Don’t kid yourself. This is a divided Republican party in the midst of a civil war. And Donald Trump can’t even get the ex-GOP nominees in his corner, including two former Presidents. The idea that he can now unite the party is complete bullshit. That’s especially important because a divided party will lose to Hillary Clinton,
To be fair, though, it’s hard to say which comes first. Maybe because it’s because he’s losing that he can’t unite the party. But if he represents the Tea Party faction’s desire to burn everything down, good luck. They got their wish (and America’s nightmare) in Trump.
HuffPost on some myths about the election (fav/unfav ratings and polling for lesser known figures):
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who trails in pledged delegates, has argued that party insiders should switch their votes to him precisely because his polling numbers are better suited for the general. And that’s true. Sanders does better in mock contests against Trump. His favorability ratings are far superior to Clinton’s.
These strengths, however, are somewhat cosmetic. Though he’s been on the trail for over the year, Sanders is not as known a political figure as Clinton. He’s faced a tiny sliver of the negative attacks. As The Huffington Post reported in mid-April, of the roughly $383 million spent on campaign television advertising in 2016, only about 2 percent was on anti-Sanders ads, much of which just briefly mentioned his name or featured his image.
“People are pointing to his general election numbers as being stronger than Clinton’s, and that’s largely a byproduct of the fact he hasn’t seen incoming fire,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth College and a columnist for The New York Times.
Clinton, by contrast, presents a surer bet, albeit with less potential upside. Should she secure the Democratic nomination, she would have a favorability rating worse than any general election candidate in history ... save for Trump himself.
But she brings advantages to the ticket too…
Often, in fact, favorability ratings tend to be overstated as a metric. Nyhan has written extensively about this.
Andrew Prokop with an extensive interview with Norm Ornstein:
Andrew Prokop: So where, exactly, do you think this anger within the Republican Party electorate has come from, and why do you think it's so powerful?
Norm Ornstein: When you look at populism over the longer course of both American history and other countries that have suffered economic traumas as a result of financial collapse, you’re gonna get the emergence of some leaders who exploit nativism, protectionism, and isolationism. They’re components — sometimes greater, sometimes lesser — that are baked into the process. So you’ve got a bit of that.
But if you forced me to pick one factor explaining what's happened, I would say this is a self-inflicted wound by Republican leaders.
Over many years, they've adopted strategies that have trivialized and delegitimized government. They were willing to play to a nativist element. And they tried to use, instead of stand up to, the apocalyptic visions and extremism of some cable television, talk radio, and other media outlets on the right.
And add to that, they've delegitimized President Obama, but they've failed to succeed with any of the promises they've made to their rank and file voters, or Tea Party adherents. So when I looked at that, my view was, "what makes you think, after all of these failures, that you're going to have a group of compliant people who are just going to fall in line behind an establishment figure?"
Trump clearly had a brilliant capacity to channel that discontent among Republican voters — to figure out the issues that’ll work, like immigration, and the ways in which populist anger and partisan tribalism can be exploited. So of course, to me, he became a logical contender.
This is a must read. Pay special attention to his description of what happened under Newt Gingrich.
Eli Steinberg:
NeverTrump isn’t about pushing neoconservatism, about open v.s. shut borders, or entitlement reform. While those are issues many of us have differed on in the past, those are battles we tend to wagewithin the conservative movement.
It’s why NeverTrump has within its ranks both Lindsey Graham & Justin Amash, despite one being a “Neocon”, and the other, well, not. It’s why it unites the Bushes & Mitt Romney, despite their having different stances on immigration. And it’s why it brings together entitlement reform poster boy Paul Ryan with people who don’t think we need to invest as much political capital into that issue. Trump (& Trumpism) isn’t, by any measure, within the conservative movement.
That is why there is a push-back against the Republican nominee — the likes of which there hasn’t been in our lifetimes. Because what he’s selling isn’t a different brand of conservatism, it’s post-conservative populism. And that is what we can’t abide by.
Greg Sargent:
This morning on Fox, Donald Trump professed himself “surprised” that House Speaker Paul Ryan has now said he is not yet ready to endorse the Donald. But this isn’t really surprising at all. As a new Politico piece explaining Ryan’s thinking puts it, Ryan was simply trying to bolster his House majority. Declining to embrace Trump will hopefully give House Republicans in the swing districts that will determine how large that majority is next year “a measure of cover from Trump’s unpopularity.”
But ultimately, what Ryan’s move really shows is that Republicans almost certainly won’t be able to escape the corrosive down-ticket saturation effect that Trump’s toxicity could end up having. At best they may be able to mitigate it, but such mitigating efforts could also have downsides — and therein lies the brutal dilemma Trump’s nomination looks to be inflicting on the Republican Party.
