Bogus Study Foundation of Voter Fraud Claims

Nate Cohn debunks Trump's epic voter fraud claim in "Illegal Voting Claims, and Why They Don’t Hold Up":

There isn’t any evidence to support President Trump’s assertion that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election. 

But there is one study that has been interpreted to suggest it is at least possible. It found that between 32,000 and 2.8 million noncitizen voters might have fraudulently cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. The study, based on a survey of 38,000 people after that election, has been under fire since it was published in 2014.

Cohn proceeds to burn the survey, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, to the ground. All its noncitizen voters can be explained, and have been explained, as response error. Respondents completing the survey filled it out incorrectly. Not one noncitizen voter has been proved.

This says a lot about the Bizarro world in which we live. The media monopoly is so tainted its critique of Trump's assertion that Hillary's margin of victory in the popular vote can be explained entirely by illegal voters seems merely like more noise.

Trump Needs a Miracle + Blows Against the Empire

This morning, the first post-convention Monday in the long march to the general election in November, is a good indication of why it will take a miracle for Donald Trump to win the White House. Stories with the most prominent placement are "Donald Trump’s Confrontation With Muslim Soldier’s Parents Emerges as Unexpected Flash Point" and "How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump." The former plays up Trump's bigotry and divisiveness; the latter, the new McCarythism. The media will tattoo Trump and the Trump campaign every day for the next three months. Trump will be unable to whittle down his disapproval rating and narrow the gender gap. Because the media monopoly has gone all in for Hillary, Trump is effectively in a box; absent the miraculous, there he will stay.

Then there is the issue of the daunting electoral map. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go" outline the harrowing journey ahead for The Donald. Basically he has to run the table on the big swing states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida -- and hold North Carolina. Problem is, Trump is woefully underfunded at this point, not to mention that he has alienated a large part of the GOP machine. Even assuming a richly-funded, well-organized campaign, Trump's task ahead is Herculean. Given that he is having trouble raising money -- and it doesn't look like he is going to bankroll himself -- and his campaign infrastructure is skeletal, once again, a miracle is called for.

Nate Cohn limned the contours of this miracle in "Donald Trump’s Path: What Map Should Democrats Fear the Most?" Trump runs the big swings as well as the little swings -- Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire -- and ends up tied 269-269 with Hillary. The election gets dumped into the House of Representatives where Paul Ryan anoints Trump il Duce. Far-fetched? Absolutely.

True, Trump has proven he is a real wild card and not one to be counted out, but I think as we get deeper into August his limitations are going to catch up with his campaign and Hillary will get back to her four-to-five-point lead.

While we are hypnotized stateside with the Trump circus, the U.S. Empire is about to absorb some big blows:

1) Some sort of rapprochement is underway between Russia and Turkey. Putin and Erdogan are to meet next week in St. Petersburg. Turkey appears convinced that the U.S. had a hand in the recent coup attempt.

2) The jihadis are surrounded in Aleppo. Pro-jihadi think tankers are already licking their wounds and looking for some sort of silver lining. That silver lining appears to be "Just wait until Hillary gets here."

3) Italy is on the verge of a full-blown banking crisis. Renzi is on the ropes. Another anti-EU party, M5S, is looking strong.

4) Britain will likely continue to trod a rocky road as it becomes apparent that Theresa May plans on screwing the white working class that voted for Brexit.

Get ready. Crisis time approaches.

New York Post-Mortem: Four More Years of the Same

Any hope that Bernie might knock off Hillary ended yesterday in New York. Sanders got shellacked by more than a quarter-of-a-million votes in the state's Democratic primary, losing to Clinton by 15 points, 42.1% to 57.9%.

A good explanation, probably the briefest and best I have read, of Hillary's victory formula is Nate Cohn's "Realistically, Bernie Sanders Cannot Afford Losses." The best predictor, Cohn argues, of Clinton voting strength is an affluent state that also has a sizable black population.

To the extent that Mr. Sanders’s supporters envisioned a path to a majority of delegates, it hinged on the assumption that he would prove strongest in the most heavily Democratic states, like New York and California.

The assumption was not consistent with the results leading to today. Mr. Sanders lost the states most similar to New York or California, like Illinois and Florida, even Massachusetts. In truth, there has been no relationship between Mr. Sanders’s strength and the Democratic leanings of a county. The stronger predictors of Mrs. Clinton’s strength were diversity and affluence — which augured well for her in New York.

In the end, Mrs. Clinton won New York thanks to big support from nonwhite and affluent voters in New York City and its suburbs.

She swept the Upper West Side, Chelsea, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. These places voted strongly for past liberal challengers, like Zephyr Teachout in the 2014 primary for governor, but not for Mr. Sanders.

She also swept majority black and Hispanic precincts, as she has for most of the cycle.

And she fared well in the suburbs, winning by nearly a two-to-one margin in Westchester County, where she lives.

Mrs. Clinton’s affluent and diverse coalition sets her up for a string of wins next Tuesday along the Eastern Seaboard, and later in New Jersey. After next Tuesday, Mr. Sanders could need 63 or 64 percent of the remaining delegates.

He will be hard pressed to make up this deficit. He has thrived in caucus states, but there is only one of those left: North Dakota. Mr. Sanders could win 64 percent of the vote in a couple of mostly white Western primaries, like Oregon or Montana. But he’s unlikely to win by much more. He could win in Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, but is not likely to do so by 64 percent.

Mr. Sanders could be competitive in California, where there are fewer black voters. But the affluence of the Bay Area and Los Angeles will hurt him there, just as it did in New York City’s liberal bastions. It is hard to imagine a two-to-one victory.

It is more likely that Mr. Sanders has reached the stage of the campaign where even feel-good victories — like repeats of his genuinely impressive win in Michigan — will leave him too far behind.

The reaction to this coalition of Park Avenue and Harlem (both Spanish and Abyssinian), interestingly, is the rock on which Kevin Phillips built his "Emerging Republican Majority" nearly half-a-century ago. Because of an abiding negrophobia and resentment of the rich, Phillips predicted that the white working class would abandon the Democratic Party, something which has certainly come to pass.

With Sanders now set to shuffle out the remainder of the primary as an ever-diminishing factor, a remaining hope we can harbor is for a destructive fight at the Republican National Convention. But this hope will be forlorn if Trump is able to replicate his Empire State performance in Pennsylvania and California since he will then likely have the requisite number of delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot. (Nate Cohn has been talking up the importance of Indiana for Trump, "The Most Important Primary Is ... Wait, Indiana?")

In any event, the general election is shaping up to answer decisively the question, "Can old, white America triumph one last time in the form of Donald Trump?"

