Trump Advantages

Kenneth P. Vogel and Darren Samuelsohn write at Politico:

Donald Trump’s rivals cling to the hope that the surprise GOP presidential front-runner lacks the know-how to lure supporters to the polls, but POLITICO has learned that his campaign several months ago assembled an experienced data team to build sophisticated models to transform fervor into votes.

The team is led by two low-profile former Republican National Committee data strategists, Matt Braynard and Witold Chrabaszcz, and includes assistance from the political data outfit L2, according to multiple sources familiar with the effort. The data push is focused on integrating information Trump has collected, through his campaign website and at voter rallies, on nontraditional or unregistered supporters. It also includes commercial data obtained from the RNC and other sources, in an effort to mobilize voters in key early states, the sources said.

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who has significant experience in voter registration, declined to comment on the data program. “We don’t discuss internal procedures; however, Mr. Trump has been underestimated through every step of this campaign, to many people’s demise,” said Lewandowski, who ran a pilot registration project for Americans for Prosperity in 2014.

Michael Calderone reports at The Huffington Post:

Donald Trump doesn't need to buy media exposure.

Television networks have given Trump the most attention this election cycle due to a unique mix of celebrity, accessibility, front-runner status and propensity for making outrageous and offensive remarks. But Trump, claiming his campaign is $35 million under budget, pledged last week to spend $2 million a week on ads, with the campaign on Monday placing its first order for spots in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Before early state voters stumbled across Trump's ad on local stations, national news networks had already broadcast it dozens of times, beginning at 5:30 a.m. Monday. Over the next 24 hours, Fox, MSNBC and CNN ran the ad 60 times, according to a HuffPost tally using monitoring service TVEyes. Networks most commonly played the ad in full, though the tally includes partial airings in news segments.

PC

Karen Tumulty and Jenna Johnson write at the Washington Post that Trump is exploiting a reaction to political correctness.

“Driving powerful sentiments underground is not the same as expunging them,” said William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who advised President Bill Clinton. “What we’re learning from Trump is that a lot of people have been biting their lips, but not changing their minds.”

One thing is clear: Trump is channeling a very mainstream frustration.

In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”

It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites.

“People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.

“ ‘Political correctness’ are the two words that best respond to everything that a conservative feels put upon,” added pollster Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans. The label is, he said, a validation that what many on the right see as legitimate policy and cultural differences are not the same as racism, sexism or heartlessness.

“Allegations of racism and sexism have turned into powerful silencing devices,” Galston agreed. “You can be opposed to affirmative action without being a racist.”

The PC backlash does not necessarily mean that people support the kinds of things that Trump is saying, or the way he says them.

When the Fairleigh Dickinson pollsters added his name to the same question — prefacing it with “Donald Trump said recently . . . ” — the numbers dropped sharply. Only 53 percent said they agree that political correctness is a major problem

Economic Clouds

The economy is the most important influence on presidential elections, and right now it is not looking terrific.  The Financial Times reports:

The Institute for Supply Management’s monthly manufacturing index slipped to 48.2 in December, marking the second month in a row that it had fallen below 50, the line between contraction and expansion. The reading was the weakest since June 2009 and marked the first time since the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis that the US manufacturing sector has seen consecutive contractions.

The result released on Monday highlights what has become a tale of two economies in the US. Despite the relatively robust headline figures for employment for the economy as a whole that led the Federal Reserve last month to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade many manufacturers complain that they are seeing what amounts to an industrial recession in the US.

Angry Americans

NBC reports:

Nearly half of Americans are angry, and no groups are angrier than whites and Republicans, according to a new NBC News/Survey Monkey/Esquire online poll about outrage in the country.

Overall, 49 percent of Americans said they find themselves feeling angrier now about current events than they were one year ago. Whites are the angriest, with 54 percent saying they have grown more outraged over the past year. That's more than Latinos (43 percent) and African-Americans (33 percent).
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The poll also found Republicans are angrier than Democrats. Sixty-one percent of Republicans say current events irk them more today than a year ago, compared to 42 percent of Democrats.

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Overall, 52 percent of the country said the idea of the "American dream" no longer holds true. The group most pessimistic about the thought that anyone in the country can work hard to get ahead is Americans between 45 and 64 who are thinking about retirement, the survey found.

