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.

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.

Menendez is Going to Jail, Unless Hillary Rides to the Rescue

Sometimes it is hard to find a silver lining in the morning's Gray Lady. Not today. Right out on the front page is Matt Apuzzo's wonderful "Senator Robert Menendez Indicted on Corruption Charges." One can almost hear the assholes collectively puckering in Washington D.C.:

The charges revolve around Mr. Menendez’s relationship with Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon and political benefactor. Dr. Melgen resisted entreaties by the Justice Department to testify against Mr. Menendez and was ultimately charged alongside him.

Prosecutors described Mr. Menendez’s offices on Capitol Hill as a hub of corrupt dealings, a place where the senator used his chief of staff to solicit gifts from Dr. Melgen, find out what he wanted in return and make sure it got done.

The indictment also reveals how the rise of super PACs, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and subsequent legal changes, have opened a new channel for the wealthy to trade campaign cash for official favors.

Through his company, Vitreo-Retinal Consultants, Mr. Melgen directed $700,000 in corporate contributions to Majority PAC, a super PAC intended to help Democrats retain control of the Senate. Mr. Melgen instructed the group to use those contributions to aid Mr. Menendez’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Among the favors for Dr. Melgen, the department said, Mr. Menendez encouraged the Obama administration to change the Medicare reimbursement policy in a way that would make millions for the doctor. Prosecutors said he also tried to push a port security deal that Dr. Melgen was involved in, and helped the surgeon’s foreign girlfriends obtain travel visas to the United States.

A bribery charge is among the most serious accusations of corruption the federal government can make. Prosecutors often opt to file a lesser charge of accepting a gratuity, which is easier to prove. A bribe amounts to the purchase of an official act, while a gratuity is seen as a way to curry favor with powerful officials.

Mr. Menendez is the first senator to face federal bribery charges since another New Jersey Democrat, Harrison A. Williams Jr., was indicted in 1980 as part of the federal corruption investigation known as Abscam [played by Jeremy Renner in David O. Russell's American Hustle; maybe Menendez can look forward to his moment on the silver screen]. In 2002, an ethics scandal deterred Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, from a re-election bid.

To prove their case, prosecutors must show that Mr. Menendez’s actions and Dr. Melgen’s gifts were explicitly traded. The two men argue that they were longtime friends and that they exchanged gifts as part of that friendship.

“Prosecutors at the Justice Department don’t know the difference between friendship and corruption,” Mr. Menendez said on Wednesday.

The senator’s involvement in Dr. Melgen’s dispute with Medicare is the most damning element of the department’s indictment. Prosecutors cite emails showing that Mr. Menendez’s office was deeply involved in the dispute.

The DOJ indictment raises the possibility of putting the whole sordid, venal system on display. It is a pay-to-play scheme, and Menendez is a skilled, extroverted practitioner. He basically advertised his senate office as a fee-for-service enterprise, soliciting foreigners to bring him their visa difficulties. I have assumed that Menendez has been under investigation for years, if not decades -- but possibly Menendez and Torricelli morphed together in my understanding.

Now that the other shoe has dropped one wonders how long Zionist groups will continue to run their full-page ads extolling the courage and friendship of Senator Menendez.

Unless Menendez pleads out, he is going to jail. His "friendship" defense is ridiculous. Government business is not supposed to be guided by personal like or dislike. Public opinion towards the U.S. political class is at a historic nadir; the same thing goes for the ostentatiously wealthy. If the Menendez case goes to trial, a lot of bombshells are in the offing. That is why puckering beltway assholes are well-nigh audible.

During the Obama years we have seen the creation of a new system of politics. Citizens United was a knee-jerk response to Obama's successful crowdfunding during the 2008 campaign. The rich realized that their overwhelming advantage in a democratic system -- their wealth -- could be neutralized by millions of small donations made via the Internet. The plutocrats dreamed nightmares of Che Guevara riding to power on the World Wide Web.

But after Citizens United no longer is a politician with national aspirations guided primarily by the math of voting blocs. Now the most important math is found in the bottom line of donations made by the super-rich, what is publicly referred to as the "billionaire primary." Candidates trundle off to Palm Springs or Las Vegas and prostrate themselves at the feet of a David Koch or a Sheldon Adelson.

