Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 8/9, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 8th/9th, 2016

Aaron Bernstein/Reuters

AMMAN — I must confess, in a race full of unprecedented behavior, I was still shocked that a distant second place candidate in the Republican presidential nomination race—one who was mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from the primary/caucus process, from winning the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention—would name a running-mate for the vice president slot with about one-third of the time still left in the contest and months before the convention, long before anyone else had ever done so during our modern nomination process.

Then again, since the chutzpah of both Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina knows no bounds, I really should not have been surprised that either Cruz named Fiorina as his “running mate” even though he is not even close to being his party’s candidate, and that she, of all people, would accept.

Pride As a Vice

This amazing duo lasted one week—just one week exactly—before Cruz gave up his quest for the presidency.  After just seven days of existence, the Cruz-Fiorina ticket was no more, and Fiorina now has the record for the shortest vice presidential candidacy in U.S. history.

It is worth examining this exceptional piece of desperation political theater because it is truly a singularity in terms of its sheer absurdity and inanity.

Short-lived though the ticket was may be, the two are truly perfect for each other: along with Donald Trump, they are by far the most shameless, dishonest self-promoters of this election cycle.  In case you might be under the incorrect assumption that they are not the most shameless self-promoters out of over twenty candidates  in both parties (apart from Trump), a brief education is in order below.

Lyin’ Ted

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

First up: Ted Cruz.

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Trump and I view his candidacy as a historically dangerous one for democracy and for Western civilization, but his “Lyin’ Ted” nickname for Cruz he came up with is about as spot-on as you can get when it comes to that man, because he lies constantly and plays dirty and deceitful politics on the campaign trail.  Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact has been checking statements by Cruz since 2012, and, as of today, nearly two-thirds (64%) of his statements that it checked were categorized as mostly false (31%) or worse: false (27%), (liar liar) “pants on fire”-false (6%); only 22% were rated positively: true (6%) or mostly true (16%).  His record ranks among the worst of all the candidates for this election, with only Dr. Ben Carson and Donald Trump having a higher portion of mostly-false statements or worse.

This is a man whom the recently-former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner just referred to as “Lucifer in the flesh,” and Boehner noted in same statement that he has “never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in…[his] life.”  Reflecting Boehner’s words, it is even a widely understood piece of political insider wisdom that Ted Cruz is the most hated man in the Washington, DC political establishment (especially in the Senate), an establishment he is extremely hostile to but is also, nevertheless, something of a member of since he is one of only 100 sitting U.S. Senators; he turns on friends, he turns on his own Republican Party, he feeds off and uses skillfully delivered and amplified misinformation in the way a Sith Lord feeds off anger, all in a quest for personal power for Ted Cruz, regardless of who or what he damages in pursuit of this power.  In fact, it all seems to actually be part of his plan, because he has always worn the hatred of those he deems “The Establishment” as a badge of honor, and has sold this as a badge of honor—even as part of his campaign platform—quite successfully to his supporters.

This is a man who led his followers to believe that he could use a government shutdown he personally orchestrated to (ostensibly) attempt to force a repeal of Obamacare, though this ignored basic constitutional and political realities, of which Senator Cruz is supposedly an expert.  No, the real reason he engaged in such a stunt—complete with reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” in the Senate while on the taxpayer’s dime, all while blithely missing the irony in doing so—was for one reason and one reason only: to promote himself.  And in this, he wildly succeeded, even as he alienated himself even more so among his Congressional colleagues and caused a damaging government shutdown that risked the United States Government defaulting on its debts, damaged his political party’s brand, cost hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors (about 850,000 people) days to weeks of pay, and caused harmful economic spillover effects to the tune of $24 billion nationally and 0.6% in national GDP growth, economic effects felt especially in Washington, DC, Virginia, and Maryland.  Moreover, this shutdown occurred even as, embarrassingly, the Syrian government was able to fully operate in the regions of Syria it controlled in the midst of a full-scale civil war.  Yes, all these were acceptable casualties in Cruz’s quest to elevate himself to maximize his exposure and thus his chances for his presidential bid.  If there is any doubt as to how calculated all this was, consider that Cruz was the first major candidate in either party to officially announce his candidacy in a field that would swell to over twenty individuals.  He had clearly been planning for some time, and he would hardly have been unaware of the fact that the government shutdown is that for which he is most known by the American public; he sure isn’t known for his record as a legislator in the Senate, where he by far makes more noise than actually engaging in the normal tasks of being a U.S. Senator.

