Iowa Post-Mortem: GOP's Boy Wonder Appears, Trump Actually Does Quite Well and Signs of Clinton Meltdown

The tendency will be to say the big takeaway from the Iowa caucuses is that Donald Trump shit the bed, coming in second as he did to the vile Ted Cruz, and not necessarily by a minute margin either with the Texan champion of the GOP Tea Party makeover beating the Manhattan real estate mogul 27.7% to 24.4%.

But that is not my takeaway. My takeaway is that the Iowa caucuses offered a smorgasbord for Republicans, giving every significant segment of the fractured party a reason to crow. For starters, evangelicals proved once again that victory for a GOP candidate in Iowa is dependent on their faith-based network. Cruz joins Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) as winner of the caucuses thanks to the Christian vote. And as Huckabee and Santorum managed to linger on after Iowa without ever dominating the race again, so too will be the fate of Ted Cruz.

For the party establishment, Iowa delivered the joyful verdict that Marco Rubio is indeed a player. Rubio came in third, just a little more than a point behind Trump. For months Rubio has been puffed as the future of the party, the bright, new face of the GOP, and he came through after really only spending January in the Hawkeye State. Reince Priebus must be tickled pink this morning. If Rubio performs well again next Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary, while Bush, Kasich and Christie underperform, the pressure from on high will be for the also-rans to get out of the race and fall in behind Norman Braman's page-boy.

For Donald Trump, all is not lost. In fact, I would say, if not "mission accomplished," then "one helluva job." An all-time record was established for participation in a Republican Iowa caucus, with 46% showing up to his/her first caucus (roughly equal to Bernie's draw in the Dem caucuses, though not up to the 57% Obama drew in 2008). And Trump had basically no ground game to speak of. This is from the frontpager in today's New York Times, Jonathan Martin's "Ted Cruz Wins Republican Caucuses in Iowa":

Turnout was about 185,000, a record, according to Edison Research, which conducted entrance polls at precincts across the state. Mr. Trump’s success had been expected to hinge on whether he could mobilize his supporters. But the turnout was not enough to deliver him a win, even though 46 percent of those who turned out were participating in a Republican caucus for the first time. 

Instead, Mr. Trump paid the price for building only a rudimentary political organization in the state: The brew of energy and anger powering his candidacy did not fully translate into votes.

This lack of ground game will not be a problem in the upcoming primary states. Trump is unsinkable; his loss to Cruz is of very little importance. What should be very troubling to Trump is the emergence of Rubio as a candidate with comparable heft. As long as Rubio remains in the frame, come convention time the party will do everything in its power to deliver the nomination to him.

When it comes to the Democratic results in Iowa, the tie between Hillary and Bernie is almost as good as a victory for the Sanders camp. Clearly the Clintons were anticipating a victory and the spate of "Go home, Bernie; you're a fringe candidate after all" stories to follow. Now the opposite is happening. Take the opening to this morning's frontpager by Patrick Healy, "Little Separates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in Tight Race in Iowa":

The close results were deeply unnerving to Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as her advisers, some of whom had expressed growing confidence in recent days that they had recaptured political momentum after weeks when Mr. Sanders was drawing huge crowds and rising in the polls. The Clintons had appeared optimistic at rallies over the weekend, thanking Iowans for their support as much as urging them to turn out to vote.

The close vote means that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are likely to split Iowa’s share of delegates to the Democratic convention, and Mr. Sanders will be able to argue that the Iowa result was a virtual tie.

The Clinton team was counting on its huge, well-trained army of volunteers, covering all of Iowa’s 1,681 voting precincts, to counter the enormous enthusiasm of voters who jammed into events to hear Mr. Sanders. But his well-financed Iowa organization was able to convert the energy of his crowds into voters on Monday night, as he drew huge numbers of first-time caucusgoers, young people and liberals who responded to his rallying cry against the nation’s “rigged economy.”

The virtual tie between the two candidates instantly raised the stakes for their next face-off, the primary next Tuesday in New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders holds a solid lead in polls there and has the advantage of being from Vermont; candidates from neighboring states have won the state’s primary in recent decades, and Mr. Sanders is admired in the state.

Clinton advisers said late Monday night that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were discussing bringing on additional staff members to strengthen her campaign operation now that a pitched battle may lie ahead against Mr. Sanders. The advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.

