win, but he can’t succeed if he loses the racist, nativist vote in the process. He almost definitely can outpoll Trump with Latinos, but McCain’s pitch to young voters needs some tweaking. Look at how he talks about them:
“I’ve been feeling it out there for some time,” Mr. McCain said. “In the southern part of the state here, they are not feeling the recovery at all. Then there is this whole issue with these young people and kids carrying around all this debt.”
“That’s the Bernie effect,” he said, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders’s youth appeal in the Democratic primaries.
He added: “The turmoil in this race is more than I’ve ever seen. Younger, newer voters are registering for only one reason, to vote against Trump. So my challenge is to convince that younger, newer voter that I am for them.”
McCain identifies the debt-load of young voters as a key reason why they like the message of Bernie Sanders, and he recognizes that a lot of young voters in Arizona (of all races) are registering specifically to vote against his party’s racist presidential nominee, but he won’t disown that racism and he doesn’t embrace any of Sanders’s agenda for helping young folks with their debt and their inability to make enough money to move out of their parents’ homes. He wants to convince young voters that he, unlike Trump, is on their side, but he’s off to the worst kind of start in making that case.
I don’t doubt that McCain is between a rock and a hard place. He doesn’t think Trump should be president but he won’t say that because he thinks it will split his base of support and cause him to lose. He can’t stay with Trump, though, and avoid losing the Latino and youth votes in a big way. And, in any case, where he differs most with Trump (on the war in Iraq and on free trade), McCain looks even worse to young voters.
Adding to his woes, his opponent Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, was raised on an Indian Reservation and will probably get a bigger share of the Native vote than is typical for a Democrat running against McCain.
The fascinating implication of all of this is that Trump will lose Arizona and lose it badly enough to possibly drag McCain down with him. After all, if Trump were to win Arizona, wouldn’t he be an asset to McCain rather than an albatross?
I’m not ready to make that prediction, but it’s hard to avoid noticing that McCain doesn’t think he can win with just Trump’s share of the vote.
I lost any respect I had for John McCain a long time ago but it’s sad to see him cling so bitterly to a seat that simply is not worth having at this cost. He should run a campaign he’ll be proud of, particularly because he might lose no matter what he does. Personally, I think he’s either safer than he thinks because Trump will carry the state, or he’s doomed unless he creates real distance between himself and Trump and gets significant crossover votes. Trying to have it both ways makes him look weak and lacking in all principles, and that’s not going to appeal to any of the factions in Arizona.
Leave John McCain alone, Booman. He’s just following orders.
Besides, the alternative is Hillary Clinton.
#Trump/Arpaio 2016: Because Hillary is just too dangerous.
And if McCain loses his seat, certainly he will tell himself it’s not because of anything he did or didn’t do while in office. Rather it will all be Trump’s fault.
Had family in Arizona for many years. I think Trump wins it, maybe a bit closer than normal though. The issue is that Arizona has a lot of old white voters, like my aunt and uncle, who lived in Scottsdale. These voters control the state now and the Democrats are a weak party nowadays as a result. Their representatives control all levers of power and do everything they can to ensure nobody else operates them. Think about the voting difficulties in the primary–that’s the power they wield. The press here in Cali has a fascination with potential blowback from the AZ’s legislature’s behavior, but it never happens.
Maybe this is the year things go differently, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Thanks for the insight from a blue voter in a state a bit more red than Arizona, albeit one that has a much larger AA population. We too have an established incumbent GOP senator who’s running for reelection and is almost guaranteed a win even though he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s last year, yet claims that it won’t interfere with his ability to serve another 6 year term.
He’s got an an unknown political newby running against him in the general who will probably only garner 15 to 20% of the vote. What we need here is an AA Democratic candidate with some real name recognition. I’ve decided that that’s the only way that the political tide is gonna turn any time soon. We tried the qualified female candidate who had a still viable Democratic family name, albeit a quite conservative one. She went down to defeat to a clearly unqualified white GOP political newcomer from the preferred business background and who had the additional appeal of being downright mean.
If this had happened to McCain prior to ’08, I would have felt bad for him. Now, not so much. Karma sometimes works fast.
The dark money is flowing. We’re already seeing TV ads in the typical grainy ‘surveillance video’ style telling us Anne Kirkpatrick is proud she voted for Obamacare.
If the Dems don’t do their usual “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” stuff here and actually RUN on being proud of Obamacare we could win here.
A LOT of people have health insurance now that didn’t before.