This is a man who has engaged in the ultimate deception on one of his signature issues: Cruz constructed what is possibly the most masterful lie in the history of American politics on immigration policy, positioning himself exquisitely carefully to be able to play both sides of the issue depending on which way the political winds blew in what may very well be the most planned (and one of the longest-running) series of political lies in American campaign history.  That he did lie many, many times and manipulate over an extended period of time on this issue is not in doubt and has been meticulously documented by William Saletan at Slate.

Then there is the infamous episode I wrote about some time ago, where Cruz was booed off the stage at an even highlighting the plight of Middle Eastern Christians.  Most of them are Arab, and Ted Cruz chose to open his remarks by insisting that Middle Eastern Christians first and foremost need to stick up for the Israeli state, even as it illegally occupies millions of Arab Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, and denies them basic human rights.  Middle Eastern Christians living under forces hostile to Israel—including ISIS—would be risking their very lives speaking out in favor of Israel.  This does not mean that Cruz does not have a point in the sense that as a minority in a region that generally treats minorities awfully, Christians there have a plight in common with Jews in a general historical sense, and that many anti-Israeli forces go way too far and veer into anti-Semitism, but this is not the main issue facing Christians in the Middle East at a forum dedicated to their suffering, not that of Israeli Jews and Cruz’s approach was certainly not appropriate, especially leading off with that, at that particular event.  Encouraging what he encouraged was not a way to help persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and was, in fact, asking them to needlessly expose themselves to danger, up to and including death.

Ted Cruz is not stupid.  Ted Cruz knows this.  Ted Cruz didn’t care about Middle Eastern Christians. Ted Cruz knew that much of the Republican evangelical base is fervently pro-Israel to the point of being apologists for Israel’s (self-)destructive and illegal nearly-half-century occupation of Palestinian territory.  Ted Cruz knew he was doing this was elevate himself in the eyes of the very people in America whose votes he needed to win in order to win his party’s nomination for the presidency.  Ted Cruz was perfectly willing to use Middle Eastern Christians as a prop to help himself.

This is a man who routinely engages in dangerous demagoguery when it comes to issues related to terrorism, Muslims (including Muslims-Americans), and Islam, in a dangerous way that preys on fears and creates more division, suspicion, mistrust, and hostility than is necessary, but this has been largely overlooked to a degree because of the Trump phenomenon.   Yet from to ISIS to Palestinians, from San Bernardino to the Iran nuclear deal (which Cruz has outrageously claimed makes “the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism”), Cruz has played a game of risky rhetorical hyperbole that deals in misleading demonization of vulnerable minorities to win political chips in order to elevate himself politically.

The lies and deceptions and destructive, selfish behavior do not begin or end here, but they are major points of a highlight reel.

This is the real Ted Cruz.

Failed Fiorina

Getty Images

Now, to pivot to Mrs. Fiorina.  Perhaps you are thinking she is better, but they are actually a match made in heaven (or hell, if you’re in Boehner’s camp).

Out of the political contenders this election cycle, only Dr. Carson, Trump, and Cruz have worse records on PolitiFact than Fiorina.  For Fiorina, 55% of her reviewed statements were at least mostly false (23%) or worse: false (23%), (liar liar) “pants on fire”-false (9%); only 28% were rated at least mostly true (14%) or true (14%).  Math might have eliminated them from getting a majority of delegates from the voting contests, but it sure makes them close in terms of lying.

In fact, as I have noted before, most of the two pillars that are together the entire premise of her presidential campaign (all of one and part of another) are based on falsehoods. 

For one thing, she has the gall to run on her record as a corporate executive at Lucent and as the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company at Hewlett Packard (HP), but she was instrumental in destroying both companies, facts which do not stop her from spinning her record to absurd lengths to shamefully duck from her clear responsibility in both historic business collapses.  As I wrote of her time at Lucent, she was either too stupid to know what was going on, which is unforgivable, or complicit in illegal and/or highly risky, highly-irresponsible business practices, which would be highly unethical and immoral.  The implosion of a company ensued, costing over 100,000 people their jobs, but Carly managed to use the deceptively ostensibly false posted “success” to land her the top job at HP, leaving just before Lucent came tumbling down.  With HP, she was actually in charge and helped to severely weaken the company from the most powerful position within it, for which she was fired after destroying much of the company’s value and shedding thousands of jobs.  She has been noted as one of the worst CEOs in modern history repeatedly.  And in each case, she made sure that her harmful business activities would be rewarded to the tunes of many millions of dollars, even as the companies she guided lost many millions of dollars in business and value.  One thing (perhaps the only thing) she excelled at during her time at both Lucent and HP was self-promotion.

