Obama Tells Democrats to Relax and Embrace Political Reality

As an earlier post noted today, Barrack Obama cautioned Democrats to not lose touch with political reality of what the American public opinion supports.  He also reminded Democrats that the lead up to his 2008 nomination had been "robust" and bruising.  While not naming them, Obama appeared to be taking shots at Bernie Sanders and their followers who live in a bubble and are out of touch with main stream Americans who want improvements and change, but not a revolution and turning health care upside down.  This comes on the election of moderate Democrats win in Louisiana and Kentucky.  The message - which Nancy Pelosi has echoed - is that a centrist candidate is more likely to see electoral success in 2020.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Obama's comments.  Here are highlights:

[O]n Friday evening, he [Obama] climbed onto a stage in a basement ballroom in Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel and asked his party’s liberal elite to chill out a bit.

“We have a field of very accomplished, very serious, and passionate, and smart people who have a history of public service, and whoever emerges from the primary process, I will work my tail off to make sure they are the next president,” he told the room of a few hundred of the party’s biggest donors and top strategists, gathered for a conference of the Democracy Alliance group.

Obama signaled for the first time a willingness to try and modulate his party’s debate — in this case to a less frantic tenor. “To those who get stressed about robust primaries,” he added, fully embodying this new slightly exasperated adult-in-the-room role, “I just have to remind you: I had a very robust primary.”

Yet Obama’s remarks were not only aimed at the donors and chatterers. He had a sterner-than-usual warning for the campaigns, too. While over the last year-plus he has been sparing in weighing in on individual primary flash points, here he cast himself as understanding but concerned emissary to what he perceives as political reality. “This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” he said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” In Obama’s telling, Americans are conservative, not in ideology, but in temperament.

Voters, including Democrats, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain left-leaning Twitter feeds, or the activist wing of our party,” he warned. “And that’s not a criticism to the activist wing — their job is to poke and prod and text and inspire and motivate. But the candidate’s job, whoever that ends up being, is to get elected.”

It’s a vision that clashes with some on his party’s left, most obviously including supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And while he dismissed the debate between persuading voters and energizing base Democrats as “a false division,” he explained that he’d been thinking about how the candidates have been talking about him on the trail. “I think it is important for candidates to push past what I was able to achieve as president.

“I think it is very important to all the candidates who are running, at every level, to pay some attention to where voters actually are, and how they think about their lives. And I don’t think we should be deluded into thinking that the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal, and as soon as they hear a bold enough proposal that’s going to activate them. Because you know what? It turns out people are cautious, because they don’t have a margin for error.” Onstage, Obama stuck to most of his personal Trump-era rules: He didn’t mention the president, or the news of the day — in this case the impeachment hearings. He didn’t mention any of the presidential candidates by name, either. But his remarks, delivered onstage next to Stacey Abrams, painted the clearest picture yet of Obama’s view of the primary, and of the direction of his party in the Trump era. And his timing sent as much of a message to the operatives in the room, and the candidates in the race, as his words.

How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump

My biggest fear surrounding the 2020 elections is that Democrats will by default reelect Donald Trump.  How?  By straying too far to the left and lose moderates and independents - and even the small percentage of Republicans sickened by Trump - and/or those so obsessed with "purity" or allegiance only to their preferred candidate - think Sanders supporters - staying home from the polls.  If one is candid, this latter phenomenon is what put Trump in the White House in 2016. The world and the nation have NOT been a better place for it and a Clinton presidency would have done far more to advance their supposed goals than what has occurred under Trump/Pence.A column in the New York Times looks at this danger and suggests what Democrats should do. The only question is whether the mainstream media will not make the same mistakes of false equivalency and allowing itself to be manipulated by Trump.  Here are column highlights:

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has no bottom. Just when you think he has sunk as low as he can, he stages a rally like that atrocity in North Carolina on Wednesday night and sinks lower. But the key takeaway isn’t that he’s a demagogue or a racist: These were facts put into evidence long ago. It’s that Democrats can’t afford to take unnecessary risks, dream deferrable dreams and engage in avoidable distractions as they set about the urgent work of defeating him. The 2020 election isn’t about getting everything that Democrats want and that Americans deserve. It’s about getting rid of Trump, because the price of not doing so could be this nation’s very soul.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates for president need to be smarter, more realistic and more disciplined than they are now. Enough with internal feuding. Enough with taking the president’s bait and bumbling into his traps. If he sets the terms of the political discussion, he wins.