No, it can't. Last month proved that Trump's negatives can be driven so high that he is unelectable. Hillary will win the West Coast and East Coast. It won't be easy for her because she is a horrible candidate, but even with low turnout, affluent, educated whites voting in concert with blacks and Latinos will be too much for Trump.

So it looks like four more years of the same -- never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East; catastrophic events caused by human-induced climate change; skyrocketing inequality; et cetera. It is not sustainable. Human institutions are already breaking down.

Maybe direct action nonviolent protest will pick up now that the Bernie opiate is wearing off.

Hillary's Plan to Beat Trump

The big frontpager this morning in "the newspaper of record" is "Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump" by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy. Bernie Sanders tossed aside like a candy wrapper before a single vote has been counted on Super Tuesday, Team Clinton now spins its fantasy of a general election victory against the avatar of the unwashed. The plan is to go negative 24-7, "an all-out assault," against Trump. David Brock is already working up a video montage of bloopers and blunders that The Donald delivered from the stump (which will probably end up drawing more alienated voters to the polls to vote for the reality TV star than indignant soccer moms for Hillary).

There are several problems with this "plan." Using Bill Clinton and Obama as surrogates to harsh on Trump will draw more voters to the real estate tycoon's ranks. Obama and Slick Willie personify to old, white America everything that is wrong with establishment politics. Both, by the way, are stalwart backers of huge free trade agreements. The average voter, despite a uniform mainstream media message about the amazing bounty produced by free trade, has concluded that the U.S. has been de-industrialized because of it. Trump will pounce on Obama and Bill with a viciousness and glee that will fill television and smartphone screens until election day, drawing the Oxycontin and Budweiser denizens into the political process like never before.

Conventional wisdom is that negative campaigning suppresses turnout. In this case  Hillary's scorched earth attack on Trump will actually boost his numbers. The last status quo election in the United Status was the 2014 midterm, which had the lowest turnout since World War Two. In one state, such as Ohio, turnout was as low as the early nineteenth century -- before there was universal male suffrage. There is no more faith in elections.

Enter Trump.

The Super Tuesday bar for Marco Rubio has been set at his winning a single state. Nate Cohn highlights the chances of "Little Marco" in "Where Marco Rubio Has the Best Chance to Win." The answer is nowhere. If Cruz doesn't squeak through in his home Lone Star state, then the primary will be all over except for the crying of GOP apparatchiks. It might be better for Trump in the long run if didn't come away with a clean sweep because then the Republican establishment can persist in its magical thinking a bit longer.

Campbell Robertson has a so-so story about the lost cause of the Democrats in the South. A lot of the commentators to the first story in The New York Times announcing Hillary's big win in South Carolina noted the fatal flaw in Team Clinton having to rely on a Deep South firewall to protect her path to the nomination. How can a candidate expect to win a general election when she won a primary based on states she can't carry in November?

Super Tuesday

It was a depressing weekend. The Clinton margin of victory among blacks in South Carolina, even greater than what she racked up in Nevada, is a death knell for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as Nate Cohn explains in "Hillary Clinton’s Winning Numbers in South Carolina Suggest Sweep in South":

[Hillary] has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

For Mrs. Clinton, the path to the presidential nomination is straightforward: fight Mr. Sanders to a draw among the nonblack voters who dominate the party’s contests in many Northern and Western states, and win by huge margins among black voters, who represent about a quarter of Democratic voters nationally. They represent the majority of Democrats in the South, which will play a crucial role on Super Tuesday.

The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing.

As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data. It’s instead concentrating resources in five states with far fewer black voters and far fewer delegates: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts and Vermont. It is a strategy that aims to maximize Mr. Sanders’s chance of winning states, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent Mrs. Clinton from running up huge delegate leads from the South.

The likelihood of a Clinton landslide in the delegate-rich South means that Mr. Sanders can’t compensate with a few narrow, feel-good wins outside the South. The thing to watch on Tuesday night is whether Mr. Sanders can win by big — even double-digit — margins in states like Minnesota or Massachusetts. The margins matter, because delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic nomination contest.

Even this might not be enough in a place like Minnesota or Massachusetts, depending on whether one assumes that Mr. Sanders has an advantage in caucus states like Minnesota or a state bordering Vermont like Massachusetts. If Mrs. Clinton has an advantage among Hispanic voters, in addition to black voters, then the burden on Mr. Sanders would grow even more to dominate with white voters in states like Massachusetts or Minnesota.

The polling, at least for now, says Mr. Sanders is not positioned to win by these sorts of margins. He’s in a tight race in Massachusetts. He’s in a tight race in Oklahoma, a state with a below-average black population and a large number of working-class Democrats. There is not much polling in Colorado or Minnesota, but there isn’t much evidence of a blowout there or in neighboring Wisconsin.

I think Cohn's analysis is on the money. Hillary has proven herself Obama's equal in winning a huge percentage of the black vote. And while it is true that Bernie wins a majority of white voters, though apparently not in South Carolina, it is more a split than a landslide. Absent a bombshell like an indictment, Hillary's path to the nomination seems safe.

Hence, the low feeling this weekend. Particularly after reading the massive two-parter by Jo Becker and Scott Shane (The Libya Gamble: "Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall" and "A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left' ") about the disastrous Hillary-backed coup of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary's fingerprints are all over the destruction of North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe.

The good news though is she going to have great difficulty winning a general election against Trump. Cohn is too busy lining out the limitations of Bernie's campaign to note the weakness of Hillary's. For starters, Democratic turnout has been less than the GOP so far. Trump broke records for turnout in South Carolina and Nevada. This has to be very troubling for Team Clinton. For the winning formula of the Obama coalition to work, Hillary will need not only the constituency groups -- blacks, Latinos, youth -- but she will need juiced turnout by those constituents. Hillary has the blacks, but so far she does not have young people and there is no evidence that she is winning the Latino vote by a significant margin. Most importantly, Hillary is not inspiring new voters to come to the polls the way Trump is. Read Matt Taibbi's excellent "How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable" and ask yourself, "How does Trump lose any of the big swing states to Hillary?"

One possible answer is found in "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump" by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Martin. The GOP will campaign against Trump in the general:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The article also limns Republican plans to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.

Maybe the GOP will incinerate itself. We can only hope. One thing is for sure: If Hillary does as well tomorrow as is generally predicted, Bloomberg will not run. The elites will all line up with Hillary, and it will be Hillary vs. the world.

Who Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada?

As to be expected, The New York Times is tattooing the Sanders campaign as a sure loser following Hillary's solid victory on Saturday in the Nevada caucuses. Nevada was important for Bernie, and in many ways it seemed ready-made for his anti-establishment candidacy, given the state's higher-than-average union density and its long suffering since the 2008 financial meltdown. But Hillary beat him, and she beat him handily in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its heavy Latino population and its union casino workers.