The other pillar of her campaign is that she is a female secretary-to-CEO success story, but this is only partially true: yes, she achieved historic success as a woman, but only worked as a secretary while she was attending college and law school, dropping out of the latter.  When she later went to business school and earned her MBA, she began right after graduation at AT&T (later her section became Lucent) on a fast-track executive-level path to senior management.  That is a pretty normal narrative—to work while in school in temporary administrative positions to help cover expenses/tuition while after you earn your degree you hardly start at the bottom—and is hardly the direct path from secretary to CEO that she misleadingly makes it out to be.

No wonder when Carly Fiorina ran for a U.S. Senate seat in California on the basis of her deplorable business record that voters there resoundingly rejected her.

But if having her campaign’s premises be less than truthful isn’t enough for you to put her in league with Cruz, like Cruz, she has had some of the most spectacular lies of this campaign season and has refused to back down from them despite being repeatedly confronted with overwhelming evidence that he claims have been false.  I am talking especially about her despicable falsehoods she has repeatedly perpetuated regarding the women’s healthcare advocate and provider Planned Parenthood, whereby Fiorina claimed that Planned Parenthood was, in her words, utilizing “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain” in video she had seen with her own eyes (so she claimed), that Planned Parenthood sells dead baby organs for profit to some kind of baby organ trafficking network.  In reality, no such video exists actually linking Planned Parenthood to any such activity, she grossly mischaracterizes the video in question that according to all expert review does not seem to either be of an abortion or at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and there is zero evidence Planned Parenthood engages in the trade of fetal organs/tissue; in fact, a grand jury convened to consider charges against Planned Parenthood for illegal activity only found the activists targeting Planned Parenthood worthy of criminal investigations, not Planned Parenthood itself).

She has also levied vicious, quite mean-spirited, and grossly unfair attacks against Hillary Clinton, perhaps thinking that because she is a woman she could get away with such abuse more easily than if she were a man.  In fact, apart from spinning her own business record and lying about Planned Parenthood, aside from a few debates where she “shone” by delivering one-liners with a degree of competence, and other than mixing it up with Donald Trump, hyperbolically attacking Clinton is what most characterized her short-lived presidential campaign.

This campaign did not last more than the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, where she finished in 7th place in both states with less than 2% and a little over 4% of the of the vote, respectively.

This is just a brief taste of the major highlights of the real Fiorina, but one that still gives you the real flavor.

Perfect for Each Other, Perfectly Unfit for Office

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

So, when you thinks about it, if Ted Cruz, who was just mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from voting contests, still fully intended to find a way to get party elites to hand him the nomination in a sheer disregard for the will of the primary/caucus participants, the idea that he would pick someone who came in 7th in two contests and then dropped out actually makes sense in Ted’s World.  And if Carly Fiorina was going be willing to try to use her historically bad record as a top business executive as a reason for voters to consider her to be a U.S. Senator or the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency, then why not use her historically bad record as a political candidate for the Senate and the presidency as a reason for voters to consider her to be the Republican nominee for vice president on a ticket that would be inherently undemocratic in nature and a longshot (even at a contested convention, as I wrote earlier)? 

(On a quick aside, Marco Rubio, apparently, rejected such the same request from Cruz that Fiorina did not reject)

As with his behavior concerning the shutdown, Cruz was thinking about what was good for Ted Cruz, first and foremost; and it is telling that another person who thinks like he does—primarily about herself—would accept the offer to be the vice presidential nominee on an almost certainly doomed ticket, months before any ticket had ever been formed since the modern primary/caucus system was instituted.  The last time a move even remotely like this happened? Reagan’s failed, desperate attempt to edge out Gerald Ford in 1976 when he named a running mate at the end of July, three weeks before 1976 Republican convention (and three months later than Cruz, who made his move three months before this year’s convention!).  Reagan, though, unlike Cruz, was not mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from voting contests when he made his announcement.  Still, Reagan’s selfish gamble against an incumbent president when Ford was heavily favored helped to weaken Ford and hand the presidency over to Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party.

Gary Settle/The New York Times

We don’t know who will win the White House in November, but we do know that both Cruz and Fiorina have developed a megalomaniacal, delusional sense of self-importance and a massively inflated views of their own records that, time and time again, has allowed them in their minds to put themselves ahead of the organizations for which they are ostensibly fighting.  If not mathematically, we must hope that morally and ethically this eliminates them forever from consideration for high national office, especially, but not limited to, the presidency. 

