Interregnum Ends, Fall Campaign Begins

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.

The week that was expected to see the race tighten didn't. Biden leads Trump by anywhere from 7 to 10 points nationally. Fox News polls show Biden ahead by 9 in Arizona, 8 in Wisconsin and 4 in North Carolina. ⁦@AsteadWesley⁩ ⁦@anniekarni⁩ https://t.co/Eur97pRAVh

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) September 5, 2020

Harry Enten at CNN:

A new CNN/SSRS poll has former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by a 51% to 43% margin.

That 8-point margin matches a Grinnell College/Selzer & Co. poll published this week as well and is in-line with the national polling average.

What's the point: The big question coming out of the major party conventions would be if they would reset the 2020 campaign. Could Trump's efforts to refocus the campaign on crime and law and order help him close what has been a consistent deficit?

The answer seems to be a no, for the time being. While it doesn't seem that Trump's messaging on law and order has hurt him to any large degree, it's pretty clear that it hasn't helped him in any significant fashion.

...

As my colleagues Gregory Krieg, Dan Merica and Ryan Nobles noted back in June, Trump's law and order messaging harkens back to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign of trying to appeal to White voters. Just like then, protesters for civil rights have been marching in the streets. In some cases, riots have broken out.

The polls show, however, that, for a Republican, Trump is very much struggling with White voters. Trump is ahead of Biden by just 3 points in an average of live interview polls taken since the conventions. That matches the longer term trend since the beginning of the summer of Trump leading by 4 points among this group

,,,
Trump won White voters by 13 points in the final pre-election polls in 2016. Mitt Romney won them by double-digits in 2012.

In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1996 for a Republican to have done as poorly among white voters as Trump is right now.

That's the opposite of what you would expect if Trump's law and order campaign was successful at stroking White backlash.

.Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

No president has entered Labor Day weekend — the traditional kickoff of the fall campaign — as such a clear underdog since George Bush in 1992. Mr. Trump has not led in public polls in such must-win states as Florida since Mr. Biden claimed the nomination in April, and there has been little fluctuation in the race. Still, the president’s surprise win in 2016 weighs heavily in the thinking of nervous Democrats and hopeful Republicans alike.

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The best chance for Mr. Trump, Republicans say, is to drive at a singular message linking Mr. Biden to the far left.

“He has to continue focusing on the network of anti-American lawlessness,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said of Mr. Trump, urging him to “emphasize American patriotism and history versus the left’s anti-Americanism” and to “turn Biden into McGovern.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers maintain that their private surveys are more encouraging than public polling. But while Mr. Trump’s swerve toward a strident law-and-order message has helped him consolidate conservative support, his rhetoric about rioting in a handful of cities does not appear to have swayed moderates, strategists in both parties said.

That is a serious problem for the president, given the lack of significant third-party candidates in 2020, which raises the pressure on Mr. Trump to win over new voters.

My latest: The Trump campaign has canceled it's Phoenix TV ads next week -- and they may not resume until early October.https://t.co/LIvvHlF6zK

— Jim Small (@JimSmall) September 4, 2020

Buchanan

In Defying the Odds, we compare the 2016 campaign to the 1992 race, pointing out that both featured a Clinton, a Bush, and a bombastic billionaire.  But Trump not only resembled Perot in certain respects, he also drew on the same issues as Pat Buchanan.

Within his own party, Bush faced an unexpectedly strong primary challenge from columnist Pat Buchanan. After growing up in Washington, DC, earning degrees at Georgetown and Columbia, working as a White House aide in two Republican administrations, and logging many hours on the television talk-show circuit, Buchanan was yet another insider who took up outsiderism. Specifically, he became a spokesperson for a faction of conservatism that disdained internationalism and free trade, and even flirted with Holocaust denial. Bush’s support for NAFTA and Israel outraged him. “He is yesterday and we are tomorrow,” Buchanan said in his announcement speech. “He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the Old Republic. He would put American's wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.”After the Los Angeles riots, he placed much of the blame for disorder on undocumented immigrants: “foreigners are coming into this country illegally and helping to burn down one of the greatest cities in America.” His solution will sound familiar to those who saw the 2016 campaign: “If I were President, I would have the (Army) Corps of Engineers build a double-barrier fence that would keep out 95% of the illegal traffic. I think it can be done.”

