Tuesday Open Thread [1.26.2016]

Filed in National by on January 26, 2016

NATIONALNBC News/Survey Monkey: Clinton 51, Sanders 37, O’Malley 2
NATIONALCNN/ORC: Clinton 52, Sanders 38, O’Malley 2
NATIONALFOX News: Clinton 49, Sanders 37, O’Malley 1
NEW HAMPSHIREBoston Herald/FPU: Sanders 55, Clinton 39, O’Malley 2
IOWAFOX News: Clinton 48, Sanders 42, O’Malley 3
IOWAARG: Sanders 48, Clinton 45, O’Malley 3
NEW HAMPSHIREFOX News: Sanders 56, Clinton 34, O’Malley 3
MINNESOTAStar Tribune/Mason-Dixon: Clinton 59, Sanders 25, O’Malley 1

NATIONALNBC News/Survey Monkey: Trump 39, Cruz 17, Rubio 10, Carson 8, Bush 4, Christie 3, Paul 3, Kasich 3, Fiorina 2, Huckabee 1
NATIONALABC/Wash Post: Trump 37, Cruz 21, Rubio 11, Carson 7, Bush 5, Christie 4, Fiorina 3, Kasich 2, Huckabee 2, Paul 1
NATIONALCNN/ORC: Trump 41, Cruz 19, Rubio 8, Carson 6, Bush 5, Christie 4. Rest were 3% or less.
IOWAQuinnipiac: Trump 31, Cruz 29, Rubio 13, Carson 7, Paul 5, Bush 4, Christie 3, Huckabee 2, Kasich 1, Fiorina 1
NEW HAMPSHIREBoston Herald/FPU: Trump 33, Cruz 14, Kasich 12, Rubio 8, Bush 9, Christie 7, Fiorina 5, Carson 4, Paul 3, Huckabee 1
IOWAARG: Trump 33, Cruz 26, Rubio 11, Carson 7, Paul 4, Christie 4, Bush 3, Kasich 3, Huckabee 2, Fiorina 1, Santorum 1
MINNESOTAStar Tribune/Mason-Dixon: Rubio 23, Cruz 21, Trump 18, Carson 11, Bush 7, Christie 5, Kasich 2, Fiorina 2, Paul 1, Santorum 1

David Axelrod says Trump is the anti-Obama: “Here’s the gist. Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.”

“So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump? Relentlessly edgy, confrontational and contemptuous of the niceties of governance and policy making, Mr. Trump is the perfect counterpoint to a president whose preternatural cool and deliberate nature drive his critics mad.”

Ryan Lizza on why Trump is the frontrunner: “Trump, though, has effectively ignored the conventional wisdom about Republican lanes. He’s like a snowplow barrelling across the highway. State and national polls consistently show that he draws strongly from all four ideological segments of the party. His strongest supporters are less educated and less well off; his fiercest opponents are Republicans with advanced degrees and high incomes. Trump has turned what is traditionally an ideological fight into a class war.”

“Throughout his campaign, Trump has made much of the dangers posed by immigration and political correctness. But central to his platform is his insistence that Americans are being cheated. To protect themselves, he says, they need to hire someone who will cut them a better deal.”

You remember yesterday where I said Bernie Sanders should welcome a Bloomberg candidacy because it would ensure his victory? Well maybe not. This Morning Consult poll shows a Michael Bloomberg independent presidential candidacy hurting Dems more than the GOP, though the Democratic candidate they tested in that poll was Hillary. Should Sanders win the Democratic nomination, Paul Krugman sees a Bloomberg run as a likely path to a Trump presidency.

Analyzing the Republican race, Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow, says the party deserves the extremism it’s now seeing at the top of the polls:

Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves. The party needs to own up to the kind of politics that we now have. The style promoted by Trump, Cruz and the entire tea party is a conscious product of the key decisions and strategic choices that mainstream Republican leaders have been making for decades. […]

Republicans might want to complain about what they are seeing unfold before them. But this has deep-rooted connections to the kind of politics the party has been practicing. If Jeb Bush and John Kasich feel as if they are being pushed out by the “anti-establishment” mavericks, they need to acknowledge that these candidates are of their party’s own making. The alliance, the ideas, the rhetoric and the style have all come from the heart of Republican politics. The only difference is that some of the major leaders no longer feel as if they are in control.

Good ad by Cruz.

“Donald Trump said he would consider skipping this Thursday’s Republican primary debate if he doesn’t get fair treatment from Fox anchor Megyn Kelly — an apparent attempt to influence moderators at the final GOP debate before Iowa,” CNN reports. Said Trump: “I don’t like her. She doesn’t treat me fairly. I’m not a big fan of hers at all.” He added: “I’d like to go to the debate… But, we’ll see what happens. It’ll be exciting.”

What a pathetic coward Donald Trump is. If he can’t handle the soft balls a Fox News host will throw at him, he can’t handle anything. If Fox News had any chops as a real news organization, it would call his bluff here, and let an empty podium stand in the middle of the stage.

Nate Silver asks if the Republican Party is collapsing: “The Party Decides, the 2008 book by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, has probably been both the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election cycle… However, the book does presume that, in part because of their breadth and diversity, American political parties are strong institutions. Furthermore, it assumes that strong, highly functional parties are able to make presidential nominations that further the party’s best interest.”

