The Party in the Electorate Decides

 Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended.

Seth Masket at Politico:

As I surveyed GOP county chairs across the country, I thought they would provide an early signal as to where the Republican nomination would end up. County chairs are influential in local GOP circles, party leaders who can offer the kind of endorsements that candidates are eager to collect. They’re also still close to the rank-and-file grassroots, and their shifts, I imagined, would signal where the rest of the party was going.

But instead, I found that the county chairs didn’t lead their voters. For the most part, they followed them — to Donald Trump.

Last February, the county chairs were less supportive of Trump than Republican primary voters as a whole. Yet as time went on, and Trump consolidated support among rank-and-file voters, the chairs fell in line. It’s a reflection of the state of the GOP that has existed since 2016 when Trump first snatched the nomination away from the establishment and took over the Republican Party.

In the pre-Trump era, GOP leaders clearly played more of a role in steering the direction of the party. The 2012 campaign is instructive: Many different candidates were briefly the favorites of rank-and-file Republican voters, from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum. But throughout the cycle, party elites’ money and endorsements stayed focused on Mitt Romney, and that’s who got the nomination. This year’s ongoing survey of county chairs illustrates how Republican elites are now more responsive to the grassroots rather than the other way around — either because they lack the interest or the ability to do anything else.

DGA Plagiarizes McCaskill (and She's Probably Fine with That)

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Natasha Korecki and Daniel Strauss at Politico:

The Democratic Governors Association is planning to launch an ad calling Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's right-wing challenger "too conservative" for the state — an apparent move to boost state Rep. Jeanne Ives in her campaign's final days.

The ad, which is slated to begin airing on broadcast and cable TV in the state Friday, begins with a question: "When is a conservative leader too conservative for Illinois?"

But it quickly evolves into a list of Ives' conservative positions, presenting them in a way that could be appealing to some Republican primary voters.

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The strategy is more reminiscent of the Missouri Senate primary in 2012, when Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill paid for ads calling then-Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) — whom she viewed as her weakest possible opponent — "too conservative" for the state.

"Using the guidance of my campaign staff and consultants, we came up with the idea for a 'dog whistle' ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people," McCaskill wrote later in her memoir. "I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad — and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad."

 

Russia Sought to Divide Us

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Adam Entous, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report at WP:

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

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While Facebook has played down the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

According to Yu, “$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful. When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”

68 Percent

Ben Ginsberg writes at Politico:

The 2012 presidential election was the first time the new rules took effect, and they dramatically prolonged the primary season. In every election since 1996, the GOP had settled on a clear nominee in March—as early as March 4, in McCain’s case. Although Mitt Romney did as well as any of his predecessors early on in the 2012 primary—effectively tying Iowa, winning New Hampshire, losing South Carolina, and then winning Florida and Nevada—he didn’t have enough delegates to secure the nomination until April 24, after 41 states had voted. Critics blamed Romney’s long slog on weakness as a candidate, but the changes in the primary calendar certainly played a major role.

The 2016 rules are much the same as the ones that dragged out Romney’s victory, but the circumstances of the race all point to a longer, harder fight. Traditionally, the Republican nominee is known when more than 68 percent of the delegates have been chosen, which won’t happen until April 19 this year. On top of that, the race itself is far more complex than it was in 2012: Romney’s anti-establishment challengers petered out relatively quickly, while the two candidates currently leading the polls this year—Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—are themselves anti-establishment candidates, and are continuing to gain momentum just as the voting season begins.
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June 7: The Final 303
5 states; 303 delegates chosen, 100 percent of the total cumulatively

History suggests that these final five states will be anti-climatic. But if the outcome remains unsettled, the survivors will have to navigate California’s massive 172-delegate haul, which awards three for each of the 53 congressional districts, with only 13 for the statewide winner. Like Bush’s Florida and Kasich’s Ohio, Christie’s New Jersey is a true statewide primary, awarding its winner all 51 delegates.

At this point, the remaining candidates will also need to step up their efforts to win over the Republican version of super-delegates—the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, three each from the 56 states and territories. They are the convention’s only guaranteed delegates. While some states bind their RNC members to vote for their statewide winner, no delegates are bound to a candidate for votes on the convention rules, credentials and platform committees. Since RNC members tend to disproportionally end up on these committees, look for the candidates to court them.

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.”

Will Recent Patterns Hold?