Even more damning is Clinton beat reporter Amy Chozick's "Tight Democratic Race in Iowa Unnerves Clinton Campaign." Campaign manager Robby Mook appears to be headed for the chopping block:

Even before Mrs. Clinton finished her brief remarks to her supporters late Monday night, discussions were underway among her outside advisers and donors about the need to bring in longtime Clinton aides and diminish the role of Robby Mook, her young data-driven campaign manager. Asked about such discussions, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the campaign, grew irritated. “Are you serious?” he said tersely to a reporter. 

Next to a commanding five-point win, Bernie could not have asked for anything more. Mook is the guy who was saying from the outset Hillary could return the Obama coalition to the polls. I'm sure at this point Slick Willie has put his foot down and told John Podesta to get serious.

Iowa

What we have witnessed over the last week is an amazing rescue operation performed by the mainstream media on behalf of the Clinton campaign. It is similar to the effort that followed the first Democratic Party presidential debate last October when the mainstream spin cycle locked into high gear and created the impression that Hillary won a smashing victory.

For a pure, distilled form of this pro-Hillaryese, go over to FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's ESPN-owned (The Walt Disney Company) outlet and read his "What Happens If Bernie Sanders Wins Iowa." Silver's argument goes something like this: Yes, Sanders might win in Iowa, and he will likely win New Hampshire, but it means nothing because there is no sign he can win in Dixie. Sanders is not doing enough to bridge his divide with black voters. So he will lose in South Carolina, and he will lose on Super Tuesday. And, oh, by the way, if Sanders can't win in Iowa, his candidacy is cooked, done, kaput.

Silver follows up that piece, which was published Friday afternoon, with one that appeared yesterday, "Hillary Clinton May Win Iowa After All," which argues that Sanders's momentum has stalled and Hillary maintains her lead in the final polls conducted before today's caucus. Silver attributes Clinton's strength to her organizational ground game in the Hawkeye State, and her enduring popularity among Democratic voters.

In other words, according to Silver, Hillary can't lose regardless of the outcome today, and she very well might knock Bernie out of the race. 

This is basically the same snake oil that is being peddled by Silver's former employer, "the newspaper of record," the august New York Times, which endorsed Clinton over the weekend, bizarrely dismissing the Sanders campaign as catering pie-in-the-sky to "alienated middle-class voters and young people," while simultaneously raising up Hillary as the most experienced politician to keep us safe from the Republican bogeymen.

The question comes down to whether there are enough Iowa Democrats willing to be duped; that, or enough caucusing Democrats who are actually pleased with the status quo. The answer to the second question is an easy one. I don't think there are many working-class voters who are ready to sing praises to the present state of affairs. Wages are stagnant. Housing and health care costs continue to rise. And job growth, despite a rosy picture that appears once every few months, has never really pierced a pervasive sense of gloom.

So the question comes down to dupes. Are there that many in Iowa? The polls say yes. But answering a telephone call is not the same as going to a caucus. There is no doubt that Bernie holds the edge in motivation. To this Clintonistas reply that Sanders' support is clustered in urban areas and around college towns, but it is thin in rural areas. 

What is being obscured by the mainstream media smokescreen is the intense revulsion voters feel towards Hillary. If Obama 2008 was a powerful collective hallucination that a better world was possible, Sanders 2016 is a shared gut feeling that the status quo with its huge banks, fraudulent justice and perpetual war is killing us all and therefore must be destroyed.

What is rarely if ever given any ink in the prestige press is that the Obama administration has been an enormous failure. Obama turned out to be a false idol, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is presiding over innumerable undeclared wars. Hillary, by wrapping herself in his mantle, is gambling that Democrats are still in love with Obama. I say no. And even if her gamble pays off and she advances to the general, she has boxed herself in. Obama is more unpopular with the opposing party than any president -- including W. -- going back to Eisenhower.

Bernie wins Iowa. I haven't said anything about Trump because I think he has separated himself from the field recently. Trump wins Iowa. The battle in the GOP then becomes one over who will the party coalesce around to take out Trump. A Rubio vs. Cruz battle is developing to see who will be the main contender.

If Trump Manages to Win the Iowa Caucus, He Will Win the Republican Primary

An interesting note is that the GOP used its response to Obama's State of the Union Address to attack Donald Trump (David Herszenhorn and Emmarie Huetteman, "Obama Speech Points to Successes, as Would-Be Successors Look On"):

In this year’s response, Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina seemed to be part of a pointed effort by Republican leaders to wrest control of the party’s message back from Donald J. Trump, the billionaire and leading presidential contender in the polls. 

Ms. Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants who became her state’s first female and minority governor, urged Americans not to marginalize immigrants in the face of current threats, an apparent reference to Mr. Trump’s recent call for barring foreign Muslims from entering the country.

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she said. “We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.” 