He wants to spend the 15 months between now and Election Day talking about “the squad” . . . Democrats mustn’t follow suit. Absolutely they should defend the four congresswomen, and make clear that they are every bit as American as Trump is.

So say that once, loud and clear. Maybe say it twice. Then move on. Trump wants to define all Democrats in terms of the squad, when they’re but a part of a diverse party and hardly its ideological proxies. So don’t let him.

[N]o one’s talking about health care or jobs: the stuff that actually turns elections and will turn this one. If Trump has his way, this campaign will be a bogus referendum on a bastard definition of patriotism. It will be a race-obsessed and racist jubilee. Don’t play along.

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. The Wednesday rally wasn’t a new Trump, just a bloated one.

Stop talking so much about the America that he’s destroying and save that oxygen for the America that Democrats want to create.

Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. That’s the 2018 midterms.

It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. . . . . so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.

Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They touted more restrained agendas. And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. They knew they didn’t need to. For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.

Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. Both lost. . . . The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.

According to a May analysis by Catalist, a data-analysis firm, 89 percent of the Democratic vote gain in 2018 was from swing voters. That’s just one set of numbers, one way to slice the pie, but it does raise questions about the progressive insistence that partisan turnout and a surge in new voters, attracted by bold policy positions, is the path to victory in 2020.

But that hasn’t stopped the leftward lunge of leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, several of whom want “Medicare for all” and many of whom support the decriminalization of illegal border crossings.

That puts them on shaky ground. Polling has shown that when voters are told that Medicare for all would mean an end to private insurance or an increase in taxes, support for it drops below 40 percent.

And according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey published a few days ago, 51 percent of voters support the sweeping raids by ICE that the president trumpets, while just 35 percent oppose them. That suggests that anything that smacks of open borders — which is how President Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, described Democratic presidential candidates’ positions in a recent op-ed essay in The Washington Post — puts those candidates at odds with public opinion. Voters see them answering Trump’s extremism with extremism of a different kind.

Nancy Pelosi knows this. It’s why she hasn’t been talking up the Green New Deal, single-payer insurance or impeachment, and the suggestion that this makes her some squishy centrist pushover — some musty relic from a timid era — is bunk. She has her eyes on the most meaningful prize, one she pursued successfully in the midterms: Democratic victory.

So Democrats should listen to her. They should also remember Obama’s legacy correctly. I keep hearing that his 2008 election makes the case for an unconventional, daring Democratic nominee. To a certain extent, it does. But don’t forget that he in some ways ran to Hillary Clinton’s right that year, and he spoke constantly of national unity, bipartisan amity and turning down the temperature of Washington politics.

Many voters still hunger for that. Many are wiped out by the raucous reality show of this presidency. And the way to promise something different isn’t to return Trump’s fire with even more heat. It’s to be dignified and deliberative.

I wonder what would happen if the Democratic nominee simply refused to talk about Trump. No responding to whatever stupid nickname he comes up with. No sweeping denunciation of some deed of his that any sensible American already knows is wrong. Just the articulation of better solutions to America’s problems. Trump would go mad with the lack of attention. And maybe then, thank heaven, he’d go away.

Democrats Take Note: Bernie Sanders Scares A Lot of People

While in the top tier of candidates in early polls, Bernie Sanders has lots of baggage and is potentially frightening to moderates that must be won over in the 2020 general election if Democrats hope to prevail.  Yes, Bernie's cult like followers - who are, in my opinion, very much akin to Trump's in terms of blind, unreasoning devotion - do not want to hear concerns or criticisms, but with so much on the line in the 2020 election, rational thought is required. A thoughtful piece in the Washington Post does a balance assessments of the liabilities that Sanders could bring to the fore if he were the Democrat nominee.  To Sanders supporters, all I can say is that not wanting to hear valid concerns does not make them any less true.  Here are excerpts:

I asked a group of Democratic and liberal-leaning consultants, pollsters, economists and political scientists what the likelihood of a Sanders’ nomination was, what his prospects would be in the general election, and how Democratic House and Senate candidates might fare with Sanders at the top of the ticket. When necessary, I offered them the opportunity to speak on background — with no direct attribution — to encourage forthcoming responses.

