We’re all looking forward to it. And after that respected Selzer poll this evening comes the vote Monday. Then we get to do more analysis, and less pontificating. Well, a little less, anyway.
This is my last APR before the vote (there’s still one every day!), so good luck to all, and remember that in the end we are on the same team. Except for you over there in the corner. I don’t know what’s up with you.
Greg Sargent:
How is it possible that someone [Donald Trump] with so many heresies in his past could be in a position to win more support in conservative Iowa — and have more support among GOP voters nationally — than any other GOP candidate? Maybe voters really are ignorant of his positions. Or maybe, if he does win Iowa and more, perhaps it will means that a lot of Republican voters don’t care about these things as much as they are supposed to.
Philip Klein has a good piece in which he carefully categorizes the various Republican voter groups and concludes that the persistence of Trumpism suggests the party may be far more divided than we thought. Here’s his description of what is driving Trump’s voters:
Trump supporters aren’t particularly ideological. They are frustrated because they think America is in decline economically, culturally and militarily, threatened by other nations on the world stage and by foreigners here at home. They don’t care about economic arguments in favor of free trade or constitutional arguments for executive restraint. They don’t bat an eye when Trump touts the importance of government seizures of private property for non-public use or the virtues of single-payer healthcare….
Trump supporters would be fine with more government spending, on, say, infrastructure, haven’t particularly paid much attention to fights about the chairmanship of congressional committees, and would probably be fine doubling corporate Export-Import bank subsidies if Trump told them it would help crush China.
NY Times:
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who spent much of January soaring to the top of the Republican pack, was absorbing hit after hit on Friday as his rivals for the Republican nomination tried to ensure that his path to victory in the Iowa caucuses next week was a difficult one.
Perhaps the most visible and unfavorable appraisal of Mr. Cruz’s recent stumbles here and his difficulties during the debate on Thursday wascaptured by The Des Moines Register, the state’s largest paper, which declared in bold on its front page: “Rough Night for Cruz.”
Mr. Cruz and eight of his rivals spent Friday in their final sprint around Iowa before voters here become the first in the country to render judgment in a presidential race that has defied convention, history and neat prediction.
Most of the contenders were taking aim at Mr. Cruz, who has sought to portray himself as the genuine conservative among a group of weak-principled politicians. Mr. Cruz found his own political persona under assault as his rivals accused him of conveniently shading his own positions, saying one thing before an audience of wealthy donors and then contradicting himself on the campaign trail.
If Cruz loses Iowa, can he win anywhere outside of Texas? The fact is that the Trump attacks on Cruz being from Canada have hurt Cruz and helped trump. It doesn’t matter to voters whether it’s true. What matters is the guy on the attack is the ‘strong’ one.
John Harwood:
Trump's hastily thrown together veterans benefit event in Des Moines drew intense coverage on other networks as Thursday's 9 p.m. EST debate time approached on Fox. He even drew friendly appearances by rival candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, past Iowa winners who have floundered so far. If enough of their past evangelical backers stick with Trump, he can prevent Cruz from pulling off an upset.
Once the debate and Trump's competing event had concluded, it was time for late local television news here in Des Moines. The lead story on those newscasts: Trump.
Trump is playing the media for fools. Why should he stop now? Their fixation on ratings has made a mockery of ‘journalism’. It’s all entertainment, bread and circus. What a country.
Sasha Issenberg pulls away the curtain on organizing Iowa:
Over seven years, a mythology has emerged about Clinton’s disregard for the peculiar folkways of Iowa caucus. There were the canonical examples of Clinton’s brushing off local expectation of collegial intimacy, like the vivid descriptions of her regal entourage of imperious staffers more focused on their BlackBerries than the citizens in their midst, or the Bell 222 that the campaign dubbed the “Hill-a-copter” as it shuttled her among farm towns. Then there were the almost comically indulgent expenditures, from the hundreds of snow shovels the campaign gifted to residents who had weathered many winters without any politician’s munificence to the nearly $100,000 in caucus-night sandwich platters that Clinton purchased from the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, even though many counties expressly forbid food at precinct locations. (After learning about the catering order from a canvasser who visited a Hy-Vee executive, Obama campaign officials subsequently contacted every county chair and reminded them to enforce their rules.) In hindsight, Clinton’s approach to Iowa was part of an institutionalized disdain for the caucus process nationwide that ultimately helped to doom her first candidacy for president.