Ms. Haley has also been especially critical of Mr. Obama on national security and military cuts, a message that resonated in her response on Tuesday. 

“We would make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around,” she said in a jab at Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

This is why Trump is likely to be the winner in the Republican primary. The GOP is peddling pure hokum, not the tolerance part about welcoming immigrants, but the neocon call for perpetual war that Haley sounds in the last sentence. Trump might be bellicose, but his position, believe it or not, is not as manifestly contradictory as that of the GOP Establishment. Trump is telling people he will build a wall to keep out the immigrant hordes. Wars might be raging across the globe, but Trump will keep the flotsam and jetsam from washing up on U.S. shores.

Republican Establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are sticking to the same script as conservative German chancellor Angela Merkel, espousing tolerance while backing devastating wars in the Middle East. At some basic level, probably beyond the ability of most to articulate, voters understand this contradiction and are at the beginning stages of rebellion. It is happening all over Europe. Trump is the right-wing manifestation of that rebellion in the United States.

A legitimate question is whether this rebellion can be communicated through the ossified channels of the political system. A persistent criticism of Trump's viability as a candidate is his lack of "ground game," the absence of volunteers in precincts to knock on doors and staff phone banks to get out the vote. In Iowa this is all the more important because caucuses require a level of commitment not found in your average voter in the United States.

An enjoyable "hit piece" directed at Trump's Iowa campaign appears this morning in the national edition of The New York Times. Written by the prickly Trip Gabriel, "Donald Trump’s Iowa Ground Game Seems to Be Missing a Coach," puts a spotlight on the half-ass, amateurish volunteer effort to get voters to the caucuses on February 1. But my takeaway from the article is that the Trump volunteers interviewed just don't have the practiced knack for lying -- because the voter outreach problems they voice are real for every campaign.

The main "hit" component of Gabriel's piece is to besmirch the Trump campaign because one of its voulteers is a "9/11 truther," someone who believes the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were an inside job, a conspiracy:

In Fairfield, in southeast Iowa, Mr. Shaddock, the 9/11 skeptic, said it would be difficult to find someone to speak publicly on Mr. Trump’s behalf in each of the eight precincts in the area. He asked the Trump campaign for $500 to rent the Fairfield Arts and Convention Center so all precincts could caucus together, which would require just one speaker. The campaign turned him down. “Donald himself could have spent $500,” he said. 

A computer network installer, Mr. Shaddock said he was disturbed by Mr. Trump’s comments about Muslims. “It comes across as bigoted,” he said. “I have customers who are Muslims.” 

Although he was not at the Ottumwa rally, Mr. Shaddock said he would have stood up to object when Mr. Trump referred to Muslims flying planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. 

“That hasn’t been proven,” he said. “I would have stood up and said, ‘Listen, it was remote-controlled takeover of the autoland’ ” technology. 

Mr. Shaddock’s outspokenness on these views, which the campaign has asked him to rein in, was not tested on Tuesday night as he placed calls to voters. Using an app, Ground Game 2, supplied by the Trump campaign, which also provided a list of prospects in his precinct, he placed calls to all eight names — as many as he had been given for the day by Trump headquarters. 

Six times he reached voice mail messages. Another number was not in service. At the one number he reached, a woman picked up, and Mr. Shaddock asked to speak to the voter on his list, a man. 

“I don’t know that person,” the woman said. 

“I did dial the correct number, right?” Mr. Shaddock asked. 

The woman hung up.

That's the way it goes when you phone bank. The way people use telephones has changed in the last 15 years. Voter outreach is harder than ever. If anything, Gabriel's description of the Trump volunteer cuts against the mainstream grain that all Trump's support comes from bigots and haters.

Based on organization alone, one would have to wager that Ted Cruz will win Iowa because of his status as champion of the Evangelicals. But then there is that unfortunate frontpager today that documents how big banks -- Goldman Sachs and Citibank -- funded Cruz's U.S. Senate campaign and Cruz never declared it. Even if you're an Evangelical you don't want to vote for a Wall Street shill.

So if your upset with the way the country and the world is trending, and you're of a conservative bent, there is no alternative to The Donald.

My prediction is that if a ground-gameless Trump can win a caucus state like Iowa chock full of Evangelicals as it is he will win the Republican primary. The next question then becomes to what lengths does the GOP Establishment go to rig its convention in order to steal the nomination.

Hillary 2016 D.O.A.

The local representative of the AFL-CIO walked into the office on Monday. He said that he has a friend on the ground in Iowa, and that friend told him, "Take it to the bank. Bernie is going to win Iowa."