Again, I am not at all a fan of Trump, but at least Trump has a record of a moderately successful businessman (if hardly a perfect one) and of getting deals done and earning the respect of many of his colleagues; Cruz is hated in the Senate (fellow Republican Senator and former presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham said that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” and only 4 out of 53 fellow Republican senators have endorsed Cruz, 2 of them doing so very unenthusiastically), and Fiorina was fired as CEO of HP, with both Cruz and Fiorina having terrible records in their highest professional capacities as noted earlier. 

Having seemingly settled on Trump, the Republican Party and its voters deserve little credit for anything these days, and yet, at least in picking Trump, they can arguably said to not have picked the very worst out of seventeen candidates (even if he is still pretty awful); at least they had the sense to pick neither Cruz nor Fiorina, who have the dubious distinctions of being two of the only candidates that can be said to be worse than Donald Trump.

Goodbye Ted and Carly (For Now)

AP

Unfortunately, the shamelessness and egomaniacal delusion displayed by both Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina means we would only be unbelievably fortunate for this failed ticket to be their political obituaries; no, their incredible narcissism that flies in the face of their terrible records is a strong indicator that we have, unfortunately, not seen the curtain call of their political theatrics in pursuit of offices for which they are most assuredly unfit.  And at least in that regard, they are in good company with many of their Republican colleagues, Trump included.

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Despite all the talk of Trump being stopped at an open convention, the only way the Republican Party can survive intact is if it unifies behind Trump.  While hardly an ideal situation for the Party, the climate it has fostered for years that has created the current debacle in which it finds itself now leaves it no other choice unless it wants to sacrifice itself for the good of the nation.  But “The Republican Establishment” will care far more about winning and staying in office than in putting country above party.  Thus, even at a contested convention, Trump is still likely to emerge as the GOP’s nominee.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 7, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 7th, 2016

Gary Varvel

AMMAN — At this moment, hot on the heels or Cruz’s big win in the Wisconsin Republican primary, there’s an awful lot of talk and speculation about a contested convention that would deny Trump the Republican nomination.  While after Wisconsin, the statistical probabilities of this have certainly increased significantly, the idea that this is likely relies mostly on the increased mathematical possibility that Trump will fall short of the 1,237 majority of delegates he needs to clinch the nomination outright on the first round of voting at the convention and that Trump’s chances to win the nomination are slim when other factors necessarily come into play, per the rules, on the second and any subsequent ballots. 

I will add that not least among the reasons that there is so much talk from both the media and pundit-class and that they are salivating at the idea of a contested convention are because 1.) it hasn’t happened in decades, 2.)both classes are deep students of the political process and it would be terribly fascinating to them, and 3.) it gives both something new to talk about and a reason for people to tune in and listen to them, since almost no Americans have any idea how such a scenario would play out an under what rules, meaning they will earn more money and more viewers (the bias is so often one of the media being a business trying to earn viewers and advertising dollars in a crowded field, rather than a political bias…).  Thus, both pundits and the media have a vested interest in seeing a contested convention, but we should not be too hard on them because, as noted, if it does happen, this is the first time since 1952 where it will happen for Democrats (and since either 1948 or 1952, depending on your definition, for Republicans) where we find ourselves in this boat.

This mode of thinking that Trump will be stopped at a contested convention, though, assumes a lot of things that, upon closer inspection, are extremely unlikely, despite the cries from non-Trumpers to make it sound like a certain thing.  Here are the top 10 reasons why it is very unlikely that the Republican Party will deny him the nomination at a contested convention:

1.) Trump will have far more delegates than anyone else, ALMOST a majority

LM Otero/Reuters

Even if Trump falls short of 1,237 delegates before the convention, he will almost certainly do so by the narrowest of margins; the Republican candidate who is second to Trump is Ted Cruz, who is only at 54% of the delegates he should have at this point in order to be on track to secure the nomination outright, and, as I have written before, Kasich is likely to surprise some people with the amount of delegates he could pick up in some of these later-voting states, thus, Cruz will not be getting all the non-Trump delegates, making his chances of making up his current gigantic deficit in delegates that much more remote, especially considering that most of the states with larger delegate prizes coming—most varieties of winner-take-all—are more favorable to Trump and some signs point to them being more favorable to Kasich than Cruz. This means Trump—currently with 93% of the delegates he should have at this time to be on track for the nomination on a first ballot, a deficit that is eminently possible to make up—will enter the convention with the most delegates by far, with his competitors nowhere near the majority needed to secure the nomination and far behind him, regardless of whether Trump is at or over 1,237 delegates or not.