And herein lies a mystery. Based on entrance and exit polling, Bernie won the Latino vote in Saturday's caucus by eight points. Then how is it that Hillary beat him by 11 points in Clark County? This has created a kerfuffle with number-cruncher Nate Cohn, "No, the Polling Doesn’t Prove Bernie Sanders Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada," rejecting the polls. Charles Blow summarizes in his anti-Bernie column, "Bernie Sanders Hits a Roadblock":

According to the entrance poll, Sanders also won the Hispanic vote, but this is where some prominent poll watchers took exception to the poll’s accuracy. 

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted: 

“Based on the results in Clark, the precincts in ELV, and the overall entrance poll error, I do not believe Sanders won the Hispanic vote.” 

ELV, or East Las Vegas, is the largely Hispanic part of Clark County, by far the most populous county in the state, where actual results showed Clinton winning handily. 

Nate Silver tweeted support for Cohn’s analysis: 

“We share @nate cohn skepticism about entrance poll finding that Clinton lost Hispanics in Nevada.”

I think this anomaly can be explained by a passage from the post-election dispatch written by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Beats Bernie Sanders in Nevada Caucuses":

Her support among labor also ran deep, even though the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 members, many of whom are Latino, declined to endorse a candidate. But on Thursday, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who also remained neutral, said in an interview he had spoken to D. Taylor, the head of the union’s parent group, to make sure its members could have paid time off to participate in the caucuses, a move that operatives in the state believed helped tip the race in Mrs. Clinton’s favor. 

She overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Sanders in the caucuses that were held at six major Las Vegas casinos, including Harrah’s, the Wynn and New York-New York, which heavily drew working-class minority voters.

Caucuses are not secret ballots. Leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, despite a professed neutrality, got time loss for its members to caucus for Hillary. The members did so, but many on the way in and on the way out identified as Bernie supporters. That is why there is a disconnect between the polling and the actual outcome in Clark County.

What does it all mean? Certainly not how Team Clinton is spinning the win this morning as somehow foreshadowing an inevitable triumph in the primary. Hillary won 19 delegates to Bernie's 14. That's it. Even Cohn sees the Nevada results as proof that the Sanders campaign has reason to hope he can diminish Hillary's advantage among people of color:

The actual election returns in Las Vegas’s Clark County hint at a different story. Analyzed neighborhood by neighborhood, they suggest that Mrs. Clinton might have won the Hispanic vote by a comfortable margin. She won about 60 percent of delegates in heavily Hispanic areas, a result that calls the finding of the polling into question.

There is not much evidence, though, that Mrs. Clinton won Hispanic voters by the sort of landslide margin that she did eight years ago. That’s a good sign for Mr. Sanders, who needs to make up for the huge swing among black voters, who have gone from uniformly for President Obama to uniformly for Mrs. Clinton.

So we need to take with a grain of salt Patrick Healy's frontpage headline this morning, "Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb." There is plenty within the guts of Healy's story which should give the Clintonistas pause:

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded. 

Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

“She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks’ time on Super Tuesday,” said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race. 

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle’s presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running. 

“The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. “We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers.” 

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters. 

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

The support for Bernie is not going to evaporate. It is hardcore. It provides a solid foundation of funds and grassroots all across the country. For example, I attended a "Labor for Bernie" rally yesterday at 4 PM -- this is 4 PM on a Sunday afternoon, a time when a lot of people are doing grocery shopping and getting ready for the work week -- and the hall was packed. More chairs repeatedly had to be hauled in to accommodate the overflow. Several state legislators were in prominent attendance. This is not a Howard Dean type of movement that is going to suddenly collapse. This is a long haul operation of people who want to tear down a system that is multiplying wars and planetary destruction faster than most can track.

The fight is just getting started. What happens, as Healy alludes, when the FBI comes back with evidence of wrongdoing? How about the transcriptions of those Goldman speeches? Hillary's corpse might appear reanimated but the stench is still there.

As for Trump, only the most committed dead-enders can deny the obvious: After Super Tuesday the GOP nomination will be Trump's.

The fantasy being peddled by Republican apparatchiks is that the race will turn into a two-way contest between Rubio and Trump, and Trump, who has never proven that he can muster much more than 30%, will fall to the more centrist candidate. This is all summarized in Nate Silver's "Trump Optimists And Trump Skeptics Are About To Go To War."

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes Cruz is going to get out the race, and he is not. He's got too much money.

New Hampshire

What we are witnessing now in the Clinton campaign, in the media monopoly that backs her, and among her campaign surrogates is mounting panic. We saw it with Bill Clinton rambling on about Sanders' deceit and misogyny to a less-than-overflowing crowd at a New Hampshire junior high school. It was also on display when Gloria Steinem, feminist museum piece, dismissed as cock chasing the large advantage Bernie Sanders enjoys among young women.

It is pathetic. But it is not arbitrary or capricious. It is a centralized decision by Team Hillary to go negative in the run up to the primary today in an attempt to keep Sanders from a double-digit win.

Here is the CNN New Hampshire polling snapshot from yesterday:

On the eve of New Hampshire's presidential primaries, a new CNN Poll of Polls finds both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are holding on to substantial leads in their respective races, but each faces an opponent whose support is on the rise.

Sanders' 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls. No public polling has found Clinton in the lead in New Hampshire since November.

Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio's 15%. Rubio has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week. Ted Cruz follows with 13%, John Kasich at 11% and Jeb Bush at 10%. This pack of four -- Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush -- has been jockeying for second place in the state for some time. The fifth candidate often included in the group, Chris Christie, has generally seen his support dwindle, and now stands well behind, dropping two points in this week's Poll of Polls to an average of 5%. Carly Fiorina ties Christie at 5% and Ben Carson rounds out the group with 3%.

Politics is not rocket science. Certain things are known to work, one of them is negative campaigning. It doesn't drive support to your candidate; it drives down the support for your opponent, particularly if your opponent is buoyed by idealistic, young, first-time voters who still believe a better world is possible. Going on the attack, accusing your opponent (and, by association, his supporters) of dishonesty and base intentions, is the equivalent of a blow to the face. Most people can't take being hit in the face. So these voters stop participating. I saw it up close in the heady days post-Nader 2000. Once idealistic young Greens figured out that people despised them and that the foundation of politics was conflict and quid pro quo they melted away, back to their lives as spectators.

The goal for Hillary is to keep Sanders' margin of victory in the single digits and then claim victory based on that result. The template here is what Slick Willie did in New Hampshire in 1992 against Paul Tsongas. Clinton came in second, losing by eight points; but he did better than expected and dubbed himself "The Comeback Kid," which the media monopoly dutifully gobbled up.