This word-of-mouth report emanating from the Hawkeye State is basically the same message as that being relayed by "the newspaper of record" in the last couple of days. Hillary is in free fall in Iowa. She has squandered a 20-point lead and is now engaging in fear-mongering attacks on Sanders, saying he is captive to the gun lobby and that he will raise taxes on working-class Iowans.

All one need do is read "Hillary Clinton Races to Close Enthusiasm Gap With Bernie Sanders in Iowa," by Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor, to get the sense of the dire situation Team Clinton is in:

A poll published on Tuesday, by Quinnipiac University, found that Mr. Sanders had jumped to a lead in Iowa, with 49 percent to Mrs. Clinton’s 44 percent, after trailing her by 11 points in mid-December. The Quinnipiac poll also found that liberal Iowans were the most enthusiastic about the election, and that Mr.Sanders was the favorite among these voters. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Tuesday showed Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead shrinking from 20 points a month ago to seven points.

The tightened race is revealing a sharp generational divide within the Democratic Party, with primary voters under age 45 favoring Mr. Sanders by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio.

*** 

Mr. Sanders’s supporters point to his grass-roots strengths: He has more than 14,000 volunteers in Iowa, and he has spoken to more than 40,000 people at events in the state so far, huge numbers that include young people, independents and new voters who might not be on pollsters’ call sheets. (Mrs. Clinton’s advisers declined to say how many volunteers she had or people she had spoken to in Iowa.) 

“I think his secret weapon, maybe his silver bullet even, is the young adult population that hasn’t been involved in politics up until this point,” said Katie Mitchell, 28, a middle school teacher who lives in Des Moines.

Taking into consideration there is still almost three weeks to go before the February 1 caucus, I'm declaring Hillary dead on arrival based on a reading of just those four paragraphs. Iowa is a caucus state. Caucuses require commitment. It is not as if you can walk into a voting booth make your choice and get out of there. Caucuses require you to be in crowded close quarters with strangers who are sometimes hostile for an hour or more. Caucuses are not for the moderately motivated citizen. Caucuses are for the true believers. The New York Times in its coverage of the last few days is acknowledging in so many words, without saying it explicitly, that Bernie is going to win Iowa because his supporters are much more fervent than Hillary's.

What this means is that Sanders will win Iowa and he will win in New Hampshire and Clinton will have to rely on her Super Tuesday firewall of Southern states to save her bacon. This creates the unsavory scenario for Team Clinton and the Democratic National Committee where Hillary's candidacy is dependent on primary victories in red states she has no hope of carrying in the general. This has been my mantra when people ask me about the Democratic presidential race: Think twice about Clinton's viability in the general election.

Another stake in the heart of Hillary 2016 is the debunking of the Clinton-peddled talking point that she can win by returning the Obama coalition to the polls. She can't return the Obama coalition to the polls because we now know that one vital bloc of that coalition -- youth -- will not turn out for her. So until the Clinton campaign can come up with another model to explain how she wins 270 electoral votes we have to conclude that she is D.O.A.

At this point because of Hillary's strength in red state primaries I'm not willing to say Sanders can knock her out and win the nomination. What I'm saying is Hillary as the Democratic nominee has big problems. Maybe she could beat a Ted Cruz. Maybe. But Donald Trump? No way.

Regional Elections in France Point the Way for the U.S. in 2016

The surmise is that Trump timed his headline-grabbing announcement about banning Muslims from entering the United States until "we can figure out what the hell is going on" because of a poll in Iowa showing Ted Cruz taking the lead there. This is from yesterday's story by Patrick Healy and Michael Barbaro, "Donald Trump Calls for Barring Muslims From Entering U.S.":

Mr. Trump has a track record of making surprising and even extreme comments whenever he is overtaken in opinion polls by other Republican candidates – as happened on Monday just hours before he issued his statement about Muslims. A new Monmouth University survey of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers found that Mr. Trump had slipped from his recent top spot in the state, which holds the first presidential nomination contest on Feb. 1. According to the poll, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas earned 24 percent of support, while Mr. Trump had 19 percent and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had 17 percent. But another Iowa poll released on Monday, by CNN/OCR, showed Mr. Trump with a comfortable lead but Mr. Cruz gaining ground on him.

Over at FiveThiryEight Nate Silver & Co. suss out the meaning of that Monmouth poll in "What If Ted Cruz Wins Iowa?" FiveThirtyEight can't stop drinking the "Trump Can't Win" Kool-Aid. So most of the analysis that one reads there is tilted toward explanations of improbable scenarios where Establishment-worthy candidates like Rubio or Cruz -- now even Chris Christie is being mentioned -- come out on top in the Republican primaries.

