Jordan Weissman:
How Insane Are Republicans’ Tax Plans? Just Look at These Charts
Dan Balz:
More than 10 months of campaign activity have left the Republican Party in a quandary. The contest for the GOP’s presidential nomination has no obvious front-runner.
This has been a confusing race almost from the beginning and it seems only to grow more muddled. That became apparent again on Tuesday night in the fourth round of debate among the candidates. No one was treated as though he or she was the person to beat. The night belonged to many and therefore to no one in particular.
The polls show a somewhat stratified field. Businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson still stand above the others. Each, however, has limitations and questions that must be dealt with. Behind them are Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.). Both continue to impress with their debate performances, but neither has been through the fires that are surely to come.
After that, it’s anybody’s guess which of the other candidates is truly viable, but some could be. Even after months on the campaign trail, the winnowing has been minimal. More rather than fewer candidates still harbor dreams of accepting the nomination next summer in Cleveland. That means the incentives argue in favor of staying in to see how things shake out, rather than quitting in the face of tepid poll numbers or weak fundraising.
Balz (above) and NYT editors (below) with as a good a summary of the GOP race as you’ll see. Good reads.
Greg Sargent:
At the debate, Donald Trump doubled down on his calls to deport the 11 million, aligning himself with one side of this argument. But John Kasich and Jeb Bush forcefully and unequivocally denounced Trump’s stance as policy fantasy and political suicide, aligning themselves clearly with the other side.
As many news accounts have observed, Rubio last night did not get drawn into this debate. But on ABC News this morning, George Stephanopoulos tried to pin Rubio’s position down — and the Florida Senator responded by straddling that seething divide. Rubio declined to directly denounce Trump’s call for mass deportations:
More politics and policy below the fold.
Doyle McManus:
Why Ben Carson has no business near the Oval Office
On the public radio show “Marketplace” last month, Carson was asked whether he would block an increase in the federal debt ceiling. “I would not sign an increased budget,” he replied. No, his interviewer clarified, the question was about debts already incurred, not future spending. Carson still seemed to think they were the same thing. “We're not raising any spending limits, period,” he said.
His vagueness and apparent lack of understanding on those counts isn't comical; it's troubling. Next to Carson, Ronald Reagan was a detail-oriented policy wonk.
NY Times editors:
Mr. Olsen and other analysts predict that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Carly Fiorina, Senator Lindsey Graham and George Pataki won’t last much longer. After the third debate, Mr. Christie’s poll numbers dropped because “he’s extremely unpopular among a wide swath of conservatives,” says Mr. Olsen. Mr. Graham and Mr. Pataki poll so poorly that they are out of the debates altogether.
Mrs. Fiorina has stayed in the top tier through four debates thanks to an early Iowa surge, but she’s not favored by the far right, and her record as a chief executive fired by Hewlett-Packard turns off the somewhat conservative group.
Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum may be hoping for overwhelming support from evangelical voters to carry them to the top of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, as happened to Mr. Santorum in 2012. But religious conservatives are not numerous enough to determine the nominee. Senator Ted Cruz’s challenge is similar; far-right factions favor him, but without bigger moderate numbers he cannot win.
Where does the culling leave Donald Trump and Ben Carson? Mr. Carson may not garner enough support among the “somewhats,” who question his lack of political experience. Voters find Mr. Trump so unlikable that he loses in head-to-head matchups with Mr. Rubio and Mr. Carson.
This is a wild year, and there could be surprises. But there is no reason yet to think that the G.O.P.’s more rational voters, while still in the back seat, won’t be poised to take the wheel.
Francis Wilkinson on why Rubio’s immigration plan isn’t serious:
If you're running for the Republican nomination and want to stress "security" in the primary, then pivot to talk about "opportunity" or some similar locution for undocumented immigrants in the general election, this is a pretty good way to go about it -- provided Rubio's opponents let him defy logic.
The problem is a gaping hole in the potentially lengthy stretch between Step One and Step Three. The purpose of a mandatory E-Verify system at workplaces nationwide is to make sure that every worker in the U.S. is legally employed. E-Verify is an Internet-based system that compares an employee's I-9 form, documenting employment eligibility, to data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. It's designed to weed out undocumented workers. If E-Verify were made universal and mandatory (it's voluntary now), undocumented workers would be exposed and their employers would be required to fire them.
According to Pew Research Center, there are about 8 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force, about 5 percent of the total. Some sectors have much higher representation; this population accounts for about one quarter of the workforce in farming.
Removing these workers from the labor force through E-Verify would cause severe disruption not only in farming, but in construction and cleaning and maintenance, among other industries. Moreover, millions of undocumented immigrants depend on the incomes from such jobs. While farmers would have to make do without workers, families headed by undocumented immigrants would be making do without incomes.
Terrell Jermaine Starr:
Video of a confrontation between a news photographer and protesters at the University of Missouri on Monday led to a dispute between journalists and the activists’ sympathizers beyond the campus walls. In response to a series of racial issues at the university, a circle of arm-linked students sought to designate a “safe space” around an encampment on the campus quad. When they blocked journalist Tim Tai from photographing the encampment, reporters complained that media were denied access to a public space.
Certainly, Tai – like any journalist – had a legal right to enter the space, given that it was in a public area. But that shouldn’t be the end of this story. We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.
NY Times:
More than 13 million people tuned in to Fox Business Network to watch the fourth Republican presidential debate on Tuesday night in Milwaukee, according to Nielsen ratings data provided on Wednesday by the business news network.
The viewership was the most ever in the history of the business news network, but less than previous debates in the 2016 presidential race. The highest rated debate so far this campaign season was the first on Fox News in August, which drew 24 million viewers. A subsequent debate on CNN in September drew nearly 23 million viewers.
McKay Coppins:
Search the transcript of Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate and you’ll be hard-pressed to find Ted Cruz uttering a single unkind word about his “good friend” and primary opponent Marco Rubio.
But read between the lines, and you’ll find that Cruz foreshadowed some of the attacks his campaign plans to unleash against Rubio this winter.
Without calling out his Senate colleague by name, Cruz twice took subtle digs at Rubio during the Fox Business Network debate. At one point, he warned against Republicans who would turn the GOP into “the party of amnesty” — without specifically mentioning that Rubio had championed a bill that would have provided undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
At another point, while railing against “corporate welfare,” Cruz singled out subsidies for the sugar industry — a policy Rubio has consistently, and controversially, supported despite objections by free-market critics.
“Sugar farmers farm under roughly 0.2% of the farmland in America, and yet they give 40% of the lobbying money,” Cruz said in the debate. “That sort of corporate welfare is why we’re bankrupting our kids, and grandkids.”
Rubio, whose home state of Florida contains hundreds of thousands of acres of sugarcane fields, remained silent.
The two candidates are slowly but steadily rising in the 2016 polls, and in recent weeks it has become fashionable for pundits to predict that the nominating contest will ultimately come down Rubio as the establishment standard-bearer and Cruz as the right-wing crusader.
Michael Grunwald:
Republicans don’t usually talk much about the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a reminder of the sour conclusion of the last Republican presidency. It’s a reminder that President Obama inherited an economy in a terrifying free-fall. And it’s a reminder of Republican opposition to Wall Street regulation and reform.
At last night’s Fox Business debate on the economy, Republicans had to talk about the crisis. It was a reminder of why they don’t like doing that.