“For a variety of reasons, the nomination of Donald Trump would probably not be in the best interest of the Republican Party. Such an outcome this year, which seems increasingly likely, would either imply that the book’s hypothesis was wrong all along — or that the current Republican Party is weak and dysfunctional and perhaps in the midst of a realignment.”

A Texas Grand Jury has cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing, and has, on their own initiative, indicted the two people who fraudulently created the videos. I wish they had indicted the entire Republican Party and all their voters and supporters as co-conspirators. Yes, there would be some 70 million defendants but it would worth it.

With the Iowa caucuses happening one week from yesterday, Nate Silver’s “polls only model” gives Donald Trump a 57% chance of winning on the Republican side and Hillary Clinton a 66% chance of winning among Democrats

Jonathan Chait says there are three theories of change in the Democratic Party.

Obama in 2008 believed Republicans could be reasoned out of their irrationality. Sanders today believes they can be swept aside when the people rise up and depose their corporate paymasters. Clinton, then as now, promises to grind away at them in a trench war that has gone on for decades and for which there is no end in sight.

I think the Obama and Sanders theories are two parts of the same theory: that change will just happened if I am elected, because people will see my election and change, or the opponents of change (i.e. Republicans) will be humbled by their failure and defeat that they will be shamed into working with Obama. Obama was proven wrong. Clinton was proven right.

Greg Sargent and Caitlin MacNeal think that President Obama subtly made the case for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during his interview with Glenn Thrush. They do so because Obama said he doesn’t think Sanders is a replay of his campaign in 2008, while at the same time praising Hillary’s experience and criticizing the media on unfair attacks on her. I think those are just factual assessments. Sanders is not Obama. Hillary is experienced and she has faced unfair attacks from the media.

But you just know Obama wants Hillary to be his successor. And his Cabinet members agree:

Obama’s housing chief, Julian Castro, campaigned for Clinton this weekend in Nevada and Iowa. Clinton recently accepted the endorsement of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and appeared in South Carolina with former Attorney General Eric Holder. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, and Labor Secretary Tom Perez also are among the current and former officials who have publicly declared their support.

The New Republic has a roundup of the Democratic town hall last night in Iowa, and Hillary Clinton was asked why people don’t like her, and proceeded to give the best answer of the night:

Clinton’s answer may have been rehearsed but her recap of her decades of political experience was still powerful; it gave her a chance to immediately cast herself as the most experienced, well-rounded, and generally most presidential candidate. She managed to turn the criticism embedded in the question—that people don’t like her—into a strength:

“I’ve been on the front lines of change and progress since I was your age. I have been fighting to give kids and women and the people who are left out and left behind the chance to make the most of their own lives. … I’ve taken on the status quo again and again. I’ve had millions of dollars spent against me. … The drug companies, the insurance companies spent millions against me .. if it were easy, hey, there wouldn’t be any contest. But it’s not easy. … You have to have somebody who is a proven, proven fighter. Somebody who has taken them on and won.”

Clinton “was at her best because she wasn’t making any effort to present herself as especially millennial-friendly or fresh,” wrote Elizabeth Bruenig in our Minutes blog. “She was presenting herself exactly as she is: a politician who’s spent a lot of time in the trenches, whose station and experience in the halls of power you either take or leave.” Nothing in Clinton’s answer was particularly groundbreaking, but she was poised and impassioned.

Jeet Heer has more on the Town Hall:

When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders shared a stage—separately—at Monday night’s Iowa Democratic Forum on CNN, the most noticeable thing was the difference in volume. By reputation, Sanders is a shouter, but on this occasion he came across as much quieter than Clinton, who gave forceful, directed, and impassioned answers to some difficult questions from Iowa Democrats. Both candidates were fighting against stereotypes that voters have formed of them, using a new tone to win over those still wavering before the Iowa caucuses next Monday. And both of them gave, in their different ways, remarkably convincing performances. […]

[O]n the whole, the kinder, gentler Sanders showed that he has a much wider tonal range as a politician than the Larry David stereotype—or some of his rallies—would suggest. It’s likely that this softer Sanders was crafted in no small part to appeal to the rural populations of Iowa and New Hampshire. Rural voters are especially important in Iowa, because of the weight their votes have in the caucus system. Sanders has already won over a considerable number of college students and urbanites, who form his core fan base, so he needs those rural voters to diversify his support.

Clinton’s new, fightin’ tone is also aimed at skeptical voters. She’s been accused of being a complacent front-runner and pillar of the establishment. Whether this image is fair or not, Clinton needed to counter it. And so she’s re-cast herself as Hillary Clinton the fighter, the counter-puncher who has had to fight the Republicans her whole life. The theme of a combative Hillary is quite visible in her recent campaign ads, and her performance in the Democratic Forum was designed to reenforce this idea.

Nate Cohn: “Momentum is generally overrated in primary politics, but back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire would give Mr. Trump a chance to run the table through Super Tuesday, on March 1, especially with the establishment-backed candidates so divided. It would be a big reversal of the hopes of conservatives from a few weeks ago; they figured Mr. Trump might simply evaporate if he lost Iowa.”

“The party’s establishment is not well positioned to stop Mr. Trump if he fares so well in the early states. All of the main establishment candidates are near one another in New Hampshire. If the field doesn’t narrow quickly after the primary there on Feb. 9, there will be a real chance that Mr. Trump will build a wide delegate lead over a split field on Super Tuesday.”

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