Michael Barone writes that recent elections have occurred within a very narrow range:

Some pollsters report an increasing percentage of voters identifying as independents. But fewer and fewer Americans vote that way. Straight-ticket voting, increasingly rare from the 1960s-1980s, has become more common today. In 2012, only 26 of the 435 House districts voted for a presidential candidate of one party and a House member of the other, the lowest number since 1920.

Presidential voting has become more predictable as well. Only three of the 50 states (Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire) voted for different parties' candidates in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Only two states (Indiana and North Carolina) voted for different parties' candidates in 2008 and 2012. You have to go back to the 1880s to find such partisan continuity.

A bigger swing in presidential voting occurred between 2004-08. But even then, only nine of the 50 states switched parties, and six of those had been carried only narrowly, with 50-52 percent of the vote, by George W. Bush. Of the other three, Indiana switched back to solidly Republican in 2012, North Carolina moved narrowly from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney and Virginia has, perhaps implausibly, become the national bellwether, with its percentages for the candidates matching national percentages more closely than any other state.

There is a big "however."

But what if the irresistible force scrambles the political map? This has always happened, sooner or later, in American politics. It has often been sparked by the rise of a disruptive candidate, running as an independent or as the nominee of a major party. Think Ross Perot, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Abraham Lincoln. A disruptive candidate raises new issues, breaks across old party lines, brings new voters into the electorate.

Game Changers! Defining Moments!

Nate Silver sensibly cautions against breathless media coverage:

There were 68 purported “game changers” in the 2012 general election, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. But for the political observer trying to sift faux game changers from genuine twists in the campaign, the primaries present a couple of additional complications.

First, there are far more opportunities to be “surprised” in the primaries. Let’s start with the most basic stuff. In a nomination race, there might be a dozen or more candidates, instead of just two. And states vote one at a time, instead of all at once.

Furthermore, in a nomination race, there is an abundance of metrics by which you might judge the campaigns: national polls, Iowa polls, New Hampshire polls, favorability ratings, endorsements, fundraising, staffing, even crowd sizes and yard signs. Eventually, we’ll also be able to look at delegates, which can be counted in many different ways. For any of these metrics, you can report on the level of support (“Hillary Clinton is polling at 48 percent”), the trend (“she’s lost 4 percentage points since last month”), or even the second derivative (“she’s losing ground, but not as quickly as before”). Multiply 23 candidates3 by 10 metrics by three ways of reporting on those metrics, and you have 690 opportunities to be “surprised” at any given time.

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None of this is to imply that nominations are all that easy to forecast. And some things this year have been genuinely surprising. In particular, that there are 17 Republican candidates, including a dozen or so who have traditional credentials for the White House, is unprecedented. If you want to develop a theory about how “this time is different,” figuring out how to explain the size of the Republican field (and how it might affect the race) seems like a good starting point.

Here is another difference:  a presidential race costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and very, very few people can pay for one out of pocket. Trump is worth about $4 billion.  Although he is "merely" the 405th richest person in the world,he could meet the cover charge.  It is highly unusual for such a person to seek a presidential nomination. Mitt Romney and Steve Forbes are both wealthy, but neither is in the billionaire range -- and neither could have afforded to pay his own way through the November election.  Perot is a billionaire but he ran as an independent.  One has to go back to Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 to find a nomination candidate in Trump's league -- and Rocky ran in the pre-reform era.

Why the paucity of billionaire contenders?  For starters, there aren't that many billionaires:  only about 536 in the United States, most of whom have no political ambitions.  They play more as funders than candidates.

Demographics and the Vote: A Calculator

At RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende and David Byler have a vote calculator:“Demographics and the 2016 Election Scenarios."

The key to operating the tool is the dashboard on top. It defaults to 2012 levels of turnout and support, by racial/ethnic group. Note that we’ve combined “Asian” and “Other,” which was necessitated by the different datasets we’ve used. You’ll also notice that the Democratic lead using the default numbers is about six-tenths of a point larger than the actual result was in 2012; this is demographic change at work.

The left column allows you to adjust the vote share that Republicans win of the various groups, while the right column allows you to adjust turnout by group. For reference, we’ve included a chart after the map that provides turnout and vote shares for the various racial/ethnic groups over time.