Buchanan also saw the budding desperation of the white working class. In his 1992 convention address, he said:

There were the workers at the James River Paper Mill, in the frozen North Country of New Hampshire–hard, tough men, one of whom was silent, until I shook his hand. Then he looked up in my eyes and said, “Save our jobs!” There was the legal secretary at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who told me she was going to vote for me, then broke down crying, saying, “I’ve lost my job, I don’t have any money; they’re going to take away my daughter. What am I going to do?”

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The social and economic forces driving the two Americas apart had been brewing for a long time. But why did they have such impact in 2016, and not ten years earlier? One reason was the Great Recession, which slammed working-class communities, and whose effects lingered long after its official conclusion. In 2016, Pat Buchanan looked back at his 1992 race and told journalist Jeff Greenfield: “Those issues started maturing. Now we’ve lost 55,000 factories. … When those consequences came rolling in, all of a sudden you’ve got an angry country. We were out there warning what was coming.

Big Cities and Everywhere Else

Thomas Edsall in The New York Times:

Bill Bishop, co-author of the book “The Big Sort” and a founder of The Daily Yonder, makes the case that the political split in America is not an urban-rural divide. Instead, he argues, it is between the largest cities and the rest of America.

In an email, Bishop noted that

outside of cities of a million or more — and really outside of the 56 central city counties of these large metros — Democrats lose.

This applies not only to presidential races, but to the House as well. In a piece for The Daily Yonder, Bishop wrote that “Democrats don’t have a ‘rural problem.’ They have an ‘everywhere-but-big-cities problem’.” He provided data on the pattern of partisan victory in 2014 House races on a scale from super urban to very rural. Democrats won a majority of districts only in the most urban counties, while Republicans won two out of every three in very rural districts.

Bishop argued in his email to me that “the split isn’t just about politics. It’s about lifestyle and identity.” Increasingly, where you live

is tied into lifestyle and lifestyle aligns with politics. Politics, like lifestyle, is one way we construct our identities.

The accelerated shift toward urban prosperity and exurban-to-rural stagnation reinforces polarizing disagreements between city and country on matters ranging from family values to education to child rearing practices to religious faith.

The two maps below show results by county in 1992, when Bill Clinton first won the presidency, and in 2016, when Trump did. The maps demonstrate the strategic hurdles currently confronting both parties. In 1992, Bill Clinton won 1,519 counties to 1,582 carried by George H. W. Bush. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won majorities in 490 counties to Trump victories in 2622. Obama won 875 counties in 2008 and 693 in 2012.

Clinton, Then and Now

Todd S. Purdum writes at Politico:

By 2016, spurred by anger at Wall Street, and at Washington gridlock and business as usual, the Democratic Party had moved well to the left of the one Bill Clinton had inherited in 1992. And while Hillary Clinton recognized the change intellectually, she seemed unable to catch up to the practical realities of its political implications for her campaign. She embraced bold approaches on hot-button issues like immigration and gun control that would have been shocking for a Democrat in her husband’s day, and accepted what was arguably the most liberal Democratic Party platform in history, but that never seemed to be enough to satisfy younger voters, especially. “People thought she’d been conceived in Goldman Sachs’ trading desk,” says one veteran Clinton aide, noting the irony that this was millennial voters’ jaded view of a woman often seen in the 1990s as reflexively more liberal than her husband.

“Part of the problem is that there have just been lots and lots of changes in America in the past 25 years,” says Elaine Kamarck, who was a senior domestic policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There were just a lot of cultural issues that were relevant for Bill that were gone by the time Hillary’s campaign came along, because by and large they’d been resolved or defused.”

Don't Unpack

At The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein writes:

Except for 1988, when George H.W. Bush prevailed after two terms of Ronald Reagan, neither side has held the White House for more than eight consecutive years since 1952. (That’s despite the fact that Democrats since 1992 have now twice won the popular vote in three consecutive elections.)

