Close correlation between positive coverage and poll results, from John Sides
John Sides:
C[ranky] R[eader]: Wait, are you suggesting that Trump’s appeal is all about news coverage? I mean, isn’t there more to it? I thought it was his unique appeal to conservatives or the tea party. Or maybe it’s that his hostility to immigration combined with his support for popular entitlement programs appeals to big chunks of Republican voters.
Or maybe it’s just that voters are mad. I mean, Frank Luntz did a focus group with Trump supporters and found that they were “mad as hell,” and after it was over, Luntz said his “legs were shaking.” I mean, that means something. FRANK LUNTZ’S LEGS WERE SHAKING.
Me: I think there are three problems with these interpretations. First, Trump doesn’t uniquely appeal to conservatives. There’s little correlation between ideology and support for Trump. He’s not a tea party favorite, either. (Update: What I mean by that last statement is that Republicans who are Tea Party supporters are not necessarily more likely to support Trump than other Republicans. His support is not a Tea Party phenomenon. See, for example, this Quinnipiac poll.)
Second, it’s far from clear that voters really have a lot of knowledge about Trump’s positions on issues, or any candidate’s positions. It’s possible that it’s more about personality.
Third, as voters, we can always provide “reasons” for our choices. But some research suggests that the reasons we give for liking or disliking candidates are often rationalizations of choices we’ve made for other reasons — like, perhaps, the fact that a candidate is in the news all the time.
I think the simplest counterfactual is this: Imagine if Trump’s candidacy had been covered like, I dunno, Jim Gilmore’s. Then would we be talking about Trump’s unique appeal to white nationalists or angry voters or whatever?
More politics and policy below the fold.
Eugene Robinson:
I know you haven’t heard enough about Donald Trump recently, so here’s more: At this point, anyone who says he can’t win the Republican nomination is in deep denial.
Trump announced his candidacy on June 16 and immediately vaulted into the top tier of candidates. On July 14, a USA Today poll put Trump in the lead by three points — and he has led every survey since. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday said he had the support of 28 percent of GOP voters — which is huge in a field this big.
There is an important story about Trump, and Europe migrant crisis as well as the rise of right wing parties. First,
NY Times:
Europe reeled from fresh shocks in its escalating migration crisis Friday, with reports that 150 people drowned in the Mediterranean and news that far more bodies had been found crammed in an abandoned refrigeration truck in Austria than first thought. Damage to the vehicle’s side raised the possibility that victims had struggled to escape.
The authorities in Austria and Hungary said at least four people had been arrested in connection with the truck. They also disclosed that the remains of 71 people had been found inside, including four children, and that at least some had come from Syria. On Thursday officials estimated as many as 50 people had been packed in the vehicle, before they discovered additional bodies.
The migrant crisis, the biggest wave to hit Europe since World War II, was further amplified Friday by a report from the United Nations refugee agency estimating a 40 percent jump this year in the number of people fleeing to the Continent by boat compared with all of 2014. Most are escaping war and strife in the Middle East and Africa.
The Guardian:
When you’re facing the world’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, it helps to have a sober debate about how to respond. But to do that, you need facts and data – two things that the British migration debate has lacked this summer. Theresa May got the ball rolling in May, when she claimed on Radio 4 that the vast majority of migrants to Europe are Africans travelling for economic reasons. The media has followed suit, one example being the Daily Mail’s unsubstantiated recent assertion that seven in 10 migrants at Calais will reach the UK.
Foreign secretary Philip Hammond this week not only repeated May’s claims about African economic migrants, but portrayed them as marauders who would soon hasten the collapse of European civilisation. Hammond, like many people, could do with some actual statistics about the migration crisis. Here are 10 of the key ones:
1.2 million
There are countries with social infrastructure at breaking point because of the refugee crisis – but they aren’t in Europe. The most obvious example is Lebanon, which houses 1.2 million Syrian refugees within a total population of roughly 4.5 million. To put that in context, a country that is more than 100 times smaller than the EU has already taken in more than 50 times as many refugees as the EU will even consider resettling in the future. Lebanon has a refugee crisis. Europe – and, in particular, Britain – does not.
You can get more info at
http://www.asylumineurope.org/
So, now, check this out from Ishaan Tharoor:
Inside a recent New Yorker article on Donald Trump and the politics behind his rise, there's a curious nugget worth contemplating. (To be sure, the entire lengthy story is worth the read.)
The article's author, Evan Osnos, watched the first Republican debate in early August alongside Matthew Heimbach, a well-known young white supremacist, and a group of his friends. Heimbach, who claims Trump's barnstorming, nativist rhetoric has brought disaffected white youth "out of their slumber," is not just another basement-dwelling extremist. He's a regular on the far-right radical lecture circuit and "has met with European Fascists, including members of the Golden Dawn, in Greece," Osnos writes.
The Golden Dawn is an influential political party in Greece, and came in third in the country's last round of parliamentary elections, buoyed by nationalist voters disenchanted with Greece's dysfunctional status quo and angry about immigration....
The point, as Osnos stresses in his piece, is not that Trump himself is a fascist or a neo-Nazi. But that his particular brand of politics -- what conservative Post columnist George Will, in a rather baleful lament, describes as a "volcanic phenomenon" -- has excited a coterie of far-right Americans who have in the past rejected the Republican cause.
"I’m sure [Trump] would repudiate any association with people like me," Jared Taylor, an editor of a white-nationalist magazine, tells Osnos, "but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit."
That sort of support -- from people like Taylor -- reflects populist political trends that we're not all that accustomed to seeing in the United States, at least in its political mainstream. As Osnos observes, Trump is cresting a wave that has already swept through Europe:
Chris Geidner keeps an eye on Kentucky:
Kentucky Clerk To Ask Supreme Court To Keep Same-Sex Marriages On Hold
A federal appeals court on Wednesday offered little hope to the Rowan County clerk seeking to avoid issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but, on Thursday, nothing had changed on the ground. Update: The clerk plans to ask the Supreme Court on Friday to step in and keep same-sex couples waiting.