2.) Trump will have a dominant plurality of votes from actual voters

Mark Wallheiser/Getty

Considering point 1.), in order for the Republican National Convention to deny Trump the nomination, it will have to thwart the will of the people who voted in their primaries and caucused at caucuses; Trump, after a string of defeats, still has 37% of the vote, and that is before the populous states of New York and Pennsylvania vote in the next few weeks, states that seem quite favorable to Trump, among other states that are favorable to Trump voting in the same time-frame. His share of the vote is certain to increase over 40% after these near-term contests, whereas Ted Cruz, who has so far won about 28% of the vote, is likely to see his share of the vote drop below 25%, perhaps even lower, in the next few weeks.  No other candidate, active or not, had earned more than 16% of the vote.  Trump could very well have 45% or even more going into the convention, Cruz a lot less, maybe even half as much or less.  If delegates and Party elites decide to throw the nomination to Cruz, someone who got far fewer votes than even Cruz, or someone who did not even run for president during the nomination process, they risk the wrath of anywhere from roughly 40% to 50% of the people who participated in Republican primaries and caucuses; even though Trump will likely not have gotten a majority of votes, he will receive a clear plurality and the Republican Party, its elites, and delegates will have to absolutely ignore and disrespect the voice of this commanding plurality to stop Trump.

The consequences of such an unprecedented and dangerous move could be catastrophic, even fatal, for the Republican Party, its elites, its delegates, it sitting office-holders, its prospective office-holders, and for the self-perceived interests of its voters.  Here are the potential consequences:

3.) Trump will form a Third Party and run as its nominee

Trump could (in fact, is almost certain to) break away from the Republican National Convention and the Republican Party, with most, maybe almost all of his passionate 40+% of the primary voters, and form a third party if he is denied the nomination. Throughout his campaign, despite several times pledging to support whoever is the Republican  nominee, Trump has not been shy about repeatedly asserting that he might not support the Republican nominee if he does not think that the Republican Party treats him fairly, and just recently asserted that this is now the case; his two still-active rivals also backed out of the unity pledge.  Without question, the Party denying him the nomination when he, by far, has the most votes and the most voting-earned delegates would be an act that falls under this category of “unfair” for Trump (and many others). Yes, we know that non-Trump voters really don’t like Trump, but the exit polls in Wisconsin just showed us that Trump voters really don’t like Ted Cruz, either, with both sets of dislikes likely holding true as the contest between the two of them has taken an even nastier turn than usual.  Trump supporters right now hate the Republican Party, its “Establishment,” and what it has become.  There is a very good chance that nearly all of his supporters would follow him and support his third-party candidacy.  But even far lower a proportion than that deserting the party could be fatal for the Party and its chances to win the White House, and even hold onto Congress, in the fall.

Consequences of a Trumpian third party: 

4.) A Democrat (Hillary Clinton) wins the White House

Getty

If Trump breaks off and forms a new party, both his new party and the old Republican Party are virtually certain* (see the end) not to win the fall presidential election, meaning a Democrat will be in the White House for at least four years.  And not just any Democrat, but one Republicans loathe: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

5.) The Republican Party as we know it will be destroyed

Tom Stiglich/Creators Syndicate

In addition to not retaking the White House, the Republican Party will have to look at the very real possibility that it will be destroyed as we know it today. The Trump coalition will be filled with even more bitterness, rage, and resentment towards the Republican Party, far more (if that is even possible) than the already high levels its members currently harbor towards it.  Like the Whigs, partly from the ashes of which the original Republican Party rose in the 1850s, the Republican Party may simply fade away into oblivion; if it survives, it could be a substantially smaller party than it has been at any time during its existence, save for its early formative days, because the damage from a formal rupture in 2016 is not one that would be able to be healed anytime soon.   As one major Republican insider recently opined on Showtime’s The Circus, “We can’t put it back together, Humpty Dumpty won’t come back together.”