And while Republicans are understandably euphoric that they will control the White House and both congressional chambers next year, neither party since 1968 has maintained such unified control for more than four consecutive years, a far more rapid turnover than in earlier generations. History suggests the best advice for Republicans now celebrating their unified control might be three simple words: Don’t unpack everything.

Town and Country

At The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein writes of the urban-rural political split:

Bill Clinton was the last Democratic nominee to demonstrate wide appeal across that divide: In both 1992 and 1996, he carried nearly half of America’s 3,100 counties. But since then, Democrats have retreated into the nation’s urban centers. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but carried fewer than 700 counties. In 2012, President Obama squeezed even more advantage from the biggest places: He carried 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including the District of Columbia), winning them by nearly 12 million votes combined. That allowed him to win comfortably, although he carried only about 600 of the remaining 3,000 counties, and lost them by nearly 7 million votes combined.

This year, Hillary Clinton pushed that model just past the breaking point. Pending final results, she now leads in 88 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including D.C.). Suffering a slight decline in African American support, Clinton did not quite match Obama’s vote margins in some crucial metropolitan areas, particularly Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

But overall, she delivered a dominant performance in most urban centers and many affluent white-collar suburbs. She held Trump to less than one-fourth of the vote in such mega-counties as Manhattan, Cook (Chicago), and Los Angeles; expanded on Obama’s margins in growing Sunbelt cities such as Miami, Charlotte, and Houston; and utterly routed Trump in thriving new economy centers like Austin, Silicon Valley, and Seattle. At latest tally, Clinton won the nation’s 100 largest counties by fully 12.6 million votes—an historic lead certain to widen with many more West Coast ballots yet to count.

October Surprise 1992

The FBI has revealed that it reviewing a new batch of emails that might relate to its previous investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server.  Will this story change the course of the campaign?  It is hard to tell at this moment, but there is a parallel to 1992.

In 1999, The Washington Post ran excerpts from Bob Woodward's book, Shadow:

On Friday morning, October 30, the Bush campaign daily tracking poll had the race a dead heat at 39 percent for Clinton, 39 percent for Bush and 12 percent for independent candidate Ross Perot. That afternoon, Walsh's grand jury voted the new indictment of Weinberger. The first wire story came out about 1 p.m.

Most news organizations have a strong policy against publishing or airing new issues or charges in the final days of a campaign. But the Weinberger re-indictment was an official grand jury action, and the "VP favored" was technically new. It was the first documented evidence that Bush had known the arms were a direct exchange for hostages and that Bush had been privy to the strong opposition of Weinberger and Shultz.

Clinton's running mate, Al Gore, jumped on the issue and used a Watergate analogy, calling it "a true smoking gun."

Bush was on a campaign train in Wisconsin the next day. His daily tracking poll was a shock. Clinton was still at 39 percent, but Bush had dropped 7 percentage points to 32 percent with those 7 points going straight to Perot, putting the Texas billionaire at 19. It happened to be Halloween. When Bush stopped in Chippewa Falls, a single-engine plane circled overhead with a fluttering banner streaking behind: "Iran-Contra Haunts You."

Foreshocks

Gerald F. Seib and Patrick F. O'Connor write at The Wall Street Journal:

A few Republicans saw the explosion coming long ago. As early as 2001, Tim Pawlenty, later Minnesota’s governor and a presidential candidate, warned that the GOP needed “to be the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”

Mr. Buchanan tapped into anti-immigration anger in his first presidential campaign in 1992. “We were saying: ‘This is what’s going to happen,’” Mr. Buchanan recalls. “And it happened.”

Why did so many other supposedly smart politicians not see Mr. Trump’s soldiers gathering?

“It really is the elitism,” says Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. The attitude of many in the party was “we’re smart, and they’re stupid, and we’ll just feed them abortion and guns,” he says. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
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In his speech to the Republican Convention in 1992, Mr. Buchanan challenged the party to stand up for middle-class workers still struggling to emerge from that era’s recession. He cited loggers in northern California put out of work to protect the spotted owl and Korean-American business owners who stood up to looters during the Los Angeles riots.

