The Republican Industrial Complex and the Conservative Echo Chamber

Matthew Sheffield writes at Praxis:

The sad reality of conservative and libertarian politics is that the generous people who donate their hard-earned cash have been fleeced for years by greedy, incompetent people who have manipulated the system to profit regardless of the policy or electoral outcomes.

In order to prevent center-Right donors from seeing the failures and demanding changes, the Republican Industrial Complex has offered false theories that (depending on who is listening) “the Establishment” or “the far Right” are responsible instead of leaders who could not deliver.

While the GOP certainly has run poorer candidates on average than Democrats, the office-seekers themselves have not been the only problem. For years, Republican politicians and donors have been tricked not just into purchasing ineffective ads, they have also been tricked into paying ridiculous commissions on placing these ads, usually 15 percent. It is no wonder that the consultants have been so eager to convince donors to go for the quick fix of a political ad instead of investing in media outlets or building up grassroots organizations

...
Besides the fact that many Republican poohbahs and advocacy group heads are double-dipping out of their organizations’ coffers, one of the other significant issues facing the Right is an apparent desire of many conservative leaders to merely preach to the choir about conservative policy ideas instead of actually trying to enact them.

Some have been more flagrant than others in proclaiming their desire to lose. Former U.S. senator Jim DeMint made himself famous by repeatedly claiming that “I’d rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who believe in the principles of freedom than 60 who don’t believe in anything.”...

The reality is that America has some areas that are more hospitable to the brand of Christian conservatism that DeMint espouses and some that are not. To suppose that a top-down, centrally planned campaign platform handed down by inside-the-Beltway interest groups is what’s best for every part of the country is monumental arrogance. It’s also a fundamental contradiction of the idea and practice of federalism, something conservatives are supposed to respect.

Sheffield continues in another Praxis article:

Besides the fact that left-leaning mainstream news outlets help Democrats get their message out, they have the additional benefit of helping Democrats refine their own policies and messages. Smart Democratic strategists know that if a scandal is a problem to their unaffiliated sympathizers in the press, it is something worth taking seriously.

By and large, conservatives have no such positive feedback loops. Instead, the Right’s media monoculture has created negative feedback loops whereby people with little political acumen like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and Glenn Beck are able to fill Republican voters’ heads with nonsensical ideas like planning to shut down the government with no backup plan or electing fewer GOP officeholders in pursuit of more “pure” ones, primarily because they grossly overestimate the number of conservatives in America. It is poetic justice that many of the same people who pushed these naive positions and strategies saw their own imbecilic noise machine turned against their preferred presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, in this year’s Republican primaries.

More center-right media outlets could also have been able to detect that the GOP’s economically libertarian message has little to no popularity among average Americans. Since these journalistic structures did not exist, however, the popularity of Donald Trump’s abandonment of that orthodoxy took the Republican elitecompletely by surprise. It shouldn’t have.

American Crossroads and "All Politics is Local"

Steve Inskeep of NPR interviews Steven Law of American Crossroads:

INSKEEP: What issues are you trying to focus the race on in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire?

LAW: Well, we've said repeatedly as have others that the best thing that anyone running for office this election can do is to focus on what they're doing for the state, the issues they're working on that people in their state care about. And one thing that we have going for us in this cycle is that most of our candidates have not only been good candidates, they've been good senators.

They've been doing a lot of things, solving problems for their state. It also helps them to continue to swim underneath the froth and the waves that may impact the presidential race and chart their own course and define their own candidacies.

INSKEEP: So if you're paying for ads in Pennsylvania, what you're going to be saying is Pat Toomey helped some people in Pittsburgh. He got a post office opened in Harrisburg or he got money for Pennsylvania and some things like that.

LAW: Yeah, and probably not quite as granular as fixing potholes. But certainly one of the things we've been talking about is things that they've been doing to solve problems that people are concerned about in their state. So with Pat Toomey, among other things, he's fighting to keep sexual predators out of schools. It's an area of concern in some of these swing and collar counties around Philadelphia.

