One’s volatile, the other not so much. That’s the state of play with the primary polls, as per Huffington Post pollster which includes Morning Consult, Ipsos/Reuters and other online tracking polls (RCP does not, by the way; they have Donald Trump at 27. Online polls favor the Donald, and may or may not include people who will actually vote.)
Since mid September there’s been little movement for the Democrats. Ben Carson, otoh, is beginning to visibly drop and is now in 4th place. Arguably, his votes go to Trump.
Ezra Klein chimes in with a look at what happens if both Trump and Carson falter:
Michael Gerson:
No one I consulted can explain the Donald Trump phenomenon, which seems to defy typology, so they tend to talk about down-ticket conflicts: Cruz vs. Rubio. Rubio vs. Jeb Bush. Ben Carson vs. his foreign policy homework.
Cruz is benefiting from a common but specious conservative argument — that recent GOP presidential candidates have lost because they weren’t conservative enough. This claim has been around since the days of President Barry Goldwater. But it has gained traction in Iowa, with a twist. Given the perceived political vulnerability of Hillary Clinton, might it be possible to nominate and elect a “real” conservative this time around, defined as the rejection of compromise at the highest decibel level?
Cruz has the decibel part mastered and has moved rightward on immigration in an attempt to sew up conservative support. “He goes where he needs to go,” one Republican strategist told me. Influential and obstreperous Rep. Steve King has endorsed Cruz; influential evangelical Bob Vander Plaats seems about to. Cruz has benefited in one way from the Trump ascendency. He looks positively reasonable in comparison. And Cruz doesn’t have Trump’s main drawback in reaching out to conservatives — that Trump isn’t actually a conservative.
Good heavens! The NY Times wrestles with ”salty” language:
Donald J. Trump pledged to bomb the, uh, stuffing out of the Islamic State.
Senator Rand Paul called any proposed trade-off between safety and liberty nothing but “bull,” before adding a syllable.
Even Jeb Bush, the stern patrician of the Republican race, has shown a growing fondness for some gentler four-letter words, at times adding them to prepared remarks that had called for something meeker.
“We’re Americans, damn it!” he shouted recently at a New Hampshire barbecue, though no one had suggested otherwise.
A little more than two months before the voting begins, the candidates have charged into what appears to be the inaugural profanity primary, wrought by an overstuffed field of competitors vying for attention and the specter of a foul-mouthed Manhattanite perched comfortably atop the polls.
Erik Wemple:
TV news has never been able to correct every misstatement as it’s uttered. But that doesn’t mean that the “media” is powerless against the lying ways of Donald Trump. Here are some links.
Catherine Rampell:
Why Donald Trump may look like a savior
Perhaps different groups see themselves as losing on different fronts. Democrats may see themselves as gaining ground in the culture wars (legalization of gay marriage), yet still believe they are losing on the economic front (stagnation of the federal minimum wage). And vice versa for Republicans.
Still, it’s hard to believe that nearly every major segment of the population has independently forgotten all of its gains.
I suspect that instead we’ve all become convinced of our victimhood, of our very thorough trouncing by our enemies near and far, because that’s what political leaders and pundits keep telling us.
Trump, of course, is the master of such rhetoric, often using explicit references to “winners” and “losers.” Losers comprise not just anyone who’s criticized him or severed business ties with him, though there are plenty of those. There’s also America writ large, today no longer “great,” and constantly being ground down by the P.C. police, foreign economic powers and greedy, murderous immigrants.
“We’re getting beaten at every front,” Trump told Iowans last month. “We’re losing everywhere!”
Simon Maloy:
The Obama administration’s response to the Paris terrorist attacks has provided an opening for pundits to indulge in one of their favorite pastimes: overwrought complaints about President Obama’s leadership and “tone.” National Journal’s Ron Fournier, the chief “leadership” fetishist of the Beltway press, wrote a terribly earnest column in which he sadly, solemnly declared that the Paris attacks proved once and for all that Ron Fournier is right and Obama can’t lead. A similar take was offered by the New York Times’ Frank Bruni, who complained: “From Obama we needed fire. Instead we got embers, along with the un-presidential portrayal of Republicans as sniveling wimps whose fears about refugees were akin to their complaints about tough debate questions.” The idea that Obama is “detached” from the terrorism debate was a key part of Josh Kraushaar’s column arguing that 2016 is shaping up to be a “landslide” election for the GOP.
Much of this is just theater criticism. The politics of terrorism and national security in the post-9/11 era still put a premium on tough-guy chest thumping. People like Chris Christie are widely presumed to be strong leaders on national security because Christie goes on TV and barks about how when he’s president, all of the country’s adversaries will be cowed by his potent manliness. Obama doesn’t do that kind of stuff, and he never has, and so commentators – with an unsubtle assist from Republican and conservative messaging efforts – argue that he’s weak and feckless.
This is frustrating because it also gives a pass to people who go out there and overreact to terrorist threats and get way ahead of what is actually happening in the world. Marco Rubio’s response to the Paris attacks was to cut an ad warning that the same thing could happen here because we are in a “civilizational struggle” with ISIS. That’s complete foolishness that vastly overstates the power and reach of the Islamic State, and it actually feeds into the terrorist group’s preferred narrative of an apocalyptic confrontation between Islam and the West. But he sounds so very serious and he’s promising to take strong action, so no one points out that he’s detached from reality.