6.) Many Republicans could lose elections by going against Trump

When a third Trump party happens, local Congressmen in districts that voted heavily for Trump will have to make a choice: stand up for Trump and/or possibly leave the Republican Party and join his movement, or stay loyal to the Republican Party and risk Trump’s supporters going against (or at least not for) them, meaning a far higher chance of them losing their seats in Congress. The same goes for senators and governors in states with a lot of Trump supporters, whose seats that are up for (re)election in 2016 will be at risk with a split as well, a rupture that would likely go all the way down to local politics as well.  Given recent elected Republican officials’ track record of pandering totally to what the people who voted for them want, and not what is in the national interest—pushing for multiple government shutdowns over “Obamacare” and Planned Parenthood, the former succeeding once, the latter narrowly avoided because of John Boehner’s sacrificial heroics—one can hardly expect them to go against Trump if they are in heavily pro-Trump districts.  In fact, the idea that large numbers of sitting Republicans would risk their seats and reelection to fight Trump out of principle is actually quite laughable.  John Boehner, Lindsey Graham, and Mitt Romney, the last two among the leading anti-Trump activists, are rare gems who are men of principle and decency; the same cannot be said for many of their colleagues.

7.) Beware the Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson as a Vulture

Gage Skidmore

Libertarian candidate and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, who garnered close to 1.3 million votes for president as the candidate of the Libertarian Party (on the ballot in all 50 states i 2016) in the 2012 national election, has seen his support increasing of late, hitting 11% in a recent poll(to Clinton’s 42% and Trump’s 34%). This puts him within striking distance (with plenty of time to close the gap) of getting to 15%, which would earn him a spot in the nationally televised presidential debates shortly before the election.  If the Republican Party splits, it will be interesting to see where members of its libertarian wing (Particularly Rand—and even Ron—Paul) go, and Johnson is very likely to pick up some support from this wing out of the Republicans’ wreckage.  This means there is a realistic possibility of four candidates on the debate stage in the fall…

8.) Most of “Establishment” is not actively going against Trump

The simple fact that is lost amid all the talk of a contested convention that would thwart the plurality of Republican primary/caucus voters is the Republican “Establishment”—office holders, elites, power-brokers, intellectuals—are keenly aware of all the points I just raised.  While The intellectual wing—intellectuals, columnists, media commentators, whose members are not generally office holders and won’t lose their current positions if Trump and his supporters revolt against the Party—is decidedly against Trump, in contrast, the current class of Republican office-holders—senators, congressmen, governors—are incredibly silent in the fight between Trump and Cruz, and even on Kasich.

To quantify this, so far only 32 Republican congressional representatives (including 10 from his home state) have endorsed Ted Cruz out of 247, or only less than 13% of Republicans in the House.  John Kasich has only garnered the support 7 Republican House members (including 4 from his home state), the same number as Trump.  When it comes to senators, sitting Senator Ted Cruz has only received the endorsement of just 3 out of 53 of his fellow Republican senators, about 5.6% of his colleagues, and 2 out of 3 of them—Lindsey Graham and James Risch—and are vocally unenthusiastic, with Graham likening a choice between Trump and Cruz to one of between shooting yourself and drinking poison and Risch markedly declining to characterize his support as an endorsement.  Kasich only has 2 senators, including one from his home state, to Trump’s 1.  When it comes to governors, out of 31 Republican governors, only 5, or just about 16%, support Cruz, including the governor of his home state, and only 2 of Kasich’s colleagues supports Kaisch, who is himself a sitting governor.  Trump, meanwhile has won the endorsements of 3 Republican governors. 

In other words, the vast majority of “The Establishment” is not even publicly trying to fight Trump, is not publicly supporting either of his two remaining rivals, and it not even publicly involved in the contentious nomination process.  Yes, the anti-Trump forces are quite vocal right now, but as we have seen from the Bernie Sanders “political revolution” movement, loudness is a poor indicator of how widespread support actually is.  As I wrote before, the last Republican debate was a clear sign that “The Republican Establishment” is resigned, however reluctantly, to Trump being their nominee, and would rather an back an unfit candidate than lose their own offices in a fight on principle.  If this was not the case, we would see far larger numbers of senators, congressmen, and governors enthusiastically supporting Cruz or Kasich, and this would have been happening for some time; after Cruz’s win in Wisconsin, it’s going to happen now or pretty much never.  And it’s not happening now, even thought many of the most important remaining contests before the convention are happening in the second-half of April, just around the corner…

9.) Delegates could also pay a price for thwarting Trump

In addition, we must discuss the delegates. These delegates are actual people with their own beliefs, and, apparently, many of them do not, and not likely to, like Trump.  And over two-thirds of delegates are selected by state/local conventions/committees some time after the primaries and caucuses for their respective states; adding in the 7% of delegates that are made up of Republican National Committee members, you have almost three-quarters of all delegates who are not selected directly by the voters or by candidates.  These three-quarters of the delegates are people who are active in state and local Republican Party politics and in the Party apparatus; these are generally not people who are in the Trump crowd, but, rather, are good, loyal Republicans.  On the first round of voting, almost all the delegates (95%) are bound to vote the way their states’ populations have voted, but after this first round, that number falls to 42%, and then to 20% in a third round if it comes to that, and so on.  

