WaPo:
Republicans are bullish about their chances of winning in November. Three in 4 say Trump would defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, while just over 6 in 10 say Cruz or Rubio would defeat the former secretary of state. Republicans are even more optimistic about winning a general election against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Among the broader public, however, Clinton is seen as a favorite to defeat Trump, Cruz or Rubio. She is perceived as having a better chance of winning than would Sanders.
A reminder: what Republicans think ≠ what the broader public thinks. The ABC/WaPo data is here.
In fact, what the GOP base thinks isn’t even what the GOP elites think.
NY Times:
Republican leaders are growing alarmed by the ferocious ways the party’s mainstream candidates for president are attacking one another, and they fear that time is running out for any of them to emerge as a credible alternative to Donald J. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Honestly, they should get out more. This election has already slipped away from them.
Ed Kilgore:
So what is a political junkie to do when it comes to understanding the [Iowa] dynamics or (shudder) making a prediction? Fortunately, there's one easy answer: Wait until the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg release their final Iowa poll at some point (or two points, since the Democratic and Republican results are usually released in successive days) this weekend.
The poll, produced by the Iowa-based firm of Selzer & Company, is one that inspires almost universal respect. Ann Selzer's firm is one of just three (out of hundreds) awarded an A-plus grade by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site in its comprehensive pollster ratings. Its Iowa polling has been especially impressive, picking up such difficult-to-identify phenomena as the order of finish in the fast-changing 2004 Democratic caucuses, the Santorum surge in the 2012 Republican caucuses, and the size of Joni Ernst's 2014 Senate win.
You’ve heard Markos say it, you’ve heard me say it. No one is better at this, especially in Iowa.
Matthew Yglesias with one of the best Bernie articles I’ve seen:
Sanders's core point: The Fed could do more to help working people
Politicians rarely talk about the Federal Reserve even though it's the main agency that regulates the pace of job creation. It's true that the Fed operates independently of elected officials' views, but so does the Supreme Court — and elected officials are perfectly aware that it makes no sense to talk about abortion rights without mentioning the Supreme Court.
Sanders's core insight, which he laid out in a New York Times op-ed that ran on December 23, is that if you want to talk about jobs and the economy, you need to talk about the Fed. And if you want to understand sluggish wage growth over the past 15 years, it's important to note the Fed's structural biases in favor of Wall Street preoccupations with financial stability and inflation control.
Ruby Cramer with one of the best Hillary articles I’ve seen:
Here is how Hillary Clinton sees herself: radically consistent, motivated by a core philosophy — voiced now through two words rarely associated with her. “Love and kindness.” If this sounds unlikely, she knows it. For 50 years, she’s struggled to explain the values that motivate her — in public life, as a candidate, as a person. The one time she really tried to, in the early 1990s, she was brutally mocked. In the view of some of her closest aides, Clinton never fully recovered from the critical backlash.
Now, Clinton doesn’t talk about this much, not like she did then. On this particular day, after a routine campaign event at a college in Manchester, New Hampshire — after taking photos and giving a speech, after getting a question from the audience about the women who’ve alleged they were sexually assaulted by her husband and answering it without hesitation or alarm, after moving onto the noise and chaos of a crowded rope line —Clinton is shepherded away to the quiet of an available room: the building’s industrial-style kitchen. And it’s in this setting, seated in a fold-out chair at a small table, that Clinton seems almost surprised by the most basic line of questioning: why she runs.
“I think most people who interview me never ask me,” she says. “They nibble a little bit around the edges but there’s very—” Clinton turns to the one aide present, her press secretary, also seated at the table, and asks him to think back: “I don’t know of very many instances in the last 14 years that we’ve had these kinds of conversations.”
She has been asked every day, for decades, what she thinks, but rarely why. And here, next to a dishwasher, Clinton slides right back into the subject. Her words are slow and deliberate and she takes the conversation to this discussion she’s been trying to talk about, to bring up on the trail, as she is again ensnared in a campaign that’s more difficult than expected, in an election dominated by the language of anger and fear.
“I am talking about love and kindness,” she says.
I would encourage supporters of each to read both Yglesias and Cramer. Yeah, I get that it’s more fun to knock them off the pedestals, but each piece is getting a lot of acclaim from fellow journalists.
Julie Rovner with an explainer at NPR:
Some of the details of Sanders' plan are still to be released. But his proposal has renewed questions about what a single-payer health care system is and how it works. Here are some quick answers.
What Is A Single Payer?
A single payer refers to a system in which one entity (usually the government) pays all the medical bills for a specific population. And usually (though, again, not always) that entity sets the prices for medical procedures.
A single-payer system is not the same thing as socialized medicine. In a truly socialized medicine system, the government not only pays the bills but also owns the health care facilities and employs the professionals who work there.
