Wednesday Open Thread [11.25.15]

MASSACHUSETTS—Boston Globe/Suffolk: Clinton 54, Sanders 29, O’Malley 3
IOWA—Quinnipiac: Clinton 51, Sanders 42, O’Malley 4

MASSACHUSETTS—Boston Globe/Suffolk: Trump 32, Rubio 18, Cruz 10, Bush 7, Carson 5, Fiorina 4, Christie 4, Kasich 2, Paul 1

Several white supremacist terrorists shot 5 people at an ongoing Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis last night. According to a police report today, two suspects have been arrested. It is what Trump has started.

White supremacists are obviously already inclined towards hatred and violence, but in other ways they are just like anybody else. They’re suggestible. They can be incited. They can take cues from political leaders and feel as if those cues grant legitimacy to their beliefs and actions.

So, when a Black Lives Matter protester gets beaten down and choked at a Trump rally and called a nigger and a monkey, and the candidate (who also happens to be leading in the polls) says that he probably deserved this treatment, it certainly seems like it could influence a few white supremacists to show up armed at a Black Lives Matter rally looking for trouble. Sending out racist tweets only strengthens this impression.

It’s really a matter of leadership. Trump has chosen to be the leader of a group that has a lynch mob mentality. I don’t think there is any doubt that he’s been encouraging and condoning this kind of behavior, even if he hasn’t told anyone to start shooting people.

Rick Klein says Trump will be very hard to stop: “He’s gone from thousands of cheering Muslims in New Jersey to hundreds of people now tell him he’s right. He had his chief rival say he saw the same thing on TV, only to say a few hours later that he actually didn’t. Donald Trump’s latest addition to his campaign highlight reel has the hallmarks of his political style. This was a tall tale with a purpose, calibrated to a moment of jitters and anti-Muslim fears and sentiments. Trump, naturally, isn’t apologizing or acknowledging that what he said he saw did not in fact occur as he describes it.”

“It now appears unlikely that any one comment or set of comments will unravel Trump. Even in this instance, his supporters grant him a general sense of being honest if not entirely truthful… As the anti-Trump forces gather, that’s a more formidable opponent than the mogul himself. Voters view him as speaking truth to power – and that means skepticism of anyone or anything seeking to stand in his way, even when he’s telling stories that are simply not accurate.”

Nate Silver:

Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely in polls. If nothing Trump has said so far has harmed his standing with Republicans, the argument goes, why should we expect him to fade later on?

One problem with this is that it’s not enough for Trump to merely avoid fading. Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among theroughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.) As the rest of the field consolidates around him, Trump will need to gain additional support to win the nomination. That might not be easy, since some Trump actions that appeal to a faction of the Republican electorate may alienate the rest of it. Trump’s favorability ratings are middling among Republicans (andawful among the broader electorate).

Trump will also have to get that 25 or 30 percent to go to the polls. For now, most surveys cover Republican-leaning adults or registered voters, rather than likely voters. Combine that with the poor response rates to polls and the fact that an increasing number of polls use nontraditional sampling methods, and it’s not clear how much overlap there is between the people included in these surveys and the relatively small share of Republicans who will turn up to vote in primaries and caucuses.

But there’s another, more fundamental problem. That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping. In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet.

Frank Rich:

The GOP — not just Trump and Carson — offers something to offend almost every minority group in the country: black, gay, Latino, and Muslim people. And one majority group: women. Even its so-called moderate Establishment candidates are culpable: Jeb Bush called for admitting only Christian refugees from Syria; John Kasich has proposed a government agency to promote “core Judeo-Christian Western values,” a plan that strikes me as not just anti-Muslim but anti-Semitic despite the lip service paid to “Judeos”; Marco Rubio opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. None of this will hurt Republican candidates in safe, gerrymandered House districts or in deep-red states. But it will cripple them in presidential elections, and contested races for the Senate and governorships in purple or even purplish states, let alone blue ones.

But it must be said that the call for banning Syrian immigrants, besides being a xenophobic replay of America’s brutal record of turning away European Jews and incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II, is most of all a stab at political bait-and-switch: The Republican candidates think that if they rail enough against the lethal potential of 10,000 destitute Syrian refugees subjected to a two-year American vetting process, maybe no one will notice that they have no coherent ideas for combatting actual ISIS terrorists as opposed to imaginary ones.

No one else in the West has a fail-safe idea, either, but the Republican presidential candidates are particularly clueless. They repeatedly state that Obama’s efforts are insufficient but then, as the president has noted, just repeat his current policy, only louder. Some seem to think the problem will be solved, as Rubio has it, if a president will only say, “We are at war with radical Islam.” Ben Carson has called for “moderate forces” in Iraq and Syria to establish “sanctuary zones” — blissfully unaware that these “moderate forces” he hopes to recruit will be drawn from the same populace he is calling “rabid dogs.” Lindsey Graham has called for 10,000 American troops to help do the job — a proposal that is a nonstarter with the American public largely because of the war in Iraq that he helped champion and prolong. The others offer only bluster and gobbledygook that are merely more polite variations on Trump’s vow to “bomb the shit out of them.” The pugilistic Chris Christie seems to think we can defeat ISIS in part by keeping 5-year-old orphans out of Jersey.

Last week, Karl Rove welcomed terrorism as a winning issue for Republicans and cited a September poll from Gallup showing that 52 percent of the public believes that Republicans will do a better job of protecting America, while only 36 percent says the same of Democrats. But that poll was taken before the Paris attacks. The latest Washington Post–ABC News poll, conducted since Paris, found that despite a drop in Obama’s numbers, Hillary Clinton was more trusted to “handle the threat of terrorism” in one-on-one matchups with every major GOP presidential candidate. That 3 a.m. phone-call ad that failed in 2008 may easily mow down the gaseous GOP armchair generals of 2016.

Jeet Heer looks at a different angle: What if Trump wins?

The Republican Party faces a nightmare scenario with Trump as its nominee, with two possible outcomes—both of which are unappetizing. The more likely possibility is that Trump could so offend the general public that the GOP would get a historic electoral drubbing to rival the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater, who carried only a handful of states and handed over super-majorities to Democrats in Congress and the Senate. Democrats are highly unlikely to win such super-majorities in 2016, but with the Republican ticket headed by a loudmouth bigot they could certainly pick up seats in the House and re-take the Senate.

But the other possible outcome is even worse for the GOP: Trump could win the presidency. A recent Washington Post article about panic within the Republican establishment made clear that there are leading figures in the party who are terrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency. “We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” one GOP strategist told the Post. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?” Here is a Republican strategist having nightmares about a Republican candidate winning the White House.

So how would Republicans deal with Trump as their candidate? As it happens, the 1964 election offers a likely guide to how the GOP could be riven apart and where that could take the party—and American politics.