The voters’ choice of words unmasked a system failure. “Looking at how people respond to the question ‘do you plan to caucus?’—the rate at which people decline, or say no—is different than the numbers we see in any general election or any other primary,” Halle reflected this week. “There’s a certain level of responsibility that people probably feel with voting in a general election that they don’t necessarily feel in a caucus. People are just honest about the fact that they wouldn’t go.”
Guy Benson:
As the story goes, Donald Trump could win a general election because his political appeal extends beyond traditional Republican voting blocs. He would attract certain types of Democrats, we're told, and he'd turn out large numbers of low-propensity voterswho've become totally disenchanted with the system. There is some truth to each of those claims, and the GOP would be wise to glean some lessons from the rise of Trumpism. The problem with this electoral calculus, however, is that even if Trump peels off discrete slivers of Democrats and manages to bring some significant mass of new voters into the fray, the math still doesn't add up. His favorability rating among Democrats -- and more importantly, among independents -- is horrific.
YouGov asks Do you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of socialism?
Matthew Dickinson:
ARE RUMORS OF JEB!’S DEATH GREATLY EXAGGERATED?
It long ago became an article of faith among most political pundits that Jeb Bush – once the purported front-runner for the Republican nomination – has seen his chances almost completely evaporate. Conservatives never really warmed to his candidacy, but a series of less-than-stellar debate performances led the chattering class to desert him in droves. As one critic put it after Jeb’s low-energy, anything-but-smooth debate performance in the third Republican debate last October, “Yeah, Jeb Bush is probably toast.” But is he?
To get a better handle on the state of Jeb’s campaign, your intrepid blogger attended a recent Bush event in Bow, New Hampshire. I came away thinking that if this is the Jeb! that New Hampshire voters are seeing at every event, it might be time to move him from the intensive-care ward and into the candidate rehabilitation room. Of course, it is dangerous to generalize from a single case study, and there’s no guarantee the patient will fully recover from his early campaign wounds, but the Jeb! I saw seemed like anything but toast. Here is my report.
Jill Lawrence points out GOP debates ignore real life:
Like Woody Allen’s joke about a place that has terrible food “and such small portions,” Republican discussion of a top issue on American minds is often strangely removed from the real lives of real people -- and the portions are tiny.
What do Republicans talk about when they talk about money?
It isn’t tuition, that's for sure. That word appears exactly once in all seven Republican debate transcripts, including the one from Thursday night in Des Moines. John Kasich almost got there in the last five minutes when he mentioned decent jobs for children so they could “pay down their college debt,” and the topic was briefly addressed in October in Boulder, Colo., when Kasich received a direct question on college costs. But the actual word “tuition” has been spoken one time by one candidate – Jeb Bush, also in Boulder.
The Democrats have a field a fraction the size of the GOP free-for-all and they’ve only held four debates. Yet the word tuition appears 33 times in the transcripts, between four and 11 times per debate.
Ruth Marcus on how the Beltway looks at Iowa:
Bernie Sanders’s supporters remind me of women who, once the baby is delivered, instantly forget the pain of childbirth and are prepared to do it all over again. Except that this analogy fails when it comes to the question of ultimate payoff. Why would voters, after watching Obama’s excruciating experience with congressional Republicans, believe that Sanders could deliver his promised “political revolution”?
For all the fevered Obama-is-a-socialist rhetoric of Republican imaginings, the fact remains that he ran — and has governed — largely as a rather centrist, pragmatist Democrat. Sanders is an actual socialist.
Just be aware there’s more work to be done. And/but it’d be interesting to see exactly what the difference is in Obama job approval between Bernie and Hillary supporters.