Signs are that Hillary's negativism is paying off. But it looks like it's too late to keep Bernie from a double-digit win. Nate Cohn has a good New Hampshire rundown this morning in "New Hampshire Should Answer a Lot of Key Questions":

The race may have tightened since the last debate. The five polls released after the debate last week showed Hillary Clinton faring seven points better, on average, than a prior batch of polls. On the other hand, those prior polls showed her behind by an average of 15 points, so there may be some “reversion to the mean” at play — it might be that the five previous polls were unrealistically good for Mr. Sanders, not that Mrs. Clinton actually gained. 

It would be tough to dismiss a huge Mr. Sanders victory simply by saying he’s well known in Vermont. That’s certainly true compared with the rest of the country, but it seems like a stretch to argue that the average New Hampshire voter should be extremely predisposed toward Mr. Sanders. 

Ninety percent of the New Hampshire Democratic electorate isn’t in the Burlington, Vt., media market, and the state’s most populous area — the southeastern section — is also the area farthest from Vermont. It was also Mrs. Clinton’s strongest area in 2008. Whether Mr. Sanders can beat here there, or at least do better than Barack Obama did in 2008, could offer real insight into the extent of Mr. Sanders’s appeal.

Bernie wins New Hampshire. The only way the narrative gets difficult is if he beats Hillary by only a few points. But whether it is nine points or 13, I don't think it makes much difference going into Nevada and South Carolina. The race really begins in Nevada. We will know how much mojo Bernie has based on how he does there. Hillary beat Obama in Nevada in 2008.

The same metric applies to Trump in New Hampshire. He has led there for a long time by a wide margin. If he wins in a squeaker, following his disappointing performance in the Potemkin village of American democracy, the Iowa caucuses, then his path to the Republican nomination becomes a trail of tears. But the New Hampshire narrative for the last week has been all about Marco Rubio. Chris Christie bitch-slapped him repeatedly Saturday night during the Republican debate hosted by ABC, and Rubio didn't look good handling it.

I watched the debate; it's the first GOP performance I have seen. What struck me is how threadbare the whole affair appeared. It reminded me of employees who have worked together for decades trapped in the company break room sniping at each other; that, or hungover fraternity brothers arguing in the filth of the kitchen the morning after a big house party. Trump looked tired. Ben Carson came off as an imbecile. Chris Christie, a bully. Marco Rubio, a hot young stupid ambitious chick in "come-fuck-me" pumps. Jeb Bush, a manikin. Ted Cruz, the second coming of Tricky Dick Nixon. John Kasich, probably the best of the bunch, but no one you would ever want to vote for anyway. ABC framed the debate like a sporting event with shots of the candidates walking through halls like boxers with their entourages on the way to the ring or footballers coming out the tunnel. Marco Rubio even had earbuds draped over his Oxford, reminiscent of so many athletes you see dismounting the team bus with their Beats headphones.

My preference for the #2 slot in the GOP New Hampshire primary, ahead of Kasich or Bush at #3, is Chris Christie. The guy is a toxic force, a lethal debater, extremely unappealing, a blowhard. Christie at #2 would shake things up.

Donald Trump: Champion of the Open Society?

It has been almost a month since this page took a peek at the U.S. presidential race. With the Iowa caucus less than two months off, terror has gripped the GOP Establishment at the prospect of Donald Trump's nomination.

One manifestation of this terror is the recent anointing of Ted Cruz as the candidate who has the best chance of knocking Trump out of his perch on top of the polls (see Nate Cohn's "Behind Ted Cruz’s Rise in the Polls: Lopsided Support" and Matt Flegenheimer's "Ted Cruz Surges in Iowa, Powered by Outsider Fervor").

If you feel nauseous due to serial deja vu, don't doubt yourself. It is real. We have been here before, and repeatedly so since Trump announced his run for the presidency in June. Once Trump weathered the surge of outrage about his Mexican rapists comment and then floated to the top of the polls (where he remains) over a crowded GOP primary field, the media and the Republican Party has put forth one champion after another to knock the crown from The Donald's head. There was the Carly Fiorina bubble. Then came Marco Rubio's turn. The big one was the Ben Carson boom, which has now gone bust. Finally, we have the absurdity of the Establishment coalescing in the 11th hour around the candidacy of Ivy League Tea Party huckster Ted Cruz. 

Cruz, whose negligible support is dissected in the Cohn piece above, is not going to win, just as Jeb Bush, who never gained any traction despite his $100 million Super PAC war chest and his Establishment imprimatur, is not going to win. Trump is headed to victory because he is the choice of the white working class, the base of the Republican Party.

Tom Edsall in an article today, "Donald Trump's Appeal," gets an earful from psychotherapists explaining the Trump phenomenon, but he identifies two basic truths about Trump that cannot be denied: 1) the bedrock of his support comes from the white male working class without college degrees -- call it old-time America; and 2) Trump voters have an insatiable appetite for destruction of the duopoly -- a system, in their hive mind, that has failed abominably and needs to be demolished (and I think rightly so) as soon as possible.

Poll data from the Pew Research Center shows how much Trump depends on the politically restive white working class. His backing from voters with a high school degree or less is twice as high as is it is from those with college degrees; the percentage of men lining up behind him is eight points higher than the percentage of women; voters from households making $40,000 or less are 12 points more likely to cast a Trump ballot than those from households making more than $75,000. 

Unlike most Republican candidates, Trump rejects cuts in Social Security and Medicare — programs strongly supported by the white working class. And, while he nods in the direction of the anti-abortion movement, he does not attempt to impose a repressive sexual morality (after all, he has been married three times).

***

At the moment, Trump leads in polls of Republican primary voters at 30 percent. Impressive as that is, more than 66 percent of Republican voters surveyed chose someone other than Trump. 

Going a step further, if Trump’s 30 percent of Republican primary voters is a marker of his core support, that translates to just 7.5 percent of all the voters who will cast ballots in the general election next November. 

Win or lose, Trump has made millions of Americans acutely aware of their dissatisfaction and prepared them to voice their resentment in the voting booth. The emotions he’s awakened and benefited from aren’t going away. 

If Trump is not nominated, the Republican candidate is still almost certain to have one of the Democratic Party’s more polarizing figures, Hillary Clinton, as an opponent, giving Trump supporters an incentive to remain loyal. 

But the larger problem Trump has created for the Republican Party is that his success has pushed all likely alternative candidates to the right, further from the mainstream, particularly on immigration. 

If Trump achieves nothing else, he has already proved himself to be a one-man wrecking crew, demolishing the efforts of Republican leaders and consultants after the 2012 election to soften the harder edges of their party.

I stopped reading FiveThirtyEight -- the web site of Nate Silver, prognosticating avatar of both Obama landslides -- because of its repetitive dismissal of the candidacies of Trump and Bernie Sanders. Polls showing Trump and Sanders in the lead are invariably picked apart, while historical statistics showing that "factional" candidates like Sanders are unelectable are highlighted. It is as if Mr. Data has rejected the first principle of scientific inquiry, the principle of falsifiability, to concoct a narrative that cannot be disproved: Trump cannot win and Hillary cannot lose.