More than half of Americans (54 percent) say their financial situation is worse off than they thought it would be. Asked why, a plurality of respondents said it is harder today to succeed than it used to be.

Esquire provides more details:

Which of the following comes closest to your opinion of today's immigrants?

• They strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents. 51%
• They are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care. 46%

Seventy-three percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of blacks believe immigrants strengthen our country; only 43 percent of whites agree. Compared with those who hold pro-immigration views, those who hold anti-immigration views are significantly more likely to say the American dream is dead; significantly more likely to say the U. S. was once but is no longer the most powerful country; and twice as likely to say that white men are struggling to keep up in today's world.

Trump as Terrorist Recruiting Tool

Curt Mills reports at The Washington Examiner:

Hillary Clinton's claim that the Islamic State uses footage of Donald Trump as a recruitment tool may have been bogus, but it appears less far off the mark in a wake of a new video.

Footage compiled by the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab includes the Republican front-runner arguing for a "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

The video bleeps out "hell."

The video's authenticity is not certain, though the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorist communications, said has determined al-Shabaab created the video.

Ben JacobsVerified account‏@Bencjacobs

Trump's lawyer retweets claim that Huma Abedin ordered al-Shabaab to release a video with footage of Trump

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Trump v. Conservatism

David Frisk and Jonathan Riehl write at The Washington Examiner:

One cannot imagine William F. Buckley or Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver or Milton Friedman tolerating Donald Trump's disgraceful conduct and rhetoric. Indeed, conservatism in our time, whether gentle or harsh, has always claimed an intellectual coherence, a moral seriousness, espoused by thinkers like these, who epitomized a consistency of aim that is irreconcilable with Trump's vapid, scattershot, "trust me — I'll be great" messaging.
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Why, then, have so many conservatives lined up with Trump, while others are open to the idea? Clearly, part of the reason is that they feel (although we think they exaggerate the extent to which) the conventional politicians on the right have long failed to advance their goals — and have also refused in most cases to boldly state them, employing the innocuous buzzwords of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and the party's congressional "leadership."

But other candidates such as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina share these frustrations and are making that clear. A conservative need not support any of them, yet, to hold off from backing Trump. What requires explanation is not the deep skepticism on the right toward everyone in public office, or the openness to nominating a person who has never held office. It is the seeming lack of skepticism toward Trump despite his obvious vulnerability to multiple questions about his own political trustworthiness.

This is a grave hour for the modern conservative movement. Trump's sound and fury — signifying exactly what Macbeth said it does — may be the death rattle of a project that took generations to build.

George Will picks up the theme:

In 1964, Barry Goldwater mounted a successful conservative insurgency against a Republican establishment that was content to blur and dilute the Republican distinctiveness that had been preserved 52 years earlier. Goldwater defeated New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller for the nomination, just as Taft had defeated TR, a former New York governor. Like Taft, Goldwater was trounced (he carried six states). But the Republican Party won five of the next seven presidential elections. In two of them, Ronald Reagan secured the party’s continuity as the custodian of conservatism.

In 2016, a Trump nomination would not just mean another Democratic presidency. It would also mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in U.S. politics.

It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this:

One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

Uncertainties

On New Year's Day, there are several reasons why we should be wary of predictions about the 2016 election.

First, as I recently explained at The Christian Science Monitor, any effort to model presidential nomination races or general elections suffers from the small-n problem:  there just are not enough cases for making sound projections.

Second, to the extent that models are useful, they depend on numbers that are not yet available.  For instance, we do not know what the economy will look like several months from now.

Third, the Trump phenomenon is hard to gauge.  Are online surveys overstating his support, or are live-interviewer surveys understating it? And will his supporters actually show up in primaries and caucuses?  We have no way of knowing until people actually vote.

Fourth, as Michael Barone writes:

Besides the known unknowns, what unknown unknowns lie ahead? The Las Vegas debate centered on terrorism, which probably would not have been the case but for the San Bernardino attack 13 days earlier. That probably helped some candidates, notably Christie, more than others.

That was not the first time that this contest was affected by what the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told a junior colleague determines history: "Events, dear boy, events." And it probably won't be the last.

None of the Republican or Democratic candidates in 2008 expected that financial markets would collapse that fall, and they might have campaigned differently had they known. We can see the calendar ahead, but not everything that will appear on the pages.