“They are our people, and we need to reconnect with them,” said Mr. Buchanan, a former White House aide to Messrs. Nixon and Reagan. “We need to let them know we know they’re hurting.”
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Republican leaders thought Mr. Buchanan’s failure showed the limited appeal of his message. A better explanation is that much of it was siphoned away by billionaire populist Ross Perot, who ran in 1992 as an independent and in 1996 as a third-party candidate. He got 19% of the vote in 1992.

The Changing Map, 1992-2016

Ron Brownstein writes:

Since 1968, Democratic presidential nominees have almost always run better in the big battlegrounds of the Midwest than they have in the key Sunbelt prizes.That’s been especially true since 1992, when Democrats began their current streak of winning the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections.Together, the five Rustbelt states offer 70 Electoral College votes, and the five Sunbelt prizes 72.

This year, the competitive picture looks very different, especially when considering the three Rust belt states where Trump has shown the most strength: Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.

In the averages of state polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com, Clinton is winning a greater share of the vote in all five Sunbelt battlegrounds than in either Ohio or Iowa. In the averages compiled by RealClearPolitics.com and Pollster.com, Clinton’s vote share in all five Sunbelt battlegrounds also exceed her showing in Iowa and she’s running better in all of them than in Ohio, except for Nevada.

Clinton is in a stronger position in Wisconsin. But even so, her Wisconsin numbers lag her showing in Florida and Virginia in all three averages, as well as her numbers in North Carolina and Colorado in the Pollster.com compilation. Pennsylvania and Michigan, to this point, look safer for her than the other three Rustbelt swing states (though in some cases the averages place her vote share behind some of the Sunbelt states in each of them as well).

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That new geographic pattern is rooted in the race’s defining demographic trends. In the six major national polls released just before last week’s first presidential debate, Trump led among white voters without a college education by resounding margins of 20 to 32 percentage points. But he confronted deficits of 40-50 points among non-white voters, and was facing more resistance than any previous Republican nominee in the history of modern polling among college-educated whites: five of the six surveys showed him trailing among them by margins of two-to-eleven percentage points (while he managed only to run even in the sixth.) The race is on track to produce the widest gap ever between the preferences of college-and non-college whites, while Trump may reach record lows among voters of color.

Trump and Buchanan

Jeff Greenfield writes at Politico that Trump is echoing Pat Buchanan's 1992 message:  the times are dark and the nation is under economic and cultural threat.

So, why did Trump succeed in leading a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, when Buchanan’s efforts came up so short in 1992? One overriding reason is that the times have indeed changed. When Buchanan warned of globalism and intervention, the successful Gulf War and the Christmas Day 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union weakened that argument. If there really was a “new world order,” America was unquestionably in charge. Today, with memories of the disastrous second Iraq War, China rising and Russia asserting itself again, anti-interventionism is a lot stronger argument. Immigration, too, is an issue far more powerful today. “Back then, there were maybe 3-4 million illegal immigrants,” Buchanan says. “Today, there are maybe 12 million.”

Perhaps the most startling parallel between Buchanan and Trump is the argument of bipartisan betrayal: They both used their pulpit to excoriate elites in both parties for leaving more vulnerable, working-class Americans behind. And on that front, the country has changed profoundly. The central American promise—that our children would live better than we live—has been thrown into grave doubt, at least for those who are part of “the white working class.” Some 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since the start of the millennium; incomes for the average factory worker have been stagnant for just about all of the 21st century.

“Those issues started maturing,” Buchanan now says. “Now we’ve lost 55,000 factories. … When those consequences came rolling in, all of a sudden you’ve got an angry country. We were out there warning what was coming. Now, on trade and intervention, America sees what’s come.”

But there’s one other major change that has made Trump’s message far more potent than Buchanan’s: the speed at which a powerful, even divisive idea can travel from one like-minded individual to another. “If Buchanan had had social media he might have done a lot better,” argues Ron Kaufman, a longtime ally of the Bush family, who has spent a lifetime as a Republican operative. “Back then in ’92, people wouldn’t have been hearing about it every 15 minutes. There was no Breitbart, no Politico.”