The fascinating kernel at the center of Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight analysis is the notion that Trump cannot win because the United States is not an open society (fascinating because the "principle of falsifiability" is Karl Popper's concept, the theorist who wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, an apologia for "liberal democracy" published at the end of World War Two). Silver won't come out and say this but that is what he means when he says that an outsider candidate cannot triumph over the apparatus of the party even if he/she has clear majority support.

A must-read is this morning's FiveThirtyEight round-table discussion, "Big Phony And Loser Nate Silver Can’t Even See Donald Trump Is A Winner! What A Joke!" between Silver and two of his colleagues, Micah Cohen and Harry Enten. Cohen and Enten, role-playing a die-hard Trump fan and a Democrat intellectual, respectively, hammer away at golden-boy Silver and his notion that Trump won't win.

Silver puts forth his "Trump can't win because our open society is actually a closed society" argument in the first paragraph below, and then there is some back and forth with his interlocutors:

natesilver: By a Trump-like candidate, guys, I mean someone who openly defies his party and whose party is openly rooting against him. It’s one thing to say that the party chooses its nominee. That’s not always true. But can the party prevent someone from hijacking its nomination when the consequences for it would be disastrous? My guess is that it can.

Also, we do have some empirical data on how non-politicians perform in campaigns. It’s not uncommon to see them in U.S. Senate races, for instance. And the answer is that they tend to perform poorly. They often fade down the stretch run — look at Meg Whitman in 2010, for example — because of a tendency to commit gaffes and a lack of organization on the ground-game side of things.

Trumpfan1959: Trump has committed plenty of “gaffes” — at least, according to you people — and he still leads every poll.

PhDemocrat: Yes, Nate, but they also win. David Perdue won in Georgia in 2014, for example, and he survived both a competitive primary and a general election campaign. And Perdue also committed some gaffes. What I hear from you is a lot of guessing.

natesilver: You guys are arguing against a straw man. I’m not saying it’s impossible for Trump to win. But it’s unlikely — less likely than betting markets and the conventional wisdom hold.

Also, there’s an important difference between a one-off election like a Senate or gubernatorial primary and a presidential nomination. In a presidential race, voters and the party establishment have time to read and react. You’ve had candidates like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan win individual states before, but they haven’t been able to sustain their momentum.

Will an onslaught of super PAC ads against Trump hurt him or help him? I dunno! But the party has a lot of time to experiment until it finds the right formula.

Trumpfan1959: It seems to me that you have no idea what’s going to happen — maybe there’s zero empirical evidence that candidates like Trump can win, but there’s just as much evidence that candidates like Trump CAN’T win. Trump is dominating the race, media and polls. How is that not the best position to be in?

natesilver: Let me turn this around a bit. You both seem to be placing a lot of emphasis on Trump’s polls. I don’t think they mean very much.

Trumpfan1959: If Marco Rubio were winning, you’d be citing the polls all the time. You just don’t like what they show.

natesilver: Dude, this isn’t complicated. Go back and look at past polling frontrunners at this stage of the campaign. They have a poor track record. By contrast, go back and look at who was leading in general elections in late October. They have a very good track record.

The point of being empirical isn’t that you love polls. It’s that you learn from experience, and our experience tells us that polls aren’t reliable predictors at this stage of the race.

PhDemocrat: 1980: Reagan led in polls and won. 1984: Mondale led in polls and won. 1988: Bush led in polls and won. 1996: Dole led in polls and won. 2000: Bush and Gore led in polls and both won. 2012: Romney was top of polls for most of primary and won. That’s seven out of 12 times the person who led in the polls at this point has won. That’s greater than 50 percent. And it’s far greater than the chance you give to Trump at this point.

The point that Silver misses is the dialectic. When has the white working class been as alienated as it is today? Not since the 1930s I would say.

Big changes are coming.

The "Moderate" Counterfeit: Syria and the U.S.

I have noticed an interesting parallel: The use of the term "moderate" in glaringly different contexts but for the same basic purpose, to mock up support where there really isn't any to speak of. Call it the "moderate" counterfeit.

In the first context, the World War in Syria, the term "moderate" anchors the main fiction of U.S. foreign policy there, that Syria is convulsed by a civil war in which a bloodthirsty dictator, Bashar al-Assad, propped up by authoritarian allies in Iran and Russia, slaughters a "moderate" civil opposition who is looking to a benevolent Uncle Sam for support. That is the cover story. What is really going on is that Syria is being invaded by foreign jihadist mercenaries, bankrolled by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Despite spending half a billion dollars to form a "moderate" fighting force to combat ISIS in northern Syria, the Pentagon came up empty. You would think that this would spur a Congressional investigation or two and possible some heads would roll. But actually nothing of the sort will happen; in fact, the Pentagon is looking for a $100-million increase in the program in next year's budget. According to this morning's "Foreign Policy - Situation Report" by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley,

Missiles for all my friends. Not all train and equip programs are created equal. While the effort by U.S. Special Forces to train a Syrian force of about 5,000 “moderate” fighters by the end of this year has flamed out, the Washington Post takes a look at the other, more successful U.S. train and equip program in Syria -- the CIA's supply of TOW missiles to rebels.

The missiles have been so successful on the battlefield that the rebels have taken to calling it the “Assad Tamer.” The program has been going on for several years, and during the recent Russian-backed offensive by Syrian forces, rebels have been posting videos of the missiles taking out Syrian tanks and armored vehicles. While a significant capability, the Raytheon-made missiles -- coming mostly from the 13,000 purchased by the Saudi government in 2013 -- have so far been unable to significantly change the situation on the ground, as Syrian forces continue to push rebels out of their positions in Idlib, Hama, and Latakia provinces.

Not dead, just less oversight! The Pentagon’s scuttled training program may be gone, but the effort lives on. Despite insisting for months that every single Syrian fighter needed to be vetted by U.S. forces before being issued weapons, White House and Pentagon officials on Friday said that actually, the opposite is true. On a call with reporters, Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said only the leaders of various trusted rebel groups will be vetted, and they’ll be trusted to pass out U.S.-supplied weapons and supplies to their troops as they see fit. “We have been working with these groups for months,” she said, and the United States will now “build on that and work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment.” She wouldn’t comment on the kinds of equipment specifically, other than to say it will not include “higher-end” weapons like anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles.

The original program may be dead, but like all good Pentagon initiatives, the funding stream lives on. The Pentagon has asked for $600 million to fund it in the 2016 budget, and Capitol Hill appears willing to go along, despite Republican and Democratic lawmakers having recently called the training effort “a joke,” a “total failure,” and “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.”