The Veterans Health Administration is an example of a socialized health system run by the government. The VA owns the hospitals and clinics and pays the doctors, nurses and other health providers.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a single-payer system in which the federal government pays the bills for those who qualify, but hospitals and other providers remain private
Hey, here’s a 2010 interview I came across that I did with an expert on authoritarianism. How relevant is that, these days?! See the Sarah Posner article to follow.
Daily Kos: Throughout the book, you use scholarly reference, but also frequently cite political reporting to illustrate examples of how worldview plays out. But reporters and journalists have their own narrative, which they use to contextualize their reporting. "Washington is broken," or "Obama is like [fill in past President]". Do you see the same dynamic in reporting as you see in the voting patterns of constituent groups?"
Weiler: What I find most notable about reporting from the perspective of authoritarianism's role in polarization is the degree to which he-said/she-said reporting really precludes American political journalism from providing any context for how extreme the base of one political party has become. Of course, I am going to sound like a rabid partisan myself when I say that, but so be it. If you think about the kinds of things Sarah Palin repeatedly said during the 2008 campaign - from drill, baby, drill, to "real Americans," to repeated overheated warnings about Obama and socialism, and then on to her post-campaign rhetoric, including death panels, etc, it's extraordinary really. This is not some fringe person, but a woman with a major political following who was the vice-presidential nominee of a major political party. And if you think about the heroes of the most vocal elements of the GOP today, the Tea Party (and yes, I regard them as a passionate faction of the GOP, not a meaningful alternative to either party), folks like Glenn Beck, who are trumpeting the most absurd, outlandish stuff imaginable, it's quite extraordinary that political journalism still acts as if the center of gravity of our political discourse can simply be calibrated in the same way as always. The Democrats say this, the Republicans say that, and the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
I heard Joe Scarborough, who passes for reasonable these days on the right, say the other day that he found Rand Paul too extreme in his views of the role of government in exactly the same way that he found Paul Krugman too extreme - one never wanting government involvement, the other always wanting it. This was, in a nutshell, what I'm talking about. Paul Krugman is, despite his emergence as a major liberal pundit, a completely conventional economist - not a Marxist or a socialist in any historically valid understanding of those terms - a believer in the way markets function that is in line with the (pro-capitalist) profession as a whole and a famous supporter of things like free trade. In a crisis, of the sort we're now in, yes, he prefers a Keynesian approach. But the idea that his view of the relationship between the government and the economy is the polar opposite of Rand Paul's is just absurd.
Political journalism has failed miserably in contextualizing the changing center of gravity in political discourse, including (though not limited to) its failure to apprehend the increasing authoritarianism of the GOP.
Sarah Posner:
Trump Doesn't Understand the Bible: Why Do Evangelicals Love Him?
Having failed to make America Christian, evangelical Trump supporters will settle for making it "great"
For Falwell, Trump is a strongman who can save America where the Christian right has failed to do so. Falwell's endorsement is a tacit admission that his father's mission to rescue America from the supposed scourges of feminism, the "homosexual agenda" and secularism is now a defunct fundamentalist dream. Falwell, who leads evangelicalism's flagship university — which claims to "encourage a commitment to the Christian life, one of personal integrity, sensitivity to the needs of others, social responsibility and active communication of the Christian faith" — seems to have conceded that those virtues are insufficient for America's greatness.
Ryan Lizza:
In the unlikely event that Cruz wins the nomination, he will find it difficult to gain the loyalty of other elected officials and Party leaders, and he will make a poor opponent for Hillary Clinton. His nomination will be akin to Barry Goldwater’s victory in 1964, or, on the Democratic side, McGovern’s victory in 1972. Both Senators were too far outside the mainstream to win in a general election. Cruz would likely lose, but he wouldn’t necessarily destroy the G.O.P. in the process. However much his colleagues dislike him, he’s still one of them.
Trump is not. Some prominent Republicans fear that a Trump nomination would fundamentally alter the identity of the Republican Party, even if he goes on to lose the general election, which seems likely.
Dana Milbank:
Jeb Bush explained Sunday why he still thinks Rick Snyder has been “a great governor for Michigan” even after the mass lead poisoning because of tainted tap water in Flint.
The disgrace over Flint’s water, the Republican presidential prospect told ABC’s “This Week,” “is related to the fact that we’ve created this complex, no-responsibility regulatory system, where the federal government, the state government, a regional government, local and county governments are all pointing fingers at one another.”
Um, no.
Bush was attempting to muddy the proverbial water by portraying the Flint debacle as a failure of government at all levels. Snyder attempted the same diffusion of responsibility last week, saying that “government failed you — federal, state and local leaders — by breaking the trust you placed in us.”
But the Flint disaster, three years in the making, is not a failure of government generally. It’s the failure of a specific governing philosophy: Snyder’s belief that government works better if run more like a business.
