The Senate Empire Strikes Back

With McCain and Rubio brushing aside challengers, no Senate GOP incumbent has lost a primary in 2016.  The tea party movement has lost a great deal of strength in these contests, thanks to Mitch McConnell.  Paul Kane reports at The Washington Post:

After seeing three senators fall during primaries in 2010 and 2012, as well as insurgents knock off establishment-backed Republicans in key seats, GOP strategists adopted an overwhelming force doctrine for handling primary challenges. They leveraged their financial edge and set out to define the opponent early, before he or she could gain momentum among the conservative grassroots, using modern technology and also spending heavily on positive TV ads to improve the incumbent’s standing among conservative voters.

That strategy was considered essential in protecting GOP incumbents like Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander in the 2014 midterms.

“The culture of primaries within the Senate GOP campaign apparatus is where the entire party needs to go,” said Josh Holmes, McConnell’s 2014 campaign manager whose firm, Cavalry, worked for McCain and several Republican incumbents. “If your job is to win elections you don’t just throw up your hands and say, gosh, I sure hope voters don’t pick the guy who can’t possibly win.”

The old sports adage that winning begets winning, and the corollary that losing begets losing, might apply here. In early 2014 a collection of Washington-based groups with ties to tea party activists were on the march, helping challengers in a clutch of primaries, including in a challenge to McConnell.

Now, after losing big in 2014, and barely engaging in 2016, those groups are a shell of their former selves.

Trump v. American Exceptionalism

Aaron Blake reports at The Washington Post:

The same day that Donald Trump travels to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto, Hillary Clinton will attack him for his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism.

Assisting her in that effort: Donald Trump himself.

And it's not just Trump's campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again" — a formulation that suggests America is no longer great. Trump, in fact, has said at multiple points in recent years that he doesn't much like the idea of American exceptionalism. And he has explained this position in detail.

...

Appearing on Fox News with Greta van Susteren at the time [2013], Trump said he agreed with Putin:

And when he criticizes the president for using the term "American exceptionalism," if you're in Russia, you don't want to hear that America is exceptional. And if you're in many other countries, whether it's Germany or other places, you don't want to hear about American exceptionalism, because you think you're exceptional. So I can see that being very insulting to the world.

And that's basically what Putin was saying — is that, you know, you use a term like "American exceptionalism," and frankly, the way our country is being treated right now by Russia and Syria and lots of other places and with all the mistakes we've made over the years — like Iraq and so many others — it's sort of a hard term to use.

But other nations and other countries don't want hear about American exceptionalism. They're insulted by it. And that's what Putin was saying

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Clinton Has a Much Stronger Campaign

Lisa Desjardins and Daniel Bush report at PBS:

To pinpoint campaign operations, PBS NewsHour compiled office data from 15 key states, speaking with state and national campaign officials, cross-referencing Federal Election Commission spending reports and checking local news coverage.

As of Aug. 30, Hillary Clinton has 291 offices in those 15 battlegrounds. Donald Trump has 88. (Those figures include joint presidential and party offices.) Both campaigns pledge that more offices are coming.

The Trump campaign says its number will more than double — adding another 132 offices — in coming days and weeks.

But lagging so far behind in infrastructure as the campaigns enter the post-Labor Day blitz is unprecedented. To win, the Trump team hopes that their candidate can rewrite the laws of the ground game.

John Sides writes at The Washington Post:

This is obviously unprecedented in modern presidential elections. Typically, the candidates have similar resources and campaign organizations. Typically, it is difficult for one candidate to have a large advantage in televised advertising or fieldwork. In 2012, for example, my research with Lynn Vavreck showed that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney could sustain a durable advantage in advertising. Obama’s edge in fieldwork did appear to net him votes, although not enough to be decisive in the electoral college.

By comparison, Trump is being vastly outspent in advertising and is limited essentially to whatever field organization the Republican National Committee can provide — which will be exceeded by Hillary Clinton’s, much as Romney’s was exceeded by Obama’s. How much will this cost him on Election Day?

Probably the best estimate comes from a recently published piece by political scientists Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler. They show that the effect of the 2012 presidential campaign on voter turnout was quite large, about 7-8 points overall.

Soros and DA Races

At Politico, Scott Bland reports that George Soros has spent more than $3 million on local races for district attorney in the past year.

Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.

Gary Johnson Ads

Ads by and for Gary Johnson are pretty good:

Middle-Class Revulsion

Joel Kotkin writes at RCP:

Middle-class revulsion with the political mainstream has been driven by slow economic growth, stagnant wages, a dysfunctional education system, and, for smaller businesses, a tightening regulatory regime. Homeownership is now at a nearly half-century low. New business start-ups, for the first time in three decades, are not keeping up with the number of deaths. Both stats reveal a real decline in aspiration. Most Americans, in a stunning reversal of past trends, see a worse future for their offspring than themselves. Who can blame them? Middle-class breadwinners and working-class wage-earners now suffer from deteriorating health and shorter lifespans.

In other words, middle-class Americans could certainly use a champion. But those who chose Trump went off the rails.

He isn't cheering Clinton, either:

By elevating this disingenuous demagogue, Trump voters have assisted in the further ascendency of the oligarch class. The forces coalescing around Hillary Clinton -- mainstream Wall Street, particularly hedge funds, beltway lobbyists, the big media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and green capitalists -- do not share the priorities of Middle America. Bernie Sanders made an issue of Clinton’s Wall Street support, but the Vermont socialist was always too marginal, cranky and, ultimately, too doctrinaire to win even in today’s Democratic Party.

With Sanders conveniently dispatched, the crony-capitalist class is assured its worldview prevails. They can check all the boxes that Rob Atkinson has labeled as“the Davos application” of open immigration, greater globalization, free trade, and higher carbon prices.

Hillary Victory Fund and Transfers to DNC

Bill Allison reports at Bloomberg:

When the Democratic National Committee announced its $32 million fundraising haul last month, it touted the result as evidence of “energy and excitement” for Hillary Clinton’s nomination for the White House and other races down the ballot. The influx of money, however, also owes in part to an unprecedented workaround of political spending limits that lets the party tap into millions of dollars more from Clinton’s wealthiest donors.

At least $7.3 million of the DNC’s July total originated with payments from hundreds of major donors who had already contributed the maximum $33,400 to the national committee, a review of Federal Election Commission filings shows. The contributions, many of which were made months earlier, were first bundled by the Hillary Victory Fund and then transferred to the state Democratic parties, which effectively stripped the donors’ names and sent the money to the DNC as a lump sum.

Of the transfers that state parties made to the DNC for which donor information was available, an overwhelming proportion came from contributions from maxed-out donors: On average, 83 percent of the money that was sent from the state committees to the DNC in July originated with a donor who had already given the maximum $33,400 to the national party.

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 “I’m not aware of any case law or regulations that would prohibit a state party from transferring to a national party committee funds raised through a joint fundraising committee,” Robert Kelner, an election law expert at Covington & Burling said. “But as a practical matter, it does appear that the DNC may be using Hillary Victory Fund as a mechanism for allowing donors to give more to the DNC indirectly than would otherwise be permitted directly.”