The answers I got from Democrats who make their living in politics revealed considerable wariness toward Sanders — the response many Sanders supporters would expect.

“Point 1, I am very worried about Bernie. Socialism is a problem word,” a Democratic operative with ties to the party establishment said: Sure he has a “stick it to the elites” message that could explain it, but it’s a problem. Point 2, Democrats are doing very well in the suburbs. Bernie could threaten that shift with an economic frame that is just too much for them. He could become a huge problem in the suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Orange County, etc. where the key Senate and House races will take place.

“Bernie is one Democrat who probably cannot win,” said a second operative:
I worry about his style for swing women voters. His proposals are good and have agenda-setting strength. I think his language of no alternative-no compromise-socialist will spook too many voters.

In the most important election in the lifetime of many Democrats — with Trump poised for a second term — the electability of the Democratic nominee is the top concern.

Democratic primary voters and caucus goers are more liberal than voters in the general election, including the Democratic electorate as a whole. They are more likely to be comfortable with the idea of socialism and more tolerant of what the Daily Mail called Sanders’ “very 1960s love life,” of the content of Sanders’ early writings and of his son born outside of marriage — matters, for better or worse, that are of concern to socially moderate and more conservative voters on whom much is riding in this election.

Sanders and his supporters have argued that his early history is part of a no longer relevant past and that he intends to run on his platform, not on his personality or personal life. Nonetheless, if Sanders wins the nomination, Trump and his Republican Party are certain to try to make the young Bernie Sanders a major issue.

What are the politics of Sanders’ commitment to democratic socialism?

An August 2018 YouGov survey found that 26 percent of voters had a favorable view of socialism (6 percent “very favorable,” 20 percent “somewhat favorable”) while 42 percent had an unfavorable view (31 percent very, 11 percent somewhat).

During the primaries, Sanders is unlikely to face demands for a persuasive response to charges that the domestic spending programs he supports — Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee, a Green New Deal, free tuition at public colleges, universal child care — would cost trillions of dollars. The libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated that Medicare for All alone would cost “$32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation,” which would require tax hikes on the middle class as well as on the rich and corporations — a sum that would, in fact, be virtually impossible to raise or procure.

Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T., who has thought deeply about global and domestic inequality, draws a clear distinction between socialism and social democracy. In Acemoglu’s view, which he expressed by email, Sanders’ “economists don’t understand basic economics. They are not just dangerous, they are clueless.” Socialist regimes “from Cuba to the eastern bloc have been disastrous both for economic prosperity and individual freedom.”

Acemoglu questions Sanders’ economic sophistication, arguing that social democracy, when practiced by competent governments, is a phenomenal success. Everywhere in the west is to some degree social democratic, but the extent of this varies. We owe our prosperity and freedom to social democracy.

The trick, though, Acemoglu argues, is that social democracy “did not achieve these things by taxing and redistributing a lot. It achieved them by having labor institutions protecting workers, encouraging job creation and encouraging high wages.”

Jagdish N. Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia and an expert in development economics and international trade, . . . described Sanders’ thinking as “a little bit naive,” displaying little “understanding of the complexity of the issues he raises.” Sanders, Bhagwati says, is in great need of “first-rate people to sort things out.”

In Bhagwati’s view, if Sanders continues to propose solutions to major problems “from the heart and not the head,” he will “not get anywhere other than shadow politics.”

Democrats are banking on making the 2020 election a referendum on Trump. How likely are the more controversial aspects of Sanders’ politics to blunt that strategy and turn the contest into a referendum on both Trump and Sanders?

A March NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 50 percent of all voters described themselves as “very uncomfortable” with Trump’s bid for re-election, and another 9 percent said they have “some reservation.” None of the Democratic candidates were viewed with the same level of discomfort, but Sanders had the highest percentage of voters, at 37 percent, who were “very uncomfortable” with his campaign, along with 21 percent who said they have “some reservations.” . . . In other words, Sanders carries a lot of baggage.