Hard to believe. But there it is. The fiction of a vibrant "moderate" opposition and the necessity of a well-funded program in the Pentagon to support it is too important for something as disposable as the truth.

Another context where "moderate" is used to anchor an Oz-like fictitious social construct is in the 2016 presidential race. "Moderates" are the wellspring of the "mainstream" candidacies of Jeb Bush and Hillary. ("Moderates" written without the quote marks -- apparently the fiction of moderates on the battlefield in Syria can be designated in quotation as an Obama administration contrivance, but moderates in the U.S. electorate much be vouchsafed as legitimate; hence, no quote marks.)

To get a sense of how the term "moderate" is used in the context of the 2016 presidential primary contest, let us turn to the Gray Lady's principal electoral tea-leaves reader, Nate Cohn ("Why Marco Rubio’s Chances Are Rising"):

A lot has changed since April, when Marco Rubio announced his presidential bid. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was the top candidate of mainstream conservative activists and donors. Jeb Bush seemed like a fund-raising juggernaut with natural appeal to the party’s moderate voters, who play an underrated role in the Republican primary process. Mr. Rubio, a broadly appealing candidate but the top choice of few, looked boxed out.

Today, Mr. Rubio isn’t blocked. Instead, he has a big opening. 

Mr. Walker dropped out of the race, and Mr. Bush does not look nearly as strong as it seemed he might. Mr. Bush hasn’t won many endorsements, he isn’t faring well in the polls, and his impressive fund-raising reflects a narrow base of strong support from wealthy super PAC donors, not wide support by party elites.

As Cohn lines out, Bush's oasis of mass moderate support turned out to be a mirage. This doesn't stop Cohn from pressing on to claim an opportunity for the ridiculous Rubio to tap the same "oasis" of "moderate" support.

The same can be said for Cohn's recent think-piece ("Joe Biden: No Money, Weak Polls, but Still Clinton’s Toughest Rival") where he buttresses Hillary's front-runner status, with, yes, you guessed it, her appeal to "moderate" voters:

Among nonwhite voters, [Hillary] leads Mr. Sanders in a one-on-one contest by a huge margin of 71 percent to 16 percent. 

Similarly, she leads among moderate voters by a margin of 63 to 23 points. The race is closer among whites and liberals, but she still takes a slight lead among both groups in a head-to-head contest with Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Sanders said earlier this year that he thought he had a chance to break into Mrs. Clinton’s coalition by winning support from working-class voters. Perhaps he can. But his opponent is a candidate with universal name recognition, tremendous backing from party elites and considerable financial and organizational resources. These factors make her far less vulnerable than other candidates to perceptions of momentum — in which voters who don’t follow the campaign very closely can flock to someone who seems to be gaining.

At the end of the quote, the underlined portion, you get the real definition of "moderate" in the U.S. electoral system -- someone who is basically ignorant and who will vote for the candidate with the greatest name recognition and the largest number of commercials on television.

While in years past -- when there was at least a modicum of hope in the future -- this would be plenty to win an election, now, things are different. Look at Jeb Bush. There are few "moderates" these days.

Nate Silver and Nate Cohn in Basic Agreement with Ayatollah Khamenei + Half of the Satanic Duopoly Begins a "Draft Kerry" Campaign

The place to begin this morning is a quote from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Thomas Erbrink, "Iran’s Supreme Leader Says Israel Won’t Exist in 25 Years"):

Iranians must not forget that the United States is the “Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khamenei warned, criticizing those calling for better relations. “Some want to show this Satan as an angel, but the Iranian nation has pushed this Satan out,” he said. “We should not allow it to sneak back in through the window.”

As GOP dead-enders in the House of Representatives seek to satisfy their Saudi and Likud paymasters by delaying debate on the agreement over Iran's nuclear program, American voters are of a similar mind as Ayatollah Khamenei. They want to throw out Satan.

The two halves of Satan's brain -- the Republican-Democrat duopoly -- are having a difficult time processing this information. Nate Cohn today, "Donald Trump vs. the Party: Why He’s Still Such a Long Shot," still cannot accept that he was wrong back in July when he dismissed Trump as a flash in the pan. His argument that Trump cannot win now seems to rely on the fact that America is actually not a democracy. Elite party opinion, not voters, decide who a nominee is:

For past candidates, elite support has been necessary, and unified party opposition has been fatal. Without elite support, an ordinary candidate can’t build a top campaign or raise big money or draw major attention from traditional media. 

Party opposition is even worse. It ensures a chorus of influential critics in the media and a well-funded opponent with endless resources for advertisements to echo the attacks. Grass-roots support and super PACs can help compensate for a lack of broad support, but they probably can’t overcome broad opposition. The voice of the elites is too strong and influential.

The blogging sage, Nate Silver, the guy Nate Cohn was hired to replace, basically agrees with his replacement ("Stop Comparing Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders"):

What Sanders and Trump have in common is they’re both unlikely to be nominated. (If I were laying odds, I’d put either one at something like 15-1 or 20-1 against.) But it’s for different reasons. Sanders is losing now, but if he eventually overtakes Clinton — and if Biden fails to come to the establishment’s rescue — his position might become more viable. Trump is nominally winning, but the GOP race is much more volatile. And if he doesn’t lose steam on his own accord, the Republican establishment will use every tool at its disposal to stop him.

Sanders and Trump cannot win because voters in the United States really don't choose their leaders. That's the point of view that Silver and Cohn are peddling here. Where Iran's supreme leader interprets this as evidence of Great Satan, what is disappointing to me is that I don't think the two Nates do.

Democrats are reading the same tea leaves, and they are pitifully casting about for a stand-in should Hillary continue to falter. For a particularly dire assessment of the state of the Democratic Party, Patrick Healy's "Big-Name Plan B’s for Democrats Concerned About Hillary Clinton" is a must-read:

It is not just Mrs. Clinton’s weakness in the polls that has generated talk of other alternatives, but also the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is routinely drawing huge crowds at campaign events. That has been disconcerting to Democratic officials who believe that Mr. Sanders, a socialist, is so liberal that his presence at the top of the party’s ticket in 2016 would be disastrous. 

“If party leaders see a scenario next winter where Bernie Sanders has a real chance at the Democratic nomination, I think there’s no question that leaders will reach out to Vice President Biden or Secretary of State Kerry or even Gore about entering the primaries,” said Garnet F. Coleman, a Texas state lawmaker and Democratic national committeeman.

***

“You have Democrats beginning to panic about the one thing that a lot of them never worried about, which was Clinton’s electability in the general election,” said Robert Shrum, a veteran strategist who was a senior adviser to Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry during their presidential runs. “You still have to think of her as the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. But the challenge she faces in the general election is both the trust problem and the likability problem.”