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First, note the limited electoral impact of Hispanic voters. All other things being equal, Republicans would have to fall to 8 percent of the Hispanic vote before another state flips to the Democrats (they would lose the popular vote by almost 10 points in this scenario). For all the talk of Texas potentially voting Democrat, that doesn’t happen until Republicans drop to 5 percent of the Hispanic vote.
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Second, note the impact of a potential reversion to mean in vote share and turnout among African-American voters. While Republicans won only 4 percent of the black vote in 2008 and 6 percent in 2012, the typical Republican vote share is between 9 and 11 percent. Note also that, historically, African-American participation has lagged white participation by about six percentage points: Black participation lagged white participation by five points in 2000 and 2010, by six points in 1998, 2002, and 2014, and seven points in 2004. The gap was 11 points in 2006.
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Third, we note that Republicans don’t have to put up a historically good performance among minority groups to win the election. Take the 2014 exit polls. If Republicans win demographic groups at the rates they did in that election, they would win the popular vote by around three points, and carry the Electoral College, 295-243. In this scenario, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wisconsin vote for the Democratic candidate by three points or less, while Colorado and Pennsylvania for the Republican candidate by three points or less.
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Finally, this model does illustrate the importance of demographic change. If you take 2012 levels of turnout, and insert Barack Obama’s vote shares among different groups from 2008, his seven-point victory increases to nine points. Of course, just as it isn’t clear that Republicans can easily return to 10 percent of the vote among African-Americans, it likewise isn’t clear that Democrats can easily win 44 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote anytime soon. But it is nevertheless a nice illustration of the changes that really are occurring in this country, even if the rapidity with which those changes are occurring is often exaggerated.

A Case for Super PACs

Josh Kraushaar writes at National Journal:

But for all the fretting, the fact that it takes fewer donors to sustain a presidential campaign is healthy for democracy because it makes it easier for underdogs to compete. The most important consequence of super PACs is that they lower the barrier to entry, not that they give the wealthiest candidate an insurmountable advantage.

The paradox of this presidential election is that despite the record amount of money that will be poured into the race over the next 18 months, fundraising actually will matter less than in recent presidential campaigns, and the value of retail political talent will be at a premium. Each individual donation matters less when the pot is so large and nearly every viable candidate boasts a number of super-donors, meaning no one uber-wealthy donor can reshape the race in his or her image.

There's massive inflation taking place in the world of campaign finance. The value of a buck—or a million of them—isn't what it used to be. What's most important is the number of candidates that can reach a certain financial level to compete in the early states. Simply racking up eye-popping fundraising numbers isn't as important; there's a diminishing law of return past a certain dollar amount.

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"It used to be you had to do all this laborious fundraising, one fundraiser at a time, and you had to do that a lot. You had to go to a million of these agonizing rubber chicken dinners," said Republican strategist Rick Wilson. "Now you just have to build a relationship with a handful of multimillionaires."

Just look at how the current, crowded Republican primary is already playing out. When Jeb Bush entered the race, the early thinking was that his fundraising ability and connection to lifelong Bush donors would grant him frontrunner status. At the least, his stature in Florida would block the path of his in-state Republican rival, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. But in practice, Rubio plowed ahead with his own presidential campaign, and is securing support from his own group of wealthy donors, including Miami businessman Norman Braman and,potentially, Sheldon Adelson. Despite the shock-and-awe efforts from Jebworld, Rubio leads his mentor in the latest two national GOP primary polls.

Reid: The End Justifies the Means

In his book The Good Fight, Harry Reid wrote:  "No amount of spin will make a falsehood the truth."

Chris Cillizza writes:

One of the more outlandish moments of the 2012 campaign came when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went to the floor of the world's greatest deliberative body and accused GOP nominee Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes at all for the past 10 years. Reid's evidence? Someone had told him. (That "someone" is alleged to be Jon Huntsman, father of the former Utah governor. Huntsman denies involvement.)

Reid's claim, which seemed outrageous on its face, was widely dismissed by fact-checkers. .

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And yet, the clip above shows Reid, in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, not only refusing to apologize for the claim but defending it — in a very weird way.

"Romney didn't win, did he?" Reid said in response to Bash's question of whether he regretted what he had said about Romney.

Think about that logic for a minute. What Reid is saying is that it's entirely immaterial whether what he said about Romney and his taxes was true. All that mattered was that Romney didn't win.

Super PACs and Candidates: Why They're Taking Their Time with Declarations

Matea Gold writes at The Washington Post:

In the last presidential contest, super PACs were an exotic add-on for most candidates. This time, they are the first priority.