So that's something we've been talking about there. In New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte has been one of the Senate leaders on fighting the Opioid crisis. She was one of the leaders in getting bipartisan legislation passed. That's the number-one issue in New Hampshire, and she's been a leader on that. And we've been talking about that issue as well.

Inskeep also asked about Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who lost his primary to a moderate.

LAW: It's interesting, the Huelskamp primary we watched pretty closely. We even thought about getting involved there. I think that election result is somewhat unique to the circumstances. Huelskamp was not liked. He had taken a number of votes that were contrary to his district's interest. I think he spent a lot more time being worried about what people in Washington said about him from the very conservative perspective than what his own district cared about.

I think what it does point to, though, is that there is a cost for simply going down a hard-core ideological line and then losing sight of what your district's constituents care about.

Trump Takes Some Hard Hits

Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

Wednesday morning on his television show, Joe Scarborough claimed he had spoken to a foreign policy expert who had been advising Donald Trump. During the course of that conversation, Scarborough said the expert told him Trump had asked three times why the president couldn’t use nuclear weapons. In response to the uproar that followed Scarborough’s comments, John Noonan, a former nuclear missile officer (and former adviser to Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush), published an extraordinary, and frightening, string of tweets on what it would mean for the future of American nuclear policy (and the world) if there were a “narcissist walking around with nuclear authenticators.”

At NYT, Former acting CIA director Michael Morrell endorses Clinton, damns Trump:

The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump’s character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president. It is already damaging our national security.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

Peggy Noonan:

Here is a truth of life. When you act as if you’re insane, people are liable to think you’re insane. That’s what happened this week. People started to become convinced he was nuts, a total flake.

It was there in the polls. Fox News shows Mrs. Clinton with a 10-point lead, with Mr. Trump at 78% of the Republican vote, compared with Mitt Romney’s 93% in 2012. Mr. Romney won the white vote by 20 points; Mr. Trump is ahead by 10. “High-end Republicans are walking away,” says a GOP oppo guy. “Who is choking now?” The battleground states, too, have turned bad.

This is what became obvious, probably fatally so: Mr. Trump is not going to get serious about running for president. He does not have a second act, there are no hidden depths, there will be no “pivot.” It is not that he is willful or stubborn, though he may be, it’s that he doesn’t have the skill set needed now—discretion, carefulness, generosity, judgment. There’s a clueless quality about him. It’s not that he doesn’t get advice; it’s that he can’t hear advice, can’t process it or turn it into action.

Will Clinton's Lead Stick? Could Be...

Amy Walter writes at The Cook Political report:

Clinton got a decent convention bump in the polls. Whether or not it sticks depends on three things: 1) Trump’s ability to keep the focus on her weaknesses and off of his. So far, he gets an “F” here; 2) things out of her control - how President Obama handles a potential terrorist attack, another Wikileaks dump with more serious allegations about her, or an expose on the Clinton Global Initiative that puts her in a bad light; 3) unforced errors. Clinton is obviously much more disciplined than her opponent, but she’s also shown some glaring lapses - whether it was her “dead broke” comment to Diane Sawyer or her most recent comments to Fox’s Chris Wallace about her “truthful” testimony to the FBI.

But the hits keep coming .. Ben Schreckinger reports at Politico:

Hours after POLITICO published a report on gaps in Melania Trump’s account of her immigration to the United States, she issued a statement on Twitter on Thursday that sailed around the central questions raised by the story.

 By specifying the year 1996, Trump’s statement conspicuously avoids addressing multiple reports and photographs that place her in the United States and working as a model in 1995, as well as a statement by Trump’s Slovenian biographer to POLITICO that she was performing modeling work in the United States that was not "technically" legal during her first trips there in 1995.

ABC reports:

Donald Trump again referred to a video he claims to have seen of the $400 million exchange between the U.S. and Iran — despite his campaign saying otherwise.

"You know, it was interesting because a tape was made," Trump said to supporters at a rally in Portland, Maine, today. "You know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country."

Trump initially discussed a video of the exchange in detail at a rally in Florida yesterday. However, Trump's campaign told ABC News today that Trump was referring to footage he saw on Fox News of the American prisoners released in Geneva.