And yet, I have a hard time believing that most of the delegates, who are hopeful of continued roles in the Party and of bright futures in politics, will be so willing to risk the ire or such a strong, vocal plurality, approaching a (or maybe even a slight) majority of the electorate that participated in the Republican contests.  You can bet the people and surrogates who support Trump will be putting very heavy pressure on them to respect the will of the voters, and will not forget those who fail to do so.  And let’s not forget that Trump supporters are the most loyal and passionate supporters of any of the remaining Republican candidates.  These delegates will have to go back to these people, with whom they live and have known for years, and answer for why they ignored their will, ignored the votes of their friends, neighbors, and fellow Party members.  The answers will likely amount to “I knew better than you” or “I was pressured (bribed?) by the Party,” neither of which will go over well… 

10.) Riots are far from a remote impossibility

Mike Christy/Arizona Daily Star via AP

Finally, there is specter of political violence. I do not believe that Trump will directly or sincerely encourage violence, but many of his very loyal and very passionate supporters are no philosophers and have not shied away from getting a bit physical (occasionally even more than a bit) at some of his rallies.  Trump supporters are already in rage mode, and many of them own guns; I’m hardly suggesting any kind of civil war or armed insurgency, but nevertheless there is the certainty of mass protests if Trump is denied the nomination and a decent possibility of violence and violent riots; Donald Trump himself has said as much.

For all of these reasons, if Trump enters the convention short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot, I don’t believe Republicans have enough chutzpah or a sense of sacrifice to risk their party’s destruction and their own chances to both hold onto their elected offices and/or have a political future by operating in the most undemocratic of ways and awarding the nomination to someone who has not earned anywhere near as much support as Trump. I would be shocked if this was the case.

*****

In any event, I happen to like Trump’s chances to get to 1,237 before the convention (game out scenarios here) even after his loss in Wisconsin.

On Wisconsin…

Yes, Wisconsin was a bump in the road, but he still managed to get over 35% of the vote there in a state whose Republicans were not as favorable to him demographically as they could have been (being slightly more conservative and educated than those in many of the other states he won), where has been an active presence of national “Establishment” Republican powers as a result of the high profile political battles of its Governor Scott Walker in the past few election cycles, where the popular-with-RepublicansWalker had endorsed Cruz, and where his enemies poured millions into defeating him.  Furthermore, Trump still held onto a large share of the vote even after he had one of the worst stretches of any candidate in modern election history over the last few weeks leading up to the Wisconsin Primary.  Wisconsin is a blow, sure, but hardly a fatal one and one he weathered quite well (as he always seems to).

The Road Ahead: Still Paved for Trump

Trump now still seems in position to dominate the contests coming up in the next few weeks as he faces two rivals in Kasich and Cruz who are competing with themselves as much as him, with a pretty resigned “Establishment” on the sidelines and declining to rally to either them.  In addition, there is evidence that suggests some of Cruz’s surging support is more of an anti-Trump thing than one of people actually voting for Cruz, and Trump’s supporters are still retaining a significant advantage in enthusiasm, factors that will favor Trump when it comes to voter turnout.

As I’ve written before, don’t dismiss The Donald; he will still very likely be the Republican Party’s nominee.  The only hope the Republicans have of still winning if they deny Trump the nomination rests on Bernie Sanders being a spoiler, refusing to support Hillary Clinton when she wins the Democratic Party’s nomination and running against Clinton, Trump, and whoever else with his own new insurgent party.  That means possibly five candidates on the debate stage in the fall.  Behave, Bernie.

AP

Related articles: Western Democracy Is on Trial, More than Any Time Since WWII

GOP To Unify Behind Trump, Cease Circus, Game Has Changed Since Debate; Democrats To Face Stronger GOP in Fall, Sanders Must Tone Down Clinton Attacks

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 1, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) February 1st, 2016

Also by Brian: Why Trump Will Win Iowa: All Major Trends Point to Trump Triumph

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

AP Photo/Paul Sancya

AMMAN — Looking at Iowa—also known as The Hawkeye State—several thematic observations can be made about the state of American presidential political campaigns as the full election season of 2016 officially kicks off.