Already, operatives with close ties to eight likely White House contenders have launched political committees that can accept unlimited donations — before any of them has even declared their candidacy. The latest, a super PAC called America Leads that plans to support Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, was announced Thursday.

The goal is simple: Potential candidates want to help their super PAC allies raise as much money as possible now, before their official campaigns start. That’s because once they announce their bids, federal rules require them to keep their distance.

Official candidates can still appear at super PAC fundraisers, but they cannot ask donors to give more than $5,000. And they cannot share inside strategic information with those running the group.

“Once someone becomes a candidate, there will be some very important guardrails you have to abide by,” said Michael E. Toner, a Republican campaign finance attorney who served on the Federal Election Commission.

But for now, there are few guardrails for most of the 2016 hopefuls. That’s why former Florida governor Jeb Bush is headlining $100,000-a-head fundraisers for a super PAC already ballooning with tens of millions of dollars in donations. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s political committee is soliciting corporate money and six-figure checks. And on Monday in New York, former New York governor George Pataki was the guest of honor at a fundraiser for his super PAC at a private Manhattan club, where co-chairs were asked to contribute $250,000 each.

Also at the Post, Dan Balz writes:

It’s widely believed that super PACs must operate with complete independence from a candidate’s campaign. But the walls between them are quite porous. An official candidate’s campaign team cannot consult and coordinate how his or her super PAC spends its money. Nor can it share strategic information. Candidates can help to raise that money, with some restrictions.

If no one is a declared candidate, as is the case today, the rules are even looser. That is one reason that so many politicians this year are not declaring candidacies yet, even if they walk and talk like candidates. Instead, they are spending considerable time lining up those super PAC angels, courting them with detailed descriptions of their paths to victory and directly asking them for huge amounts of money.

Romney and Rubio

Each campaign sets the table for the next.  At The Washington Post, Robert Costa and Philip Rucker report:

Sen. Marco Rubio has been cultivating a relationship with Mitt Romney and his intimates, landing some of the 2012 Republican nominee’s top advisers and donors and persistently courting others as he readies an expected 2016 presidential campaign.
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Some Romney loyalists harbor bad feelings about several candidates. Privately, they say Bush was not as active in his support as they expected in 2012 and that they think he tried to muscle Romney out of the 2016 race in January.

They hold a grudge against Walker for sharply criticizing Romney in his 2013 book, “Unintimidated,” for doing “a lousy job” connecting with voters. And many Romney insiders were steamed at Christie for his high-profile embrace of President Obama, after Hurricane Sandy devastated the Jersey Shore in the final week of the campaign.

By contrast, Romney’s allies almost universally praise Rubio, who was vetted as a possible vice-presidential pick and worked on Romney’s behalf during the campaign. They singled out his prime-time speech — introducing Romney — at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Chris Christie and Rand Paul Make Campaign Stops in Crazytown

Vaccines made a brief appearance in the 2012 campaign.  The issue is back.  Like Michele Bachmann before them, Chris Christie and Rand Paul have made campaign stops in Crazytown.

CROSS-POSTED FROM AUTISM POLICY AND POLITICS:

The New York Times reports:

Gov. Chris Christie’s trade mission to London was suddenly overshadowed on Monday after he was quoted as saying that parents “need to have some measure of choice” about vaccinating their children against measles. The New Jersey governor, who is trying to establish his credibility among conservatives as he weighs a run for the Republican nomination in 2016, later tried to temper his response. His office released a statement clarifying that “with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”

 Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a physician, was less equivocal, telling the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that parents should absolutely have a say in whether to vaccinate their children for measles.

“While I think it’s a good idea to take the vaccine, I think that’s a personal decision for individuals,” he said, recalling his irritation at doctors who tried to press him to vaccinate his own children. He eventually did, he said, but spaced out the vaccinations over a period of time.

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Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”

Nia-Malika Henderson reports at The Washington Post:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) both said Monday that they favor "choice" when it comes to whether parents get their kids vaccinated. This was seen by the Democratic National Committee as "kowtowing to the fringe rhetoric of the anti-vaccination movement."

"Chris Christie isn't a scientist. He isn't a doctor. And he sure as heck isn't a leader," DNC spokesman Mo Elleithee said. "If his campaign is going to be about kissing up to the radical, conspiracy theory base that’s wagging the dog of today’s Republican Party, that’s up to him and his cracker-jack team."