AP:
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham says he won't support presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The South Carolina senator and former White House hopeful says in a statement he doesn't believe Trump is a "reliable Republican conservative nor has he displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as commander in chief."
Also not supporting Trump are the Bushes (HW, W and Jeb), two other Senators (Ben Sasse, NE and Dean Heller, NV). Some will do so tepidly (I support my party’s nominee, but will not name names).
But there is always David Duke to make up for it. And the whole mess is enough to make Mary Matalin a Libertarian.
Remind me of what part is going well? Oh, yeah, this part from CNN:
Trump spokeswoman: Ryan not fit for speaker if he can't support Trump
Conservative Charles C.W. Cooke:
The more I speak to supporters of Donald Trump, the more convinced I become that a significant portion of the man’s apologists are blissfully unaware of what is actually at stake in 2016. Time and time again, I’m told blithely that it doesn’t really matter if Trump loses in 2016, because a loss could not possibly be worse than the status quo. Trump, I am informed, is a “Hail Mary.” And if the Senate and the House go down, too? Well that’s just the price of trying to shake things up. This, I’m afraid, is flat-out wrong. Disastrously wrong. Apocalyptically wrong. The Republican party is an imperfect vehicle and it has, of course, made mistakes. But the idea that it hasn’t effectively and consistently opposed President Obama’s agenda is little more than a dangerous and ignorant fiction.
Conservative Liam Donovan:
Vast swathes of the electorate despise him, so he has no chance of winning As conservatives around the country wake up to the new reality of a Trumpist GOP, shell-shocked Republicans are still coming to grips with the implications.
In one camp you have the eager team players, gamely digging in to do combat with Hillary and support the nominee no matter what. In the other you have the #NeverTrump crowd, steadfastly resisting calls to stand down in the name of party unity. But by far the biggest group doesn’t quite know what to think. They didn’t support Trump, they’re nervous about him as the standard bearer, but he beat the odds, right? If conventional wisdom was wrong then, who is to say it’s right now? To them I say: Stop it. Stop talking yourself into it. Conventional wisdom was wrong precisely because it didn’t heed the polls. It expected voter sentiments to change and Republicans to “get serious” as the election approached. As it turns out, they were serious all along. Trump tapped into something, all right. But the tide of grievance, resentment, and white identity politics he rode to the nomination is a drop in the general-election bucket.
I like this one especially because it acknowledges white identity politics and racial resentment, a key to Trump’s rise.
Josh Marshall:
So many stories in presidential politics, in all politics, are more sound and fury than substance. This one isn't. It's hard to overstate how big a deal it is. Donald Trump caught a lot of grief during the primaries for putting several of his companies through bankruptcies during his career. He's also made a point of arguing that he'd bring his brand of "deal-making" to the presidency. It now seems like both of those things may have been way more significant than maybe anyone realized.
On CNBC this morning Trump suggested that one strategy he'll use for reducing the national debt is having bond holders accept "haircuts". To be clear what that means, he'll try to get people who own US Treasury bonds and are owned X to accept X/2, or some reduced amount of what they are owed.
That's called defaulting on a debt obligation.
In other words, he wants to put the US through something like bankruptcy. Now, to be clear, in the world of business this is not at all uncommon. In a bankruptcy proceeding almost everyone takes a haircut. Many lose everything. You were owed $7 million and you have to accept $2 million. It often happens in simple business negotiations too. Things aren't going great. Debt has to be restructured to help the company survive. A creditor thinks they might lose everything so they'll accept 50 cents on the dollar.
So all good, except the United States is not a struggling casino. It's a sovereign nation with sovereign debt.
Politico:
One possibility is that Clinton could pick [Elizabeth] Warren as her running mate as a way to throw a powerful bone to the Bernie Sanders left, putting Warren a mere heartbeat away from the Oval Office. But another, more likely prospect is now floating into view. Between Warren’s powerful fundraising chops and the potential for a Donald Trump candidacy to push Senate seats into Democratic hands, the next Senate could see a whole new power bloc with Warren at the head.
Warren’s influence is twofold. First and foremost, she’s the undisputed queen of the party’s message: Warren-esque liberalism has become the de facto tongue for most of the party’s Senate candidates, regardless of gender—just as her brand of economic populism has dominated the Democratic presidential primaries. Warren’s passions— decreasing college debt, investing in research and regulating financial institutions—have become the party’s passions.
And since winning election to the Senate in 2012, Warren has emerged as her party’s most potent ally at the operational level.