Panic

Philip Rucker and Dan Balz report at The Washington Post:

The Republican Party was in turmoil again Wednesday as party leaders, strategists and donors voiced increasing alarm about the flailing state of Donald Trump’s candidacy and fears that the presidential nominee was damaging the party with an extraordinary week of self-inflicted mistakes, gratuitous attacks and missed opportunities

....

Trump has failed to take advantage of Friday’s report showing slow economic growth in the last quarter or on an interview Clinton gave to Fox’s Chris Wallace on Sunday in which she said that FBI Director James B. Comey had generally agreed with her characterizations of the use of a private email server as secretary of state. The interview has drawn criticism from news organization fact checkers.

“Donald Trump can still win this thing, but not on the current trajectory that he’s on, and that’s really up to him,” said [MS RNC member Henry] Barbour. “At some point, he needs to be immeasurably better than Hillary Clinton, but he’s not going to have an opportunity to govern if he doesn’t begin to bring Republicans together and then, eventually, bring independents and even Democrats on board and convince them that he can do this job.”

Barbour said he, like others, has been frustrated at missed opportunities since the Democratic convention ended Thursday night. “The last several days have made this election a referendum on Donald Trump. We want this to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton and the wrong direction the country’s on.”

Chuck Todd and Carrie Dann enumerate at NBC:

• In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
• He reiterated that he hasn't endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war "has not done a good job for the vets"
• He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying "she has given me zero support"
• He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
• He said he's "always wanted" to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was "much easier"
• He said that the handling of sexual harassment has "got to be up to the individual"
• He accused Khizr Khan of being "bothered" by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
• He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
• He reiterated that "if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised"
• [The list goes on ...]

Team Blue Wins the Battle of Conventioms

Gallup reports:

Americans are evenly divided on whether they view the Democratic Party more favorably (44%) or less favorably (42%) after the party's national convention last week. However, their ratings of the Republican Party after the GOP convention two weeks ago were significantly worse, with 35% saying they viewed the party more favorably and 52% less favorably.

The results are based on Gallup polls conducted in the days immediately after each party's convention -- the Republican convention in Cleveland from July 18-21 and the Democratic convention in Philadelphia from July 25-28.

Americans' assessments of the effect of the conventions on their image of each party largely mirror their assessments of how the convention will affect their vote in the 2016 election. By 45% to 41%, Americans say they are more rather than less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton based on what they saw or read about the Democratic convention. In contrast, many more Americans said they were less likely (51%) rather than more likely (36%) to vote for Donald Trump as a result of what they saw or read about the Republican convention.

Gallup has asked this question about Democratic and Republican national conventions since 1984, with the exceptions of the 1984 and 1992 Republican conventions. The 2016 Republican convention is the first after which a greater percentage of Americans have said they are "less likely" rather than "more likely" to vote for the party's presidential nominee.

The Fluid Democratic Race

Pew reports:

Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination in every Pew Research Center survey conducted throughout the party’s primaries. But many Democratic voters vacillated in their candidate support throughout this period.

Today, however, overwhelming shares of all Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters – including 90% who consistently supported Sanders for the nomination – back Clinton in the general election against Donald Trump.

Even as Clinton led throughout, the share of voters who remained consistently loyal to her over the course of the election was far smaller than her overall support in any single survey. By April 2016, near the end of the Democratic primaries, Clinton was named the first choice of 46% of Democratic voters in an open-ended question about their nomination preferences. But only 29% had consistently named her their first choice in December 2015, March 2016 and April 2016. And even fewer, just 15%, had consistently named her their first choice going all the way back to March 2015.

This fluidity wasn’t confined to Clinton supporters: Sanders was the top choice of 37% of Democratic voters in April 2016, but only about half of these supporters (20% of all Democratic voters) consistently backed Sanders across the three primary-season surveys. Fully 44% of Democratic voters changed their preferences at least once in the surveys conducted over this four-month period, including those who may have been undecided at some point.