Here are some Democratic figures who might want to have a word with the DNC:

• Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
• Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Andrew Kaczynski reports at Buzzfeed:

For more than two decades, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was a member of a group, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, that advocated a link between vaccinations and autism, among other conspiracy theories.

The AAPS, as Kentucky’s Courier-Journal noted in a 2010 article on Paul’s association with it, opposes mandatory vaccinations and promoted discredited studies, which linked the vaccine-component thimerosal to autism in children.

“Mandatory vaccines violate the medical ethic of informed consent. A case could also be made that mandates for vaccines by school districts and legislatures is the de facto practice of medicine without a license,” the group said in a fact-check.

Paul’s adviser, Doug Stafford, told BuzzFeed News he didn’t know if Paul was still a member of the group but that he joined because it was a group of pro-life doctors. He said Paul does not endorse all the group’s views.

Jane Orient, who handles media for AAPS, said she did not believe Paul had renewed his membership.

Blue State Influence on GOP Nominations

At The New York Times, Nate Cohn makes a very important point about the Republican nomination process: delegate allocation. Although red states get bonus delegates, blue states still maintain a substantial share of the total, simply by virtue of population.

Overall, 59 percent of Romney voters in the Republican primaries lived in the states carried by President Obama. Those states hold 50 percent of the delegates to the Republican National Convention, even though they contain just 19 percent of Republican senators. Just 11 percent of House Republicans hail from districts that voted for President Obama.

For all the legitimate attention that will be given to questions about whether an establishment favorite like Mr. Bush can win over deeply conservative voters, there are just as many questions about which conservative candidate can win over blue-state Republicans. Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney won every blue-state primary in 2008 and 2012, making it all but impossible for their more conservative challengers to win the nomination.

“There’s no question the presidential trail goes through places that congressional Republicans don’t always have to go,” said Ari Fleischer, the first White House press secretary for George W. Bush, the last Republican to win the party’s nomination largely because of strength in red-state primaries. Mr. Bush struggled in blue states, losing early primaries in New Hampshire and Michigan, but still secured the nomination.

Romney Out

Mitt Romney announced yesterday that he won't run after all.  At Bloomberg, Mark Halperin offers some intriguing, if vaguely sourced, observations:

People close to the former governor say he believed he would beat Hillary Clinton in a general election matchup if the election were held today. But, like many election watchers, Romney anticipates a vicious Republican nomination fight that will damage and deplete the ultimate winner, while Clinton, virtually unchallenged for her party’s nomination, will be luxuriantly free to squirrel away hundreds of millions of election dollars and step into the general arena, rich and refreshed, against a shattered GOP nominee.

In public, Romney says nice things about Bush...

But those familiar with Romney’s thinking as he's been contemplating a run and over the years say that he has held a jaundiced view of the former Florida governor dating all the way back to his handling of the Terri Schiavo case, and has come to see Bush as a non-entity in the 2016 nomination contest. Romney is said to see Bush as a small-time businessman whose financial transactions would nonetheless be fodder for the Democrats and as terminally weighed down with voters across the board based on his family name. Romney also doesn’t think much of Bush’s political skills (a view mocked by Bush’s camp, who say Romney is nowhere near Bush’s league as a campaigner). Romney also considers Bush the national Republican figure who was the least helpful to him during his last run for the White House, a position that has darkened Ann Romney’s view of Bush as well.

Nate Cohn writes at The New York Times:

In renouncing a new run for president Friday, Mitt Romney becomes the first big casualty of the invisible primary — the behind-the-scenes competition for donors, endorsements and campaign operatives.
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It is now clear that Mr. Bush, despite his weaknesses, has attracted much of the support that Mr. Romney wanted. The highest-profile example is David Kochel, a former Romney official who was selected Thursday as Mr. Bush’s national campaign manager. My guess is that many more will follow.
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The candidate most obviously hurt by Mr. Romney’s withdrawal is Rand Paul, who was probably counting on a fairly divided field in New Hampshire to win an early primary. It will be much harder to win New Hampshire with less than about 30 percent of the vote — something Mr. Paul could feasibly pull off.

Rebecca Ballhuas, Heather Haddon and Josh Dawsey report at The Wall Street Journal:

“It would be such a tough thing to do to tell either one of them ’no,’ ” said Barry Wynn, a top fundraiser for Mr. Romney in 2012 and for former President George W. Bush. “I don’t know what I would have done. This would have been a very difficult decision to make.”