Democratic primaries, as I mentioned earlier, are hardly a proving ground for how well a democratic socialist — and a self-declared social and cultural outsider — will sell in November, something Trump and the Republican Party are already gearing up to turn into a major 2020 issue.

The question extends beyond Sanders. Democratic constituencies competing to pick a candidate to square off against Trump next year face a difficult-to-resolve problem. Will they find themselves flying blind, entangled in a cause more than a campaign as they leave too much of the middle-of-the-road electorate behind 

As I have said before, in a general election, I do not view Sanders as electable.  Democrats need a candidate who can win in November 2020.

GOP Consultant: Donald Trump Is Committing Political Suicide

Mike Murphy, a Republican Party consultant, has a piece in the Washington Post that looks at the train wreck that Donald Trump's campaign is quickly becoming.  It is caustic but right on point given my years of working on campaigns back in the days I was a Republican.  Hopefully Trump continues his out of control ways and, if the GOP does somehow manage to tell Trump "you're fired!," I for one hope that Trump's misfit supporters revolt and sit out the election.  As noted in a prior post, those who have analyzed Trump view him as having narcissistic personality disorder, so it is unlikely that he will listen to others since in his mind, he is always right and "huugely wonderful" just as he is.  The one lack in the column is that it ignores the fact that the GOP establishment created an atmosphere where a demagogue like could win the party base which no consists largely of white supremacists, anti-government nutcases, and the ignorant and uneducated (which is why Trump is so popular with many evangelical Christians).  Here are column highlights:

Here’s a pitch for a new reality TV show. Political neophytes run for office; then, when the harsh reality of running a serious national campaign thoroughly punctures their cocky naiveté, they are fired. Donald Trump is already starring in the pilot.

Forget, for a moment, all of Trump’s epic character flaws. A new question has seized the campaign: Can the self-proclaimed world-class business wizard actually manage anything? His campaign’s spiral into collapse proves he cannot. Let us count the ways:

Basic targeting. Presidential campaigns come down to a handful of swing states and a relatively small group of persuadable swing voters who ultimately decide the election. That’s why campaigns invest so much money in paid advertising and on-the-ground organizing in those key states. Trump has done neither. Instead he is careening around the country in his beloved jet, chasing elusive high-dollar donor support in Republican base states. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is gleefully beating his brains out in swing states with harsh but effective negative advertising — none of which is being answered and rebutted by the Trump campaign as his polling numbers tank.

Fundraising. Even if Trump wanted to rebut those Clinton attack ads, he lacks the money to fire back.  . . . Meanwhile, what relatively little money the braggadocious billionaire has invested in his campaign has mostly been structured as a loan from, you guessed it, Trump. So despite his endless promises during the primary, Trump is showing no actual interest in self-funding his effort. Instead he’s hoping donors pay him back for the cost of bouncing around in his garish airplane. It’s no surprise that so few donors are falling for this suckers’ ploy.

Message. Trump’s pitchfork rhetoric played well in the GOP primary; winning him about 44 percent of the voters. But the voters he needs most now — college-educated white women and Hispanics — are giving Trump record unfavorable ratings in recent polls. It’s almost as though he is trying to offend them. Well, it’s working.

Ground war. Person-to-person campaigning is effective, but it doesn’t happen without a well-run ground organization heavily linked to the metrics provided by modern digital marketing technology. Trump is doing none of this. He seems to think holding rallies with voters who already support him is the campaign activity that counts. That’s not strategy; it’s egomania.

What is Trump’s biggest failure? He lacks any real strategy. Trump appears to totally miss the fundamental fact that the general-election electorate is much larger and demographically very different from the small electorate he captured in the Republican primaries.

So as the Trump campaign moves into full meltdown, Republicans are seeing a presumptive nominee on a mission of political suicide. Nobody in the party wants a nominee with the Secret Service code name “Certain Train-wreck.” The question is: Can anything be done about it? The answer is yes. If Trump rolls into the convention broke and with a terrible deficit in the polls, the delegates may indeed act. Under convention rules, they have the power to do so. GOP conventions are party affairs empowered to pick the best candidate to win the general election. If Trump’s incompetence doesn’t change, he may well get fired in Cleveland.