The rise of talk radio, cable networks and an online echo chamber for political discourse has changed the game for people with an outsider message, whether on the left or the right. Longtime Democratic operative Joe Trippi, who turned the Howard Dean campaign into an online fundraising behemoth in 2004, says: “I think one of the things we have all underestimated is how connected underground networks are these days—from Occupy Wall Street to white supremacists to conspiracy aficionados. … So if a Pat Buchanan came along today, it’s much easier to roll over a party.”

Jerry Brown's Un-dorsement of Hillary Clinton

An open letter from California Governor Jerry Brown:

On Tuesday, June 7, I have decided to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton because I believe this is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump.

I have closely watched the primaries and am deeply impressed with how well Bernie Sanders has done. He has driven home the message that the top one percent has unfairly captured way too much of America’s wealth, leaving the majority of people far behind. In 1992, I attempted a similar campaign.

For her part, Hillary Clinton has convincingly made the case that she knows how to get things done and has the tenacity and skill to advance the Democratic agenda. Voters have responded by giving her approximately 3 million more votes – and hundreds more delegates – than Sanders. If Clinton were to win only 10 percent of the remaining delegates – wildly improbable – she would still exceed the number needed for the nomination. In other words, Clinton’s lead is insurmountable and Democrats have shown – by millions of votes – that they want her as their nominee.

But there is more at stake than mere numbers. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has called climate change a “hoax” and said he will tear up the Paris Climate Agreement. He has promised to deport millions of immigrants and ominously suggested that other countries may need the nuclear bomb. He has also pledged to pack the Supreme Court with only those who please the extreme right.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Our country faces an existential threat from climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons. A new cold war is on the horizon. This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other. The general election has already begun. Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as Secretary of State, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country on day one.

Next January, I want to be sure that it is Hillary Clinton who takes the oath of office, not Donald Trump.

With respect,
Jerry Brown

A classic Seinfeld episode revolved around an un-vitation – one that was not meant to be taken seriously.

This is an un-dorsement,  a minimal bow to the inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton without any real pro-Clinton passion. You will not find the statement featured on his political homepage (www.jerrybrown.org).  You have to click “news” and then click “an open letter.” 

Brown has a long, unhappy history with the Clintons, dating back to his primary run against Bill Clinton in 1992. See the video here: 

Clintonism Is Dead. Long Live Clinton.

Lloyd Green writes:

Yesterday marked the end of Clintonism, circa 1992; that is, the impulse to tack to the center while paying homage to law, order, and markets. To win, Clinton had to squirm away from the 1994 crime bill, and hoped the voters would forget about the fact that her husband left the campaign trail in 1992 as Arkansas governor to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a self-lobotomized cop killer.

The world had changed, and time had moved on. Instead of Bill trashing Sister Souljah, Hillary 2.0 paid homage to Rev. Al Sharpton, singing the tax-dodging and race-baiting Reverend’s praises all with little hope of snagging his pre-primary endorsement. But then again, Clinton, unlike Sanders, always knew it was all about the “W.” For Clinton, winning was everything.

The Jewish vote took a hit on Tuesday. According to the exit polls, Jews made up just 12 percent of the electorate. Religious “nones” now outnumbered Jewish voters by more than two to one. To put things in perspective, just eight years earlier the Jews cast 17 percent of Democratic ballots, while in 1980 the figure was 38 percent. The three “Is” of New York politics—Ireland, Israel and Italy—have been supplanted by hot sauce and Hamilton.

Some things don't change.  In All  Too Human, George Stephanopoulos said:

As I wrote and rewrote, I came to see how Clinton's shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength.  

Hillary Clinton has tried to apply this lesson, at least as far as denial goes. Trump has mastered it.

Red Wall, Blue Wall

Chris Cillizza makes an uncharacteristic mistake:

Republicans are openly fretting about how Donald Trump could cost them the White House in 2016. Ditto Ted Cruz. But, the truth is that no matter who Republicans nominate — Paul Ryan! — that person faces a decidedly uphill fight to be the next president.

Why? This simple chart from the good people at the Cook Political Report(subscribe now!) tells the story ...

There are 19 states that have gone for Democrats in each of the last six elections. Those 19 states account for a total of 242 electoral votes. By contrast, there are 13 states that have voted for the Republican nominee for president in every election since 1992. Those 13 account for just 102 electoral votes.