Mr. Wynn said he now plans to throw his support behind Mr. Bush.

His decision echoes the choice many donors are making in the wake of Friday’s news. Dirk van Dongen, who raised nearly $1.5 million for Mr. Romney’s campaign in 2012, said the Republican fundraisers he had spoken with in recent weeks were conflicted over backing Mr. Romney or Mr. Bush. “Some of them said, ‘Hey, I’d be with Jeb Bush except for the fact that I need to know what Mitt Romney is going to do.’"

Following Friday’s announcement, Mr. van Dongen said, “presumably those people will now sign onto the Bush initiative.”

“It simplifies the calculation,” added Mr. van Dongen, who said he committed to back Mr. Bush even before Mr. Romney said he was considering a bid.

GOP Ambivalence About Romney

Jonathan Martin reports at The New York Times:

Mr. Romney’s indication in New York last week that he may run in 2016 has set off excitement among his loyalists in the Republican donor class and assurances from his consultants that he can bring a different dimension to the campaign this time.

But interviews with more than two dozen Republican activists, elected officials and contributors around the country reveal little appetite for another Romney candidacy. Beyond his enthusiasts — a formidable constituency given that many are donors — opinions range from indifference to openly hostility.

Some party leaders are still angry about the former venture capitalist’s struggles to fend off the inevitable attacks on his business background, his awkward demeanor, and his inability to connect with working-class and minority voters. While political circumstances change between campaign cycles, Mr. Romney’s vulnerabilities, they say, are a constant.

“He got defined early, after he got through the nomination process, and they spent a lot of money to define him,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, who praised Mr. Romney’s passion and sense of purpose. “And those issues are still there. That doesn’t change, and that narrative is still out there.”

Nearly without fail, Republicans call Mr. Romney a decent man, and in public they prefer to speak delicately about him. But beyond the ritual accolades there is an unmistakable weariness, and in private, their criticism of him can be fierce.

Romney's Oppo Box

At NRO, Joel Gehrke notes:

Democratic opposition researchers scurrying to unearth the sins of potential Republican presidential candidates can rest easy: GOP operatives, especially on Mitt Romney’s team, have already done a lot of the work.

“There’s an awful lot of oppo sitting in Mitt Romney’s inbox,” says Rick Wilson, a Florida Republican with ties to Senator Marco Rubio and former governor Jeb Bush.

And that opposition research came from the candidates themselves as they divulged a great deal of personal information to Romney and his top campaign aides during the vice-presidential vetting process in 2012. Those candidates, many of them too new to federal office to run for president at the time, now stand as some of the most formidable competitors for the Republican nomination in 2016. If Romney decides to run, he’ll have an exhaustive understanding of his potential rivals’ weaknesses. If he decides not to run — Jeb Bush’s avowed interest diminishes the likelihood that Romney will try again — rival consultants think his aides might take that information to other campaigns.

...
Some Republican consultants simply don’t believe the Romney team’s claims that the files have been destroyed. “Yeah, bulls***, they’re sitting somewhere,” says one GOP operative, who notes that Romney’s vetters produced “very detailed” reports on the weaknesses of the governor’s potential running mates.

Indeed, as Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King's Men:

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the dark path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

And that is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth.

How Many Romney Staffers Did It Take to Send a Tweet? Twenty-Two. No Joke.

At New Media and Society, Daniel Kreiss has an article titled Seizing the Moment: The
Presidential Campaigns’ Use of Twitter During the 2012 Electoral Cycle"

The abstract:

Drawing on interviews with staffers from the 2012 Obama and Romney presidential campaigns and qualitative content analysis of their Twitter feeds, this article provides the first inside look at how staffers used the platform to influence the agendas and frames of professional journalists, as well as appeal to strong supporters. These campaigns sought to influence journalists in direct and indirect ways, and planned their strategic communication efforts around political events such as debates well in advance. Despite these similarities, staffers cite that Obama’s campaign had much greater ability to respond in real time to unfolding commentary around political events given an organizational structure that provided digital staffers with a high degree of autonomy. After analyzing the ways staffers discuss effective communication on the platform, this article argues that at extraordinary moments campaigns can exercise what Isaac Reed calls “performative power,” influence over other actors’ definitions of the situation and  their consequent actions through well-timed, resonant, and rhetorically effective  communicative action and interaction.