Shades of Red and Blue Among Virginia Voters

With Virginia a likely "swing state" in the 2016 presidential elections, attention is being trained on Virginia's voters and their varying mindsets.  The findings of one such study by Christopher Newport University shows the complexities of Virginia's increasingly diverse and more urban population.  Not surprisingly, among the areas key to winning the state is the Hampton Roads region with roughly 1.7 million people.  The political views in the region could be described as schizophrenic in some ways with people saying they are conservative, but not partisan.  Also, moderates make up 40% of the state's voters - a reality seemingly lost on the Virginia GOP.  Here are highlights on the findings via the Daily Press:

On Thursday, the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University released a study that broke that purple electorate down into seven classifications, or "typologies."

One of the findings will surprise no one: "There are more moderate voters in the state," said Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center. "Virginia is a swing state, with about 40 percent of the electorate deciding elections."

The center's report, "Commonwealth of Contrasts," places registered voters into groups based on attitudes and values rather than political party affiliations. The typologies they came up with are:

•Solid Liberals, who reject completely the idea that everyone has the power to succeed or that most people who want to get ahead can.

•Suburban Liberals, who hold views similar to Solid Liberals, but with less intensity.

•Staunch Conservatives, who dominated by the Tea Party and take extremely conservative views on most issues, such as the environment, government and immigration.

•Working Class Conservatives, who are moderate cousins of the Staunch Conservatives, but with less intensity.

•Libertarians, a younger group with strong views in support of individual self-determination and responsibility and strong opposition to government intervention in most ways.

•Disengaged Liberals, who are the only majority-minority group of the seven, are conservative on God and morality, but more liberal on most other issues.

•Disaffecteds, who are younger voters who are the least partisan and least ideological of the groups.

In Hampton Roads, only 3 percent were identified as Solid Liberals — the lowest in the state. But 17 percent of area voters were identified as Suburban Liberals.

Less-partisan voters in the region topped 42 percent — one of the highest rates in the state, and a clear sign that Hampton Roads, like much of the state, is in play for the 2016 presidential election.

Rapid urbanization of major Virginia metropolitan areas — Hampton Roads, Richmond and Northern Virginia — has helped Democrats capitalize on local and national victories, the report finds.

"Not long ago, Virginia was predictably Republican in presidential elections," Kramer said. "But it's become competitive as it became younger and more racially and ethnically diverse, and as population shifted away from the rural parts of the state to Northern Virginia and the urban and suburban eastern half."

"President Obama's victories in Virginia in 2008 and 2012 suggest that the Democrats have built a new coalition of liberal voters in the Old Dominion," Kidd said. "Can they recreate that in 2016, or build a new one? And can the Republican nominee put together a new coalition large enough and energized enough to overcome the Democrats' recent success?"

Maybe, according to some political experts, but it's going to take some work.

A number of younger millennial voters fall within the Solid Liberal, Disengaged Liberal or Libertarian categories — with many nearly as unhappy with the direction of the country as Staunch Conservatives, according to the report.

[M]any undecided moderate and millennial voters have grown "disillusioned" with Obama over the last seven years, which could make it difficult for Democrats to maintain their growth in Virginia.  "They must find a way to recreate or fashion a new coalition," Kidd said. "The voter is disillusioned and that could come to the detriment of the party."

Republicans have a similar problem. If they nominate a right-wing social conservative, Kidd said, they risk losing millennial and moderate voters in Virginia.  "Young Libertarians are not attracted to socially conservative candidates," Kidd said.

"No one party can rely solely on its supporters to win Virginia," Kidd said. "If they do that, they lose."

. 

Pew Survey: Changing Positive Attitudes on Gay Marriage

While some polls have suggested that support for same sex marriage has fallen in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, a new piece at Pew Research Center has bad news for the Christofascists: 55% of Americans support marriage equality versus 32% of Republicans who support marriage equality.  Most troubling for the GOP are the findings that 61% of independents support same sex marriage.  Worse yet from a long term view, 70% of  so-called Millennials support same sex marriage.  The findings are but further proof that the GOP is increasingly out of touch with the rest of America and living in a bubble like echo chamber dominated by Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and loud mouth blowhards like Rush Limbaugh.  Here are highlights from Pew:

In Pew Research polling in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a 57% to 35% margin.  Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown. Based on polling in 2015, a majority of Americans (55%) support same-sex marriage, compared with 39% who oppose it.

