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Blue on Blue Violence
Over at Steve Sailer’s blog, one of his commenters has found an interesting post from economist Brad DeLong back in 2003. For those of you who don't remember the early '00s, DeLong was a deputy assistant secretary at Treasury under Bill Clinton who became one of the stars of the lefty blogosphere, combining the seriousness and nonpartisan open-mindedness of Matthew Yglesias with the personal… → Read More
Get Off the Sidelines in Arizona
If you had to come up with a description for the response of institutional Republicans to Donald Trump, it would be this: Too late. At every turn, Republicans have been late to challenge Trumpism. Back in August, as Trump was just taking over the race, Right to Rise’s Mike Murphy famously explained, If other campaigns wish that we're going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they'll be… → Read More
The Rules
Sean Trende has an important piece on delegate pluralities this morning. Here's a flavor of it: The GOP has required that its nominees receive a majority of the vote from its delegates for 160 years now. And this requirement has been consequential: Along the way, multiple candidates have received a plurality of the vote, yet failed to become the nominee. For example (note: The following… → Read More
Trump as Frontrunner
How strong a frontrunner is Donald Trump? That depends on how you look at him. The chassis of Trump’s campaign—the rally crowds, the poll numbers, the primary wins—looks like that of a traditional frontrunner. But under the hood he's running a pure insurgent campaign not unlike what Howard Dean and Pat Buchanan tried to do in previous cycles. When you look at Trump as an insurgent, his strength… → Read More
Mitt Romney and Dean Barnett
Watching Mitt Romney’s excellent speech yesterday reminded me of my departed friend and colleague Dean Barnett. For those of you who didn't know him, Dean was an amazing man. I first met him around 2001 when we became email correspondents. I could tell from his letters that he was a talented writer and even though he had a day job—a real job—I started nudging him to start one of these… → Read More
Five Reasons Trump Is Weaker Than He Looks
There’s a classic scene in First Blood where John Rambo declares, Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! So let's go with that for a moment. You'll get no shortage of Trump-is-the-nominee talk today. At worst, he's in a very strong position. At best, he's the presumptive nominee. But even though I'm a born-pessimist, I'm not quite sure that I'm convinced by the best-case (for… → Read More
Get Your Shinebox, Donny
In his indispensible newsletter, the Transom, Ben Domenech makes a profound observation about tonight’s debate: The best way to become the Not Trump, is to beat Trump. And the way to beat him isn't to argue that he's a meanie or detail his ideological inconsistencies. It's to go full-alpha and nuke him from orbit. Here's Domenech's pitch: Here's the thing: you don't beat frontrunners by ignoring… → Read More
Is Marco Rubio Really an 'Establishment' Candidate?
One of the (many) oddities of the 2016 Republican race is how perverted our language has become in categorizing the candidates. Marco Rubio is the establishment candidate. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are anti-establishment. Neither of these definitions really fits what's going on. The 2016 race featured a trio of real, live, establishment Republicans. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich are… → Read More
Antonin Scalia, Larger Than Life
The first time I saw Justice Antonin Scalia in the flesh was in college. He came to speak at my school, which was a broadly apolitical place. There were no protests. He gave a brief talk on the idea of originalism—easily the most engaging lecture of my four years—and then he took questions. For close to two hours he stood onstage and answered myriad queries from a collection of professors,… → Read More
The View from New Hampshire: Likely a Two-Man Race
One of the most striking things about the New Hampshire primary, on the GOP side, was how none of the Republican candidates (other than Donald Trump) played to win. Stuart Stevens wrote about this earlier in the week and it's completely true: Trump took a commanding-but hardly unassailable position. And the response of the rest of the field was to wage scorched-earth warfare against ... Marco… → Read More
The New Jersey Circus
Hampstead, N.H. Chris Christie has four events scheduled for today, which is good. Less good is that all of them are in tiny venues, the type of awareness-building, candidate-shopping size places most campaigns hope to do back in early January. This morning, for instance, Christie is booked into a coffee shop in a strip center. Maybe 80 people—counting voters, employees, and media—pack inside,… → Read More
Trump Triumphant
Manchester, N.H. The big media story from the debate will be Marco Rubio’s confrontation with Chris Christie. But the larger picture might be about how well Donald Trump did. Trump was relatively reserved. He wasn't bombastic. Or erratic. He was—by Trumpian standards—presidential? Okay, let's not get crazy. Trump wasn't able to stay in check for the full three hours—he couldn't help himself from… → Read More
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Atkinson, N.H. John Kasich walked into a small conference room at the Atkinson Country Club this morning and was greeted by a polite crowd of roughly forty people. Which is actually kind of impressive, the venue was tucked away in a next of winding back roads and Granite Staters woke up to a snowstorm troublesome enough to cancel area schools. (It would have shut down Washington, D.C., for 48… → Read More
Marco Rubio: The Natural
Portsmouth, N.H. For all the hype surrounding him, a Marco Rubio rally is completely different from the mega-rallies of Trump and Sanders or even the smaller, yet richly-produced, Clinton affairs. Thursday’s rally, for instance, was held in a dingy banquet hall just off the U.S. 1 Bypass in Portsmouth. At eight o'clock in the morning about 150 people packed into the small room, which looked like… → Read More
An Awful Candidate
It was 11:30 p.m. on the night of the Iowa caucuses and Hillary Clinton had a decision to make. She was ahead of Bernie Sanders by less than 1 percent of the vote count and most of the precincts were in. But her lead was shrinking. If she waited much longer, her victory speech might turn into a concession. So instead of taking the risk, she chose a middle course: She went out before the cameras,… → Read More
Trump Glances at Reality
Exeter, New Hampshire According to the fire marshal I talked to, about 450 people were packed into Exeter’s charming, historic—and very tiny—town hall this morning to see the Trump show. To judge by the crowd's reactions, they weren't disappointed. They laughed, they cheered, they shouted. What they didn't seem to notice was a brief, five-second sequence, in which their candidate admitted that… → Read More
The Battle of New Hampshire
So here we are at last. The voters have started to speak and what they've said so far is quite different from how the race had been portrayed in the media. Nate Silver estimates that through mid-December, Donald Trump dominated 54 percent of the media coverage of the Republican primary campaign. Meanwhile, he got 24 percent of the vote in Iowa. Ted Cruz, who won Iowa with more votes than any… → Read More
The Iowa Shocks
Winners and losers from Iowa, ranked: Ted Cruz: The big winner, obviously. Because Cruz didn’t just stake his campaign on Iowa, he vanquished the ogre. And the win is much more important because Cruz had to take the state back from Trump. Cruz can now legitimately claim to be the Donaldslayer. It also validates his organization, his data operation, and his GOTV plans. All in all, Cruz couldn't… → Read More
The Iowa Wayback Machine
To my mind, Barack Obama has always been wildly over-rated as a speaker. He has a great voice--really Saruman-caliber pipes. But his delivery is erratic and his material is rarely anywhere near as good as people think in the moment. His 2004 Purple America convention speech, for instance, might be the most over-praised political oratory in living memory. Except, perhaps, for his Jeremiah Wright… → Read More
Cruz Flails at Trumpless Debate
With Donald Trump skipping the debate to consort with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum (because he cares so very much about veterans), Ted Cruz had a golden opportunity to make a strong closing pitch to Iowa voters. He missed it. Cruz started out strong, with a clever line about Trump’s patois. But after that he failed to hammer home the difference between himself and Trump. Instead, he was… → Read More