Nate Cohn on the signs and portents in today’s South Carolina demolition derby:
The Ted Cruz campaign has made it very clear how it believes its candidate can win the nomination: by unifying the party’s ideologically consistent and self-described “very conservative” base with the somewhat more populist, evangelical voters who make up the party’s rank and file in the South.
Together, these voters represent something near a majority of the Republican electorate. But apart, you get losing candidates like Mike Huckabee or Newt Gingrich.
If the polls in South Carolina are right, then Mr. Cruz isn’t even Mr. Huckabee or Mr. Gingrich.
If Trump loses, however, and/or Cruz or Rubio pull an upset, everything is scrambled. The polls do seem to be tightening. My best guess (and it’s just that, a guess) is that Trump wins, but underperforms.
Meanwhile today is NV, a must win/embarrassing loss for Bernie/Hillary or a “phew”/”oh, crap now what?” moment for Hillary/Bernie. Stay tuned. No one knows how it will turn out (even if the smart money is on Hillary).
Politico:
There have only been two public surveys in Nevada this week, and pollsters warn that the caucuses – a system only recently implemented in the state and typically attended by very few Nevadans – are nearly impossible to predict. That's frightening for those wondering if Clinton can sustain her Nevada firewall or whether Sanders’ momentum can bring a surge of young voters to the caucuses.
Jennifer Jacobs:
“If Bernie wins, the hype machine is going to take off in a really, really serious way,” said Ed Kilgore, a Democratic analyst and political columnist for New York magazine.
“If Clinton wins,” Kilgore added, “we’re back to the situation where she’s very likely to win South Carolina and most of the states that vote on March 1 – in no small part because of her strength among African Americans, which has slipped a small bit but is still pretty impressive.”
David Wasserman:
Cruz’s short-term dilemma has received plenty of attention: Donald Trump is on the verge of a big victory in the South Carolina Republican primary, according to most polls, and could easily capture all 50 of the Palmetto State’s delegates. And if Cruz can’t beat Trump in South Carolina — a Southern state with a large proportion of evangelical and very conservative voters, Cruz’s supposed bread and butter — what “SEC Primary” states can he win on Super Tuesday, March 1?
But Cruz also faces a longer-term, potentially more devastating math problem that has received less attention: The states that are his most natural fits — those with the highest proportions of evangelical voters — are also the least likely to award their delegates on a winner-take-all basis. In other words, Cruz’s votes may not translate into delegates nearly as efficiently as his rivals’.
An examination of the GOP delegate landscape shows that in states where evangelical Protestants are at least 30 percent of the population, just 22 percent of delegates will be awarded on a winner-take-all basis,1 compared to 47 percent of delegates in other states:
More from Ed Kilgore:
You could almost imagine a Bernie-rific rap where the candidate lays out a vision of what life would be like for most people if his agenda were implemented, and then implicitly (or explicitly) asks if some abstract objection to Big Government is a good reason to reject it.
And beyond that, you would figure that given his foreign-policy views he could suggest some reductions in the size and cost of the very large part of Big Government represented by the Department of Defense.
So far, at least in the debates, he's not doing any of that. Perhaps he thinks being identified with Big Government is just an occupational hazard for every socialist.
But the questions won't stop. And Clinton's drive-by suggestions that a Sanders administration would represent a choice between policies that can't be enacted and a government that can't be sustained provide a small, bitter taste of what Republicans will shovel out should Sanders be nominated. Bernie's already defying one well-established convention of American politics by arguing that we need to start emulating other countries. Running directly into the teeth of deeply embedded anti-government sentiments without better armor could be fatal.
Marc Caputo:
Several Jeb Bush campaign workers are already shopping their résumés with Florida political consultants as expectations mount inside his team that their candidate won’t push on after South Carolina.
“I can unequivocally tell you that people are looking for work, because they say they’ve been led to believe that they won’t have a job because the campaign won’t be around any longer or their jobs won’t because the campaign won’t have any money,” said one Republican who helps run one of the Florida campaigns and who is a Bush donor.
On Thursday, I posted the story of leftwonk criticism of Gerald Friedman’s support of Bernienomics, and we had a great discussion. Now comes the followup. Neil Irwin:
Behind closed doors, among the left-of-center policy types who populate the congressional offices, executive agencies and think tanks of Washington, I’ve seen enough eye rolls when Mr. Sanders’s name comes up to suspect something more tribal is going on.
The wonkosphere vs. Bernie clash is not just a story of center-left versus left-left. It is also a clash between those who have been in the trenches of trying to make public policy for the last seven years versus those who can exist in a kind of theoretical world of imagining what public policy ought to be.
If you only read one, read Neil Irwin. But there’s more.
Tim Fernholz:
Senator Bernie Sanders is suffering from a wonk gap.
His sweeping plans to reorganize the government to provide single-payer healthcare, free public college, and tax the wealthy have inspired his followers, but his campaign doesn’t have many details. His staffers say this doesn’t matter during the primary season and answers will come later, but it may be harder to make it past Hillary Clinton if voters aren’t convinced he can fulfill his plans.
David Dayen:
Let’s not allow one subset of Democratic economists to take the high road of “evidence-based” mathematics when they’re all throwing darts at a board.
Elias Isquith:
Oh, and did I mention that we’re one presidential election away from having a President Rubio (or Cruz or Trump) make Speaker Paul Ryan’s massively regressive budget the law of the land? If these are the results of having the wonk perspective determine the course of the Democratic Party, well, let’s just say that people on the left should be willing to hear some new options.
Jonathan Chait:
I am personally sympathetic to technocratic government. But it is important to concede that technocracy is not inherently correct; it is a value judgment. It’s perfectly valid for tax-cutting conservatives to care more about slashing government than about how this will bear upon government revenue or access to health insurance; it’s likewise valid for Sanders to care more about eliminating the role of private insurance than how this will fit into his budgetary plans. Sanders’s evident disdain for technocracy is not a campaign failure. Just the opposite: liberating the Democratic Party from the constraints of technocracy may be a primary goal of his political revolution.
This is a good argument for Democrats to have. Read all the above pieces, and/but for perspective, keep your sense of humor (see the next one).
Jim Tankersley:
The first thing you should know about Gerald Friedman, the economist suddenly at the center of a wonk-storm over Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals, is that he does not actually support Bernie Sanders for president.
He likes Sanders. And he has written, in consultation with the Sanders campaign, an analysis that projects Sanders’ ambitious domestic agenda would raise economic growth to as high as 5.3 percent per year, yielding sustained income gains for the middle class.
But Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says he’ll vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.
Bernie people will say that strengthens his argument as he’s not in the tank for Bernie. Hillary people will just laugh. They’re both right, of course.
I love this one! But I’m from Brooklyn 50’s-60’s. I can tawk like this, too.
Note that the betting markets have not been affected much by all the primary Sturm und Drang.
PredictWise compilation