A long, contentious federal bribery trial puts this new system in the spotlight. Everyone knows it is corrupt, spotlighting it will generate calls for reform. The plutocrats would prefer not to have to deal with deflecting such calls. So this morning I am sure the conversation Menendez is having is whether to dig in and wait for a new chief executive in 2017 to spike the DOJ case -- I'm sure either Hillary or whomever the GOP nominates would be amenable -- or, after reaping as many pledges of financial consideration as he can muster, falling on his sword and pleading to a lesser charge, serving out his penalty time in a comfortable federal prison looking out on green hills.

McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission: Lifeline for the Duopoly

For an easy-to-digest synopsis of yesterday's 5-4 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision check out today's lede unsigned editorial, "The Court Follows the Money," in the Gray Lady:

As a result of Wednesday’s ruling, an individual donor will now be able to contribute as much as $3.6 million per election cycle (the sum of maximum donations to all national and state party committees and a party’s presidential and Congressional candidates). This money can then be funneled to specific campaigns through the use of joint fund-raising committees, effectively nullifying the per-candidate limit. Chief Justice Roberts blithely rejected such a scenario as “speculation,” and he ignored political reality by confining the meaning of corruption to instances of “quid pro quo,” or the direct exchange of money for political favors. 

But the interest of Congress in preventing political corruption has long been “far broader” than merely forbidding bribery, as Justice Stephen Breyer argued in dissent. It includes an interest in controlling influence over and access to politicians.

Nicholas Confessore points out in a helpful think piece, "Power Surge for Donors as Terrain Is Reshaped on Campaign Money," that the McCutcheon ruling will counteract the trend toward super PACS by pushing money back into the parties:

Donors would still be barred from giving more than $5,200 to any one candidate over the course of the 2014 campaign. But the new ruling would allow each donor to contribute that amount to as many candidates as he or she wants, freeing those with the means to pour millions of dollars into candidates and parties. 

Current rules limit each donor to a total of $74,600 worth of contributions to party committees and political action committees, and $48,600 to all federal candidates, enough to permit a donor to make the maximum $5,200 in contributions to as many as nine candidates. But when the Supreme Court decision goes into effect, a single donor will be able to contribute the maximum amount to every candidate in the country, every political action committee, and every party committee, campaign experts say. 

The ruling opens the door for each party’s establishment to reclaim some power from the super PACs and other independent spending groups that are now playing an outsize role in campaigns. Experts said the decision would permit party leaders to form joint fund-raising committees and solicit multimillion dollar checks on behalf of candidates. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, for example, could in theory approach a donor seeking to help Democrats win control of the House of Representatives, and solicit as much as $2.3 million — $5,200 for each Democratic candidate in every House race, plus a contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

A donor could also, in theory, give $5,000 per year to every political action committee currently registered with the Federal Election Committee. That would total more than $13 million, versus the $74,600 allowed under the existing aggregate cap. 

Party officials have been effectively prohibited from soliciting supersize checks since Congress moved in 2002 to ban unlimited contributions to party committees, also known as “soft money.” The prestige and financial muscle of party leaders was further eroded by the court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which led to super PACs, which could raise and spend unlimited amounts of money so long as they did not coordinate with parties or candidates. Super PACs have spent more than $700 million since that decision. 

But the ruling offers a path for party officials to re-establish themselves as kingmakers. And because senior congressional leaders often have the closest ties to big donors, the decision could give them a tool with which to discipline rank-and-file members.

So McCutcheon accomplishes two things: 1) it basically scraps all the Watergate-era Buckley limits designed to combat corruption since now the parties can once again rake in seemingly unlimited soft money contributions and then funnel this money to individual candidates, bypassing the $5,200 limit; and 2) the political parties, the duopoly, increasingly showing signs of obsolescence with the rise of super PACS and groups like the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity, can move back to center stage.

McCutcheon is thus both radical and conservative; it kills off for good the campaign finance reform of the Hippie era while insuring that the Republican and Democratic party system stays in place. In other words, it does not look like we're headed for duopoly disintegration in the near term replaced by a brave new world of 501(c)(4)'s and new political configurations. Huge infusions of cash will keep the cadavers animated for all election cycles on the horizon.

Couple McCutcheon and Citizens United with the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder backdoor scrapping of the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and you have the outlines of a system where the rich may exercise the franchise but the poor, the uneducated cannot.

Neo-Dixiecrat Push to Scrap Section 5

This is the key paragraph from Adam Liptak's story today about Wednesday's arguments on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the Supreme Court:

Should the court strike down the law’s central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states [now covered by a federal preclearance requirement] to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.