The bottom line on Healy's piece? A draft Kerry movement is lurching to life. A true sign of desperation.

Trump's Staying Power

The week began with a frontpage acknowledgement in the "newspaper of record" (Michael Barbaro, Nate Cohn and Jeremy Peters, "Why Donald Trump Won’t Fold: Polls and People Speak") that Donald Trump is the front runner to win the GOP presidential nomination. After repeatedly dismissing the real estate mogul as a flash in the pan, a figure that would soon diminish in the polls after voters came to their senses, the organs of elite opinion have shifted their point of view to grudgingly accept that Trump's support is broad and comparatively deep:

In the command centers of Republican presidential campaigns, aides have drawn comfort from the belief that Donald J. Trump’s dominance in the polls is a political summer fling, like Herman Cain in 2011 — an unsustainable boomlet dependent on megawatt celebrity, narrow appeal and unreliable surveys of Americans with a spotty record of actually voting in primaries. 

A growing body of evidence suggests that may be wishful thinking. 

A review of public polling, extensive interviews with a host of his supporters in two states and a new private survey that tracks voting records all point to the conclusion that Mr. Trump has built a broad, demographically and ideologically diverse coalition, constructed around personality, not substance, that bridges demographic and political divides. In doing so, he has effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements that might instantly doom rival candidates.

In poll after poll of Republicans, Mr. Trump leads among women, despite having used terms like “fat pigs” and “disgusting animals” to denigrate some of them. He leads among evangelical Christians, despite saying he had never had a reason to ask God for forgiveness. He leads among moderates and college-educated voters, despite a populist and anti-immigrant message thought to resonate most with conservatives and less-affluent voters. He leads among the most frequent, likely voters, even though his appeal is greatest among those with little history of voting.

That was from Sunday. Since then what we have seen is a circling of the wagons, as columnists decry Trump's divisiveness and analysts attempt to undercut the polling that puts Trump so clearly ahead in the hearts and minds of the citizenry of the "indispensable nation."

For an example of the latter, one can consult Nate Cohn's "There’s Evidence That Trump’s Polling Support Is Overstated." But really it is the headline of Cohn's article that is overstated. For after an interesting discussion of how election opinion polls work and agreeing with the hypothesis that Trump's national numbers are soft if looked at through the prism of repeat voters, Cohn concludes that "Over all, the data is consistent with the view that Mr. Trump’s support might be overstated by public polls. But he leads among voters who have participated in one or 12 elections. His challenge among likely voters isn’t necessarily unique. His lead might be modestly overstated, but it’s not a mirage." In other words, Trump is for real. (This is basically the gist of yesterday's frontpager by Trip Gabriel, "Test for Donald Trump: Turning Crowds Into Real Voters.")

Trump's Tuesday-night kerfuffle with Univision's Jorge Ramos offered an opening for tastemakers to cluck their tongues (see Michael Barbaro's "Testy News Conference Exchange Puts Donald Trump’s Quirks on Display"). And while this kind of public confrontation exposing Trump's pomposity might bear fruit in the future, I'm sure Trump will adapt and learn how to diffuse such standoffs.

Where Trump is vulnerable is how he has made his money. David Cay Johnston effectively skewers the Trump business model as being built on consorting with organized crime and refusing to pay subcontractors.

What will keep Trump in the contest is the public's disgust for the alternatives. In closing, keep this fact in mind from a story yesterday by Eric Lichtblau, "Bernie Sanders’s Success in Attracting Small Donors Tests Importance of ‘Super PACs’ ":

Super PACs supporting Mrs. Clinton have already raised more than $20 million, records show; on the Republican side, two super PACs backing Jeb Bush raised about $108.5 million.

Trump Sitting Pretty

I woke up last night thinking about Donald Trump's ever-present "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" cap. Trump wears it whenever he is outdoors to protect his elaborate comb-over from a troublesome gust of wind. Could Trump's pomposity bear a flapping in the breeze of a comb-over revealing the baldpate of an aged man? If Trump ends up in the White House will he shun the Rose Garden? If he goes to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns will he do so with "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" firmly secured to his head?

Then I asked myself, "Why am I thinking about this?" Though it did feel like a revelation, much other significant news is aborning. There is continued movement to jump start peace talks on Syria. Jejune Saudi defense minister Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud could be proving his naysayers wrong as the Houthis appear to be on the run in Yemen.

But the news dominating the coverage in the United States is of the 2016 presidential election still half-a-year off.

At this point I don't see how Trump can be beat. Over the weekend he released his plan to deal with immigration. It is being roundly criticized in the press. There is a particularly cogent piece, "Donald Trump’s Claims on Immigration: A Reality Check," and it is short too, in today's paper by longtime Mexico reporter Julia Preston. She lists the plan's many contradictions and failings before concluding with an acknowledgement of its political potency:

Yet among Mr. Trump’s populist proposals are some that could attract support from Americans in the beleaguered middle class. He went further than his rivals calling for changes to the temporary work visas known as H-1B, to raise the wages paid to immigrants and tighten requirements for employers to search first for Americans to fill jobs.

This is an issue that resonates with many voters across the political spectrum. The digital economy is creating pockets of amazing wealth which is not trickling down to the "soccer mom" suburbs. The go-go growth is in the urban core and the jobs appear to be going to foreigners from Indian. Trump can demonize Mexicans at the low end and Indians and Pakistanis at the high end, and he'll laugh all the way to election day.

Hillary on the other hand is not laughing. In fact, she should be crying (though Nate Silver gives her an 85% chance to win the Democratic nomination; Nate Cohn, the Gray Lady's Nate Silver simulacrum, basically agrees, without quantifying the odds).

An interesting longer story today by Amy Chozick and Eric Lichtblau, "Facing Money Gap, Hillary Clinton Slowly Warms to ‘Super PAC’ Gifts," gets at why both Silver and Cohn think that Hillary will have a tough time in the general election. The GOP is raising a lot more money in million-dollar-plus Super-PAC contributions, and this money is being used by both top-contenders like Jeb Bush and also-rans like Carly Fiorina to pummel Clinton in the here and now:

Republican contenders have used their overflowing coffers to bash one another, but the money has also helped finance months of attacks on Mrs. Clinton.

In mid-September, Right to Rise, a super PAC supporting Mr. Bush, plans to spend at least $10 million on television ads in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the group. Last month, Mr. Bush’s two PACs, which raised a record $108.5 million, reported spending $100,000 on online ads in early primary states in part opposing Mrs. Clinton.

And a super PAC supporting the Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, which recently trumpeted a “fiery new attack ad aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton,” received about $1.6 million, nearly half its funding, from a single donor: A. Jerrold Perenchio, a Los Angeles billionaire who made his money in media investments. 