A year ago, Nate Silver disposed of this idea:

If you were browsing campaign coverage at this point in advance of the 1992 election, you’d be reading a lot about the Republicans’ impregnable “red wall.” OK — it wouldn’t have been called the “red wall” (the association of Republicans with red states and Democrats with blue states came about more recently). But you’d have been reading a lot about Republicans’supposed “lock” on the Electoral College.

The argument was something like this. During the past six presidential elections, from 1968 through 1988, 21 states voted Republican every time. These included almost all states in the fast-growing West — most importantly, California and its trove of electoral votes — along with some wealthy, suburban states (Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia) and a couple of traditionally Republican states in New England (including Vermont).1

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Nowadays, of course, it’s become common to hear talk about the “blue wall” — the set of 18 states that, along with the District of Columbia, have voted for the Democrat in each of the most recent six presidential elections, from 1992 through 2012. Together, they represent 242 electoral votes. Many pundits, ignoring the lessons of history, claim the “blue wall” or some close variation of it puts the Democratic nominee (likely Hillary Clinton) at a substantial advantage for 2016.

The error that these commentators are making is in attributing the Democrats’ recent run of success to the Electoral College. In fact, the Electoral College has been a minor factor, if it’s helped Democrats at all, and one probably best ignored until the late stages of a close presidential race.

But wait. Wasn’t Barack Obama’s margin in the Electoral College in 2012 — 332 electoral votes, to Mitt Romney’s 206 — awfully impressive given that he won the popular vote by only a few percentage points?

Actually, it was pretty much par for the course. The nature of the Electoral College is to accentuate small margins in the popular vote; Obama’s electoral vote tallies have been fine, but historically ordinary.

From Sister Souljah to Emily Litella

Two news reports illustrate the evolution of the Democratic Party and racial politics since 1992.

Amy Chozick reports at The New York Times:

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday he regretted drowning out the chants of black protesters at a rally in Philadelphia the day before, when he issued an aggressive defense of his administration’s impact on black families. His reaction thrust a debate about the 1990s into the center of his wife’s presidential campaign, one that has focused heavily on issues of race and criminal justice.

“I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,” Mr. Clinton said Friday of the Black Lives Matter protesters who interrupted him Thursday in accusing Hillary Clinton of being responsible for black deaths. “But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.”

It was a remarkable reversal for Mr. Clinton, who has had to campaign for his wife in an era when the signature policies of his administration have been repudiated both by Mrs. Clinton and her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

None of those issues has been more central to the 2016 campaign than the 1994 crime bill, which created tougher penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, erected dozens of new prisons and deluged American cities with more police officers.

In June 1992, Gwen Ifill reported at The New York Times:

Aggressively rebutting the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Bill Clinton said today that he would not "back down on what I said" at the conference of the Rainbow Coalition last weekend about remarks attributed to a rap performer.

"I bragged on the Rainbow Coalition and its programs," Mr. Clinton told reporters as he entered a radio station, defending his speech at the conference. "I criticized divisive language by Sister Souljah. If Jesse Jackson wants to align himself with that now and claim that's the way he felt, then that's his business."

Rubio's Very Good Week

At The New York Times on Thursday, Nate Cohn wrote:

In the fourth quarter of 1991 and of 2011, Democratic and Republican officials broke toward candidates who would ultimately become their party’s nominee: Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney.

Each was imperfect, and each faced protracted resistance from dissenting factions in his party. But by late fall, the choice was clear for many party leaders. In 1991, Mario Cuomo decided not to run; in 2011, Rick Perry proved to be a disaster. And in both election cycles, no one else seemed to have the wide appeal necessary to unify the party or win the general election.

It’s still too early to say whether the Republican primary has reached a similar moment, but when analysts look back on the 2016 election, they may conclude that the G.O.P. reached a similar inflection point this week. Last week’s debate might have been a clarifying moment for party officials and donors, moving many toward deciding in favor of Marco Rubio and ultimately sending him on a path to the nomination.

Jonathan Easley reports at The Hill:

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for president on Friday, giving the Florida Republican his fourth Congressional endorsement in as many days.
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It’s the latest sign that establishment Republicans are gravitating towards Rubio.