But I really doubt that AZ is going to go to Clinton, it’s too damned red a state. I mean the state lege literally locked the Democrats out of the budget negotiations this year. Literally…they locked the doors and wouldn’t let them in. Nor is this the first time this kind of thing has happened.
I don’t even expect it to be close.
I’ll take ‘politicians I could not care less about’, for $1200, Alex.
If McCain loses, you’ll do a Snoopy Dance.
This analysis from 2013 is still on point. White vote is 77% of total voters and Romney took 78.2 of ’em meaning 60.2% of the total, thus Democratic Party futility. In 2010 McCain won 58.7% to 34.5% or +24.2%.
In 2012 Romney won 53.48% to 44.45%. We should discount questionable polls* and anecdotal persiflage and assume Trump will take Arizona and McCain will be re-elected.
* as Sam Wang has notice, polls in early summer are highly unreliable
And ATinNM needs to work on English grammar.
Arizona is like Georgia and Texas. Eventually it’ll flip, but it’s not there yet.
in 2008 it was 53%-45% with McCain on the ballot and nearly identical in 2012 53.5%-44.5%
We’re essentially talking 9% does Trump swing 9% in AZ? Even thinking optimistically I don’t know if that’s possible
This is W-H-I-T-E-P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E
Trump vows not to change — which means everyone else in politics has to
By Karen Tumulty
June 3 at 7:14 PM
There are reasons to be skeptical that the wall on the border would ever be built. Putting a ban on Muslims entering the country seems neither practical nor constitutional.
But Donald Trump has finally made one three-word campaign promise that voters may be able to count on.
“I’m not changing,” he declared this week.
Indeed, it is the rest of the political world that is having to adjust.
If recent days are any indication, the remaining five months of this presidential campaign are likely to be fought entirely on Trump’s terms.
The celebrity real estate mogul continues to defy predictions — including some of his own — that he will soften his rhetoric and elevate it to a more presidential level as he moves into a general-election campaign.
Good. I don’t want Trump to pretend to be reasonable. I want him to be his loud, rude, vicious self. It makes the differences between the parties so much more obvious. Let’s see where the US really stands on racism, misogyny, isolationism, and hatred.
I agree. Let Trump be Trump and continue as he has. Let him be the bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic, hateful asshole that he is. Yes, it’ll excite his base, but staying “true” to who Trump really is? I think that’s more likely to turn more people off.
I don’t want Trump to “tone it down.” Why? Let’s see him for who he really is.
The Fix
Jake Tapper asked Donald Trump if his judge attack was racist — then followed up 23 times
By Callum Borchers
June 3
There’s persistent … and then there’s Jake Tapper.
The CNN anchor posed the following question to Donald Trump on Friday:
Let me ask you about comments you made about the judge in the Trump University case. You said that you thought it was a conflict of interest that he was the judge because he is of Mexican heritage, even though he is from Indiana. Hillary Clinton said that that is a racist attack on a federal judge.
Actually, Tapper didn’t quite get to form a question. Trump interjected to talk about Clinton’s emails. So Tapper tried to steer the conversation back to whether Trump’s complaint about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was racist. Trump deflected again. Tapper tried again. And again.
In all, Tapper made an astounding 23 follow-up attempts. This moment right here — with this look on Tapper’s face — perfectly encapsulates the exchange.
What? Follow-up when a candidate dodges the question? Oh, please let this be more than a one-off; please let this be the way the media, mind-boggled at Trump (and seeing the entertainment value), decide to treat him instead of rolling over and letting him go unchallenged.
About all this GOP supposed handwringing about Trump.
it’s amusing to me. As a reporter, I would ask every GOP officeholder that came into my sight TWO questions:
What POLICY positions of Donald Trump’s do you disagree with…Congressman, Senator, Governor?
What POLICY positions that he holds that you say are NOT Republican positions.
Wait for the silence…
Well then, Congressman, Senator, Governor…if you have NO POLICY differences between you and Donald Trump…then why have any hesitation in supporting him?
Only thing that would come out of my mouth as a reporter.
THEY HAVE NO POLICY POSITION DIFFERENCES WITH TRUMP.
THEY ARE ONLY MAD THAT HE WON’T SPEAK IN FRANK LUNTZ-APPROVED DOGWHISTLES TO HIDE THOSE POSITIONS.
It sounds like time for someone to write an angst-filled piece titled something like “Whatever Happened to the Straight Talk Express?”. I nominate David Brooks for the job.