The conservative justices indicated by their questions that they were in favor of scrapping Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The problem that they're grappling with is how to turn a neo-Dixiecrat GOP into a majority party. Their first bold move was the fast-tracked Citizens United ruling equating money with speech. Conservatives were frightened by the amount of money Obama raised in small amounts online during the 2008 campaign. But the Super PACs, which resulted from Citizens United, spectacularly underperformed for the neo-Dixiecrat GOP in 2012. Large swaths of the citizenry are immune to attack ads. Certain kinds of people have to be kept from voting. There are various ways to do this -- identification requirements, moving polling locations and limiting their hours of operation -- which were tried by Republican-controlled states. But the Department of Justice intervened in those states covered by Section 5 and told them to stop. This from today's unsigned editorial in the New York Times, Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote:

Congress found that, in general, the problems of voting discrimination were much worse in the covered areas than elsewhere in the United States. A recent study by Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology confirms that: “five-sixths or more of the cases of proven election discrimination from 1957 through 2013 have taken place in jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight.” The Justice Department used Section 5 last year to block and change discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, for example, and to block a discriminatory Florida law that limited early voting.

If the conservative majority votes in a bloc to strike down Section 5 it would do so on the basis that the formula used to determine covered jurisdictions is out of date. Congress would be tasked with updating the formula. This, as Liptak points out, will not happen; hence, a de facto ban:

Should the court strike down the coverage formula when it decides the case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But Congress seems unlikely to be able to agree on a new set of criteria, given the current partisan divide, meaning the part of the law requiring federal pre-approval of election changes would effectively disappear.

This is Republican road map for neo-Dixiecrat domination: massive amounts of corporate cash, a gerrymandered permanent majority in Congress and restrictive voting laws.

The Gerrymandered House of Representatives

There is an excellent unsigned editorial in today's New York Times on the effort underway in Michigan's Republican-controlled legislature to pass right to work.  Parts of the editorial could have come from Workers World, a socialist weekly I've read for many years: "Concern for the rights of individual workers, of course, is not the real reason business is pushing so hard for these laws. Gutting unions is the fastest way to achieve lower wages and higher profits."

According to Monica Davey's front page story the pivotal figure in this fight is Michigan's Republican Governor Rick Snyder who originally opposed right-to-work legislation as divisive but then suddenly changed his mind and requested last week that the legislature give him something to sign in a matter of days.  UAW's Bob King is quoted as saying that Snyder succumbed to Rightist pressure groups.  One can almost smell the sulfur belching from a Georgia Pacific smokestack.

Equally dispiriting in today's paper is Jonathan Weisman's story about GOP anti-tax purity in the House, which is based on rigorous gerrymandering.  This is the second time in as many weeks that Weisman has addressed the issue of how it is that Republicans in the House can be so out of touch with the national sentiment on raising taxes on the rich.  Polls consistently show that a supermajority want the wealthy to pay more and Social Security left alone, the exact opposite of the House majority.  How can this be?  Of the two houses of the United States Congress isn't the House of Representatives supposed to be the people's house?

House Democratic candidates won about 50.5 percent of the national vote in November, but took just 46 percent of the seats. In the last 40 years, only one other time — 1996 — did the party that won the majority of the votes end up with a minority of the House, said Nicholas Goedert, a political science researcher at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri. Democrats actually gained two seats in the Senate.

Political scientists point to two factors influencing this divergence: a redistricting process dominated by Republican legislatures, and even more so, the concentration of Democratic voters in urban enclaves.

Gerrymandering did matter. In nine states redistricted by Republicans, the Democratic vote share was well above the percentage of seats won, Mr. Goedert said. For instance, in North Carolina, Democratic House candidates won 51 percent of the vote but only 27 percent of the House seats. Where Democrats drew the lines, in Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts, Democratic House delegations fared better than their vote totals, but not as drastically. This points to an inherent advantage for Republicans. In closely contested years, like 2012, the concentration of Democratic voters in cities has put them at a loss — and given House Republicans little reason to fear national opinion.

In other words, the House has become another Senate — a block on the popular will.  With Citizens United the law of the land, a rural congressional district is chump change for a Super PAC.  I imagine the GOP can mantain its 30-seat House majority for quite a while.  Barring a radical shift our future seems certain to be some form of plutocratic dystopia.