Younger generations express higher levels of support for same-sex marriage.  However, older generations also have become more supportive of same-sex marriage in recent years.

Among people who are religiously unaffiliated, a solid majority have supported same-sex marriage since 2001.

And among Catholics and white mainline Protestants, roughly six-in-ten now express support for same-sex marriage.  Support for same-sex marriage among black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants remains lower than among other religious groups.

Majorities of both Democrats (66%) and independents (61%) now favor same-sex marriage.  A smaller share of Republicans fave same-sex marriage (32%), though they also have become more supportive over the past decade.

Today, 58% of whites support same-sex marriage, as do 39% of blacks.

Despite these findings, the GOP remains the political whore of Christofascists.  When one does the numbers, it is hard to see the GOP remaining a viable political party in the long term, not because of marriage equality but because of a host of issues.  Increasingly, racism and demagoguery only plays well with a shrinking part of the electorate.

The GOP’s Two Latino Problems - Moderate Voters Being Alienated Too

In tandem, Jeb Bush and Donald Trump appear to be well on the road to alienation both working Americans - the media is all over Bush's "people need to work longer hours" statement - and Hispanic voters thanks to Donald Trump speaking candidly about the racism that fuels much of the GOP.  But, as a piece in Slate notes, it isn't just Hispanics who are being driven away by the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric.  Moderate white voters are being driven away as well and for the GOP, which must win a huge majority of the white vote to win the White House, this is not good news.  Here are article highlights:

Trump also illustrates a second, more complicated problem. As long as his rhetoric has a place in Republican politics—as long as it has defenders—it won’t just alienate Latinos. It will offend and turn off voters who have conservative ideas and beliefs but won’t sanction or support anti-immigrant sentiment.

Before looking at this other side to the “Latino problem,” it’s worth examining the first one. In the past two presidential elections, Democrats have won more than two-thirds of Latino voters, reversing and eroding gains made during George W. Bush’s administration. Part of this is anti-Republican backlash after the 2008 recession and the tail end of the Bush presidency, but even more is the intense anti-immigration wave that swept the GOP in the wake of the Tea Party’s rapid rise to prominence.

At this point, Latinos don’t just oppose particular candidates, such as Mitt Romney. They disdain the Republican label itself. According to a 2014 survey from the Pew Research Center, just 10 percent of Latinos say that the Republican Party “has concern” for their communities, compared with 50 percent who say as much about the Democratic Party. Few agree with Republicans on policy  . . .

[T]he second problem. The appeals the GOP uses to turn out disaffected whites—and maximize white support writ large—could backfire, both with Latinos and with other whites, who have nonwhite friends, neighbors, spouses, and partners and see themselves as tolerant. In working to maximize their share of the white vote, Republicans who take this path could lower their ceiling.  

It’s not clear that there’s a way out of this dilemma.

I hope the GOP continues to twist on the rope of its own creation.  

As another piece in the Washington Post notes, the GOP has created its own monster now embodied by Trump and other crazies:

[T]here is one entity that can’t dump Trump, no matter how hard it tries: the GOP. The Republican Party can’t dump Trump because Trump is the Republican Party.  

Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate.

Anti-immigrant? Against Common Core education standards? For repealing Obamacare? Against same-sex marriage? Antiabortion? Anti-tax? Anti-China? Virulent in questioning President Obama’s legitimacy? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check and check.

Trump may be a phony, but he’s no dope: He recognized that, in the fragmented Republican field, his name recognition would take him far if he merely voiced, in his bombastic style, the positions GOP voters craved. The mogul’s broader basket of issues is also in tune with those of a slate of candidates who have compared homosexuality to alcoholism (Perry), likened union protesters to the Islamic State (Walker) and proposed elections for Supreme Court justices (Cruz), and who virtually all oppose same-sex marriage and action on climate change.

Trump may be a monster, but he’s the monster Republicans created.