Last week, Rubio won the backing of influential Republican billionaire Paul Singer over former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

This week, Rubio surged into the lead for Senate endorsements, picking up support from Sens. Cory Gardner (Colo.), Steve Daines (Mont.) and James Risch (Idaho). No one else has more than two senators supporting their candidacy.

Noem’s endorsement gives Rubio his 11th backer in the House, according to the FiveThirtyEight tracker.

Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo report at Politico:

Jeb Bush’s decision to attack old friend and new rival Marco Rubio is backfiring, pushing important supporters to criticize the campaign’s tactics and driving one of Florida’s top fundraisers to officially quit and signal a shift in allegiance to the senator.

“I think the world of Jeb Bush. He was a great governor of Florida and is a really good person, but the campaign has hijacked his message,” said Brian Ballard, a Tallahassee lobbyist who contributed more than $25,000 of his own money and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more for Bush’s campaign and the super PAC supporting him.
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“The campaign has become negative, one that is about attacking and trying to bring down Marco Rubio. And that doesn’t sit well—not only with me, but with anyone who knows the two,” Ballard said. “Marco’s a friend of mine. I didn’t sign up for a campaign that was going to be negative and attack a bright star of the party’s future. It doesn’t make sense. I’m over it. And I’m done.”

At Politico, Marc Caputo explains how the Rubio campaign has cleverly dispatched an issue that rivals had been hoping to use against him.

On Saturday, Rubio released his 2005 and 2006 statements that showed he only spent $65,000 on party business. That’s far less than other Republican leaders who succeeded him in the Florida House. And it’s just about half of the $117,000 Rubio himself charged on his party credit card after he became Florida House speaker in 2007-08.

The Rubio campaign’s decision to release the 2005-06 credit-card statements marks a tactical turnabout from to his 2010 Senate race, when they refused to release any documents after Crist’s campaign had them delivered to a Miami Herald reporter.

Then, the campaign correctly calculated that it could afford to take its lumps over the $117,000 in charges, about $16,000 of which Rubio said he paid because they were personal expenses. In this election, Rubio’s team had the luxury of time and knowledge that he charged only $65,000 -- about $7,200 for eight different items that Rubio deemed personal and said he paid. As the campaign began analyzing his bills and bank statements, it waited a little longer to set a trap for critics to repeat speculative exaggerations about the size and scope of his 2005-06 credit card expenses.

“He is a disaster with his credit cards,” Trump said in a speech this week. “For years, I’ve been hearing his credit card are a disaster.” The Democratic National Committee followed up with a Medium post that asked “What is Marco Rubio hiding?” And the campaign of Rubio rival and longtime friend Jeb Bush recently gave a presentation to donors in which it called the senator “a risky bet” and accused him of, among other transgressions, “misuse of state party credit cards.”

Billionaire Surges in Polls!

For some perspective on billionaire presidential candidates surging in the polls, consider The New York Times on June 11, 1992:

In a three-way general election matchup, Ross Perot has moved to a clear lead over both President Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton in the latest Gallup Poll.

In the telephone poll of 815 registered voters nationwide, conducted June 4 to 8, Mr. Perot was supported by 39 percent, Mr. Bush by 31 percent, and Mr. Clinton by 25 percent. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.

In a previous Gallup matchup in late May, Mr. Bush and Mr. Perot were tied at 35 percent each, while Mr. Clinton was supported by 25 percent.

No previous independent or third party candidate has ever placed second, much less first, in nearly six decades of Gallup's nationwide polling for President.

Another poll found a double-digit Perot lead,  37 percent to 24 percent each for Clinton and Bush.

On May 28 of the same year, USA Today reported:

Anyone doubting Ross Perot is for real can look at the polls, where he is showing electoral strength impossible to ignore. The evidence is in 25 statewide polls, representing more than 60% of the Electoral College votes:

- Perot leads in nine states having 128 electoral votes.
- President Bush leads in 15 states (190 votes). But much of that came in early polls, before Perot ran first in a Texas poll April 18. Since then he's won seven state polls to Bush's 10.
- Democrat Bill Clinton has led only at home in Arkansas, worth six electoral votes. It takes 270 to win.