Mrs. Clinton’s donors have taken notice. “Over the last two months, they’ve seen in real time what’s actually happening on the other side and the severe attacks Hillary is under,” Mr. Cecil said, “and the reality that when it comes to how campaigns are won, the ground underneath us has changed.”

Romney was a weak candidate. But what 2012 proved in terms of presidential electioneering is that if you drive up a candidate's negatives sky high early on then that candidate is most likely doomed come November. This is what Hillary is up against. Sanders is going to rough her up as well.

The Trump Boom Will Not Bust Quietly

Nate Cohn is the Nate Silver simulacrum that the Gray Lady slotted in to replace the FiveThirtyEight blog which Silver sold to ESPN in 2013. As simulacra go Cohn is a good one. Though it is hard to match up with Nate Silver, whose predictions of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections were phenomenally accurate, I have found Cohn's writing clear and his data-based assessments compelling.

For instance, his bucket of cold water on Hillary Clinton's candidacy, "Hillary Clinton Is More Vulnerable in 2016 Than You Think," is terrific, as is the wet blanket he draped over Bernie Sanders, "Why Bernie Sanders’s Momentum Is Not Built to Last."

The other day Cohn adjusted his gun-sight to Donald Trump and his boom of the last couple of weeks, "The Trump Campaign’s Turning Point."

The turning point referred to in the headline are statements that Donald Trump made on Saturday in Ames, Iowa at the socially conservative annual Family Leadership Summit. Trump questioned the heroism of longtime GOP senator and 2008 presidential standard bearer John McCain. This is how those statements were reported by the Associated Press:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is again criticizing a well-respected member of his own party.

Speaking at a conference of religious conservatives on Saturday, Trump was pressed on his recent description of Arizona Sen. John McCain as "a dummy." 

The moderator, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, described McCain as "a war hero." McCain spent more than five years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down during combat in Vietnam. 

Trump said McCain "is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured." 

Trump is among 10 GOP presidential candidates on the program for the Family Leader Summit in Ames, Iowa.

Half-an-hour later AP reported that Trump tried to walk his criticism back while other GOP presidential aspirants set up a withering crossfire:

During a news conference after his appearance, Trump did not apologize but tried to clarify his remarks: "If a person is captured, they're a hero as far as I'm concerned. I don't like the job John McCain is doing in the Senate because he is not taking care of our veterans." 

Trump said he avoided service in the Vietnam War through student deferments and a medical deferment, then said he didn't serve because "I was not a big fan of the Vietnam war." He added he wasn't a protester.

Other 2016 hopefuls were quick to attack Trump's comments. In a statement, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said the remarks make Trump "unfit to be commander-in-chief." On Twitter, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said: "After Donald Trump spends six years in a POW camp, he can weigh in on John McCain's service." Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wrote on Twitter: "Enough with the slanderous attacks. @SenJohnMcCain and all our veterans — particularly POWs have earned our respect and admiration."

Nate Cohn predicts that the Trump's swelling levels of support will now begin to deflate. He dismisses Trump's surge in the polls as nothing more than saturation media coverage combined with the overwhelming name recognition that Trump enjoys as a reality television celebrity:

Donald Trump’s surge in the polls has followed the classic pattern of a media-driven surge. Now it will most likely follow the classic pattern of a party-backed decline. 

Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War. Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments — a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust.

His support will erode as the tone of coverage shifts from publicizing his anti-establishment and anti-immigration views, which have some resonance in the party, to reflecting the chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record.

His surge in the presidential polls began on June 16 when he declared his candidacy. Announcements of that type always yield a wave of media coverage, just as they did for candidates like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. So far this year, media attention from announcements has helped the best-known candidates by an average of six percentage points, with the effect degrading steadily afterward.

***

But media-driven surges are not sustainable. Eventually, the media coverage shifts from whatever initially propelled the bounce — an announcement, a strong debate performance, a convention — toward a more serious examination of the candidate newly at the top of the polls. Some candidates can withstand this scrutiny. Most do not.

Lynn Vavreck, who contributes to The Upshot, and her fellow political scientist John Sides described the cycle of boom-bust candidacies as “discovery, scrutiny and decline” in their book “The Gamble.” Mr. Trump, who already enjoys high name recognition, may not present a typical case of “discovery,” but it’s highly unlikely he’ll avoid decline after encountering scrutiny.

Even a cursory look at Mr. Trump’s political record revealed a candidate with serious liabilities once journalists and campaigns started taking him seriously. He has donated more to Democrats than Republicans over the last decade. He has even donated to Hillary Clinton, who he has said he likes, and the Clinton Foundation. He has supported universal health care and seems to continue to do so. He has supported a $5 trillion dollar tax increase and has said he is “very pro choice,” although he has since changed his position on abortion. He is self-evidently unelectable in a general election, combining terrible poll numbers with an unpresidential persona. 

Conservative candidates and their supporters view him as a rival. They have every incentive to publicize those of his views that the G.O.P. considers heretical. More moderate and establishment-friendly Republicans oppose his statements and views on immigration. They fear that his tone will alienate Hispanic voters, who are considered essential to the party’s general election chances now and in the future. Mr. Trump’s supporters will start taking cues from the uniform opinion of their fellow partisans.

In his article Cohn quotes a piece, "Two Good Reasons Not To Take The Donald Trump ‘Surge’ Seriously," by FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten that compactly summarizes the limitations of Trump's campaign:

But the polling points to another, less sexy story: First, Republican voters don’t rate Trump as all that conservative, and second, he’s actually polling about equally well among all sections of the GOP. In Trump speak, this means he is loved universally; in reality, the broad, shallow nature of Trump’s support suggests it’s due mostly to near-universal name recognition, thanks in part to being in the news more often than the news anchors.

Trump is not conservative enough for the GOP.

While I think Cohn's analysis is on the mark there are a couple points that need to be mentioned, both of which fall under the header of "This Time There's Something Different Going On."

Point one, let's not forget Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 gubernatorial recall election victory. The liberal Schwarzenegger was able to get elected as a Republican in the deep blue state of California. He rose above a splintered field of contenders to win decisively. The analogy is not perfect but it is close enough since the national electorate is obviously more progressive than the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. Nonetheless, Trump will have to survive the GOP primary minefield, which I don't think he can do.

Which brings us to point two: Trump is not going to go quietly. The Donald will continue to toss bombs right up to the convention, where he will demand a prominent slot. I don't think he has any intention of running a third-party campaign once he fails to win the Republican nomination, but he will cause a lot of damage to the GOP -- with the party's ability to attract Latinos and independents.

Just as Bernie Sanders has little chance of winning the Democratic Party nomination and whose substantial number of supporters will be difficult to integrate back into the nominee's camp, Trump represents a similar problem for Republicans. The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be a dead heat like 2000's Bush v. Gore.