From the article:

The Romney campaign, by contrast, was organized very differently. The digital
department had a seat at the senior staff table, at the same level as political, policy,
operations, and finance. However, in contrast to the Obama campaign, Romney’s digitalteam had to go through an extensive vetting process for all of its public communications,meaning that the temporal workflow of the campaign did not match the speed of social media. As Caitlin Checkett (2014, personal communication), the campaign’s digital integration director, describes,

So whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone for approval. Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it. … The digital team unfortunately did not have the opportunity to think of things on their own and post them. … The downfall of that of course is as fast as we are moving it can take a little bit of time to get that approval to happen.

Zac Moffatt (2014, personal communication), Romney’s digital director, went so far
as to describe the campaign as having “the best tweets ever written by 17 people … It
was the best they all could agree on every single time.” A number of staffers on the
Romney campaign cite that while the initial challenge of the campaign was resources
given an extended primary, in the long run it was the lack of organizational autonomy
that undermined digital efforts on behalf of the candidate. Without a large staff during the primaries, the challenge was producing the various types of rich digital content the
Obama campaign was producing (such as interviews with field volunteers and staffers). But the broader issue of the approval process meant that by the end of the campaign, even when it had staffed up considerably, staffers were often repackaging press releases across platforms because everyone knew they were approved. As Checkett (2014, personal communication) describes,

So you get into the cycle where a press release is sent to us, it is something that we can add to the site, you can pull a Facebook message from that, some Twitter copy, and you don’t have to go through the approval process because it was already approved. So I felt like that was a huge problem because of course people don’t want to go to your website and read press releases and we knew that.

Recycling an Ad Theme

At Vox, Andrew Prokop notes a new ad from Americans for Shared Prosperity.

 

In After Hope and Change, we discuss the potential candidacy of Mitch Daniels, who eventually opted out of the 2012 race.  The ad above is very, very similar to a 2011 spot by a student group supporting Daniels:

Primary Turnout in California

PPIC reports:

In the first test of California’s top-two primary in 2012, the new system failed to produce the increase in voter turnout that many had hoped for. But it did appear to encourage participation of independent voters. Under the new system independents are no longer required to take the extra step of requesting a ballot with all legislative and congressional contests on it. As a result, more independents appear to have voted in these primary races than they had under the old system.

These are among the key findings of a report released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

One of the goals of the top-two primary is to get more voters to the polls, but turnout in the 2012 California primary was the lowest of any presidential primary in 90 years. This was at least partly because the races for president and U.S. Senate were low key. But the result raised questions about turnout in primaries generally and about the impact of the new top-two system, in which voters can vote for any candidate from any party and the two top vote-getters—regardless of party—compete in the general election.

"Reform efforts to increase turnout may not prove particularly effective, but the top-two primary does appear to have already encouraged more independents to vote in legislative and congressional contests,” said Eric McGhee, PPIC research fellow and author of the report.

The shift to the top two has added new urgency to the question of who votes in the primary and who doesn’t. The PPIC report finds that California’s primary electorate is older, less likely to be Latino or Asian American, and typically more Republican than the electorate in the general election. The partisan differences mattered little in the old system because every party that ran at least one candidate in the primary would be assured a place on the fall ballot.

Now, primary voters can close off the possibility of a contest between parties in the fall. There has already been one primary race for a competitive seat that resulted in a same-party contest in November—the 31st congressional district in San Bernardino County. The PPIC analysis shows that the outcome almost certainly would have been different if the fall electorate had voted in the primary.

The report identifies an important reason why turnout will be especially low this year:

The effect of initiative campaigns deserves close consideration because of a recent policy change. The California Legislature, through SB 202 in 2011, offered a new interpretation of the state constitution and declared that all citizen initiatives must appear on the general election ballot. As a result, the June 2014 primary will be the first in decades that does not include a statewide citizen initiative. However, the June ballot will not be devoid of all ballot measures: The legislature has placed two of its own proposals on the ballot, and it is possible that these two will be enough to draw voters to the polls. However, our analysis suggests that should future primary elections fail to include any initiatives on the ballot, primary turnout is likely to be between three and seven percentage points lower than it might otherwise be.

Here are some other reasons why turnout will sag:

• There are no US Senate elections in California this year.
• In the gubernatorial race, Governor Brown has a big lead and is not yet campaigning.  The Republican contenders have raised little money and are unknown to many voters.
• Scandals have dampened political enthusiasm among Californians.