Perot ended with 18.9 percent of the popular vote and zero electoral votes.

Money and the Clintons

Twenty-one years have passed since the 1992 election, in which Jerry Brown tried to make an issue of the Clintons' finances:

Many voters have no direct memory of the many ethical questions that surrounded the couple in the 1990s.  That is why Lloyd Green's Daily Beast article is important:

Put kindly, the Clintons have a tropism towards other people’s money. Put more bluntly, Hill and Bill are the Bonnie and Clyde of campaign fundraising.

Who can forget Clinton’s final-days pardon of fugitive oil trader and Scooter Libby client, the now late Marc Rich, or those Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers? In the incredulous words of DreamWorks' David Geffen, a big-time Democratic donor and former fan of the Clintons, “Marc Rich getting pardoned? An oil-profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice?”

Opposition researchers on both sides should not assume that reporters know this history.  It is quite likely that most of those covering the 2016 were in grade school when Whitewater was a top story. Peter Hamby writes:

In the summer of 2012, Reid Epstein’s editors at Politico moved him from the Romney beat to the White House. Epstein, then 33, remembers being among the oldest reporters in the press pack when he left the Romney bubble. At the White House, he was suddenly one of the youngest.

This isn’t too surprising. Since the 2004 campaign, with budgetary and deadline pressures weighing heavily on editors, news outlets have increasingly opted to send younger and more digitally savvy reporters on the road with campaigns.

The White House beat, meanwhile, is considered a “prestige” job. Editors and television bureau chiefs often put their more experienced reporters there, even though it’s a heavily controlled and sometimes too-cozy environment with very little news to sniff out. Plus, you can have children and maintain healthy personal relationships while covering the White House. The president lives in Washington, too, after all. Not so on a campaign.

Chuck Todd calls campaign coverage, with its ruthless travel schedule and ungodly morning call times, “a young man’s, a young woman’s game.”

They may know all about Twitter, but have they ever heard of the McDougals, Webster Hubbell, and the Rose Law Firm?  The challenge for oppo guys is to educate the press about such things.

The Politics of Evasion, GOP Style?

A quarter-century ago, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck helped develop the "New Democrat" philosophy that was such an asset to Bill Clinton. Drawing on that history in Democracy, they offer some advice to Republicans:

In our experience, successful reform of a political party requires a number of difficult steps: diagnosing the party’s ills; discarding backward-looking policies; restating the party’s principles in terms that attract rather than repel skeptics; and crafting proposals that address the broad population’s problems and concerns, not just those of core supporters. Reform requires, as well, an organization that serves as a focal point for reformers, helps incubate new ideas, and leads the battle for their adoption by the party. And it requires, finally, standard-bearers who understand the reform agenda and can explain it clearly to party leaders, to the rank and file, and ultimately to the entire electorate. Money, technology, and tactics matter, of course, but only within a broader reform strategy.

Judged against this template, the reform of the Republican Party is taking, at most, its first halting steps. A politics of nostalgia still attracts too many Republicans, for whom “Back to Reagan” is a mantra that soothes and cures. But we are as far away from the end of the Reagan Administration as Democrats were from FDR at the beginning of the Nixon Administration. Reaganism applied conservative principles to a specific historical situation. If Reagan reappeared today, his principles would be the same, but many of his proposals would not. As long as Republicans imagine that the party’s 1980 platform will solve either today’s public problems or their own political problems, they’ll continue to struggle.

They argue for some pretty close parallels:

• The Myth of Fundamentalism:  some Republicans think pure Reaganism is their solution, just as 1980s Democrats thought they they only had to return to pure FDR liberalism .
• The Myth of Mobilization:  some Republicans think that they only have to do better among whites, just as Democrats in the 1980s thought that they only had to mobilize minorities in greater numbers.  (Sean Trende might quibble on the data here.)
• The Myth of the Congressional Bastion: some Republicans assume that their control of the House can withstand all national tides, just as 1980s Democrats assumed that they could never lose their own majority.

They suggest that the Gerson-Wehner approach could be part of a GOP revivial.