This speaks to the hollowness and superficiality of "horse race" reporting, the kind of writing which dominates election coverage in the United States, because it misses the obvious tsunami heading toward the duopoly. People don't believe in the parties and national government anymore. Perpetual war, skyrocketing inequality, institutional racism, partisan gridlock, wage stagnation, rising housing and healthcare costs -- what is there to feel hopeful about?

Establishment analysts pay too little heed to the alienation swelling in the ranks of the average citizen. It is on full display in France where the first round of regional elections took place last weekend and which will finish up this weekend with what everyone is predicting will be a big win for Marine Le Pen's National Front. The National Front will no longer be an also-ran but one of the top two parties in France, replacing the Socialists.

Alissa Rubin laid it all out yesterday in "National Front Gets a Boost in French Regional Elections"; she might as well have been talking about the U.S.:

The National Front not only came in first in the popular vote on Sunday with 28 percent of votes cast nationwide, it was leading races to govern six of France’s 13 regions, decisively in at least two. 

Many factors combined to help Ms. Le Pen’s party in the first round of voting — the second will be held on Sunday — but the overwhelming message was one that the French elites have been reluctant to confront: The political rules that have governed the country for the past 25 years are being reshaped by a wave of nationalist right-wing populism familiar to voters in many other countries, not least fans of Donald J. Trump in the United States. 

Just like Mr. Trump, Ms. Le Pen is shrewdly speaking to voters who feel economically strained, distant from leaders they perceive as elitist and out of touch, and angry or frightened by waves of immigration that they feel threaten their national identity and personal security. Her appeal, which helped her party win political control of a few French cities last year, seems to have only grown since the attacks in Paris last month that killed 130 people, giving the National Front a chance to establish greater credibility by governing key regions, including the area in the north around Calais that has been struggling all year to deal with an encampment of thousands of migrants.

***

Her success is rooted not just in her ability to modulate her message, cloaking some of her more xenophobic ideas in coded language. She also had the good fortune to come to the political stage at a moment when the traditional parties are splintering, seemingly unable to address the economic woes of the middle class, stem the more negative effects of globalization on the French way of life or convince voters that they are not imperiled by immigration and extremism. Ms. Le Pen has long had proposals on these issues — albeit ones that exclude immigrants from many of the benefits that go to French citizens, or that force assimilation.

The old Socialist Party is “incapable of changing at the moment; it is an empty shell,” said Pierre Haski, the co-founder of the French news site Rue 89. “The Socialists are losing the cities, except for Paris, Lyon, maybe Lille; it’s lost most departments; and it’s going to lose regions after this election. It’s been weakened so that it’s very difficult to imagine it could win the next presidential election.

“And you find the same crisis in the traditional right,” Mr. Haski said. “Sarkozy’s party is in disarray.”

Trump has shrewdly protected his spot at the top of the polls since the summer. And while his Islamophobia is grossly demagogic, it is better politics than demonizing undocumented Latinos who make up a far-larger percentage of the electorate than the 2% who identify as Muslim. Also, Trump has cast his spear at the Achilles' heel of the U.S. Global War on Terror (GWOT). Administration policymakers refuse to acknowledge that the brand of Sunni Islam that is the primary fuel for jihadist terrorism is an export of our chief Arab ally, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. voter has been vaguely aware of this since 9/11, but conflicting messaging of the USG and the shallow reporting by the mainstream press has kept the Saudi role in GWOT from reaching critical consciousness.

Trump has once again proven he can command the direction of the presidential race. And like Marine Le Pen, he remains the candidate who must be beat.

The End of Scott Walker's Presidential Aspirations

One achievement that Donald Trump must be granted is his destruction of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's presidential aspirations.

I took some extra time to peruse the The New York Times/CBS News poll on the presidential race. Besides the usual story lines -- Trump's staying power, Hillary's hemorrhaging -- two takeaways jump out: 1) for the time being, the "Anybody But Trump" camp is cohering around Ben Carson's candidacy, the support of which has jumped amazingly from 6 percent in August to 23 percent in September; and 2) no presidential candidate, excepting Hillary, has seen as precipitous a decline as Scott Walker, who has gone from 10 percent to 2 percent in the same time frame.

At 2 percent, with fall on the way and Trump locked in at the top, a charisma-deprived Walker is finished. He will likely linger on until Iowa; at which point, if he doesn't finish in the top three -- which will be tough with Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz showing more consistent levels of support -- the governor, who made a name for himself by flaying the backs of working people, will drop out.