1.) The Republican Civil War Has Now Devolved Into Anarchy

The last week before the Iowa caucuses will be remembered as the time when any pretense that the Republican Party was not in an anarchic civil war melted away.  There are so many fractures and faultiness being exposed here that this resembles less the American Civil War between North and South than the current Syrian Civil War or the Thirty Years” War.  While there is a clear front-runner, the entire rest of the tier—well over half of surveyed Republicans’ support is divided among the dozen non-Trump candidates—is a mess.

A whole separate article (or series of articles!) could be written about how we got to this point.  For now, we can look at the the most recent schisms in light of recent events, which together demonstrate beyond a doubt the anarchic state of things for the GOP.

a.) Trump’s war with Fox

Ever since the first Republican debate, it has been clear that Trump has not liked Megyn Kelly; Trump went after her and Kelly’s network stuck by her, escalating the feud to include Fox.  Eventually, Fox News head Roger Ailes and Trump spoke, and let it be known they were on good terms.  However, it soon became clear that the personal good terms did not seem to extend how Trump felt about the network or Kelly, and over the past few months, regular pundits on Fox have been critical of Trump and Trump has been critical of Kelly and her network.  He flirted with the idea of skipping the last debate before the Iowa caucuses since Kelly was going to be a moderator, but did not sounds particularly emphatic regarding this possibility.  That changed when Fox News issued an official press release mocking Trump in very a satirical (and unprofessional) tone.  Trump responded angrily by definitively pulling out of the debate. 

I am not sure if people realize how incredibly unprecedented this is: both that the one major news organization that can be seen as a mouthpiece of the Republican Party was publicly attacking its front-runner a few days before the final debate before the nominating process officially began with the Iowa caucuses, and that the front-runner withdrew from a debate he had committed to almost at the last minute.  Either by itself would have been unprecedented enough.  This might have never happened before in American history, and certainly has not happened in the modern era. 

For a party that has so long been characterized (and characterized itself) as the more organized and disciplined of the two major parties, very few occurrences could so dramatically illustrate the rapid decline and internal chaos now afflicting that party.  Thus, a few days before the first contest in which Republican voters would begin choosing their nominee, the nation’s preeminent, most successful, and most dominant conservative news outlet was in open conflict with the the conservative party’s front-runner.  As a result, Trump announced that he would hold his own event to raise money for veterans instead of attending the debate, and the debate had the second-lowest ratings of any of the seven Republican debates held thus far.  And Trump did manage to raise $6 million for veterans, including a donation he made himself for $1 million.  While people can debate about the decorum of how veterans and their causes are used as political football, this is simply how American, and especially Republican, politics operate, and it is hard, objectively, to single Trump out on this measure.  At least in Trump’s case, $6 million was raised that would not have been raised otherwise. And he did this while his opponents squabbled and tore each other apart, hurting each other but not Trump.  Trump even opened by saying he would have liked to have gone to the debate, but framed it as a matter of principle, but mentioned also that Fox had reached out to him repeatedly, “apologized” (Fox did not use that word in its account), and was very nice, but that it was just too late.

Yes, somehow, Trump managed to (relatively) elevate himself above the debate’s political bickering and actually do something that helped people, and the network that was attacking him and decidedly not favoring him enabled this whole contrast to take place in the first place.  Apart from certain conservatives who are decidedly anti-Trump and tried to frame the whole situation as Trump being a coward and wanting to avoid a debate, the consensus from respectable pundits on both the right and the left, from Chuck Scarborough to David Gergen, is that Trump came out on top over Fox.

b.) Trump’s war with the right’s ideological intelligentsia

What passes for the Republicans’ version of an intelligentsia has been very anti-Trump from the start.  Now, one of the preeminent publications of conservative intellectual thought, National Review, has devoted almost an entire issue to attacking Trump in one of the biggest media broadsides directed at Trump to date.  The problem for The National review is that today’s Republican Party is clearly very much not an intellectual party and the party rank-and-file is in revolt against such intellectual elites, especially since the rise of the Tea Party, thus this little issue will have almost no effect on the race; very few Republicans will actually even read it…

c.) Trump vs. Cruz

They played nice for some time, but once the two were close in Iowa, the gloves came off, and their attacks against each other have definitely escalated.  There is something intensely satisfying about seeing such a darling of the Tea Party weighed down by Trump’s birtherism attacks, since the Tea Party has long embraced ludicrous birther conspiracy theoriesabout Obama.  Trump and Cruz have been hitting each other hard in the final days in Iowa, but only Cruz seems to have suffered significantly as a result.

d.) Cruz vs. Rubio

While there were previews of this fight before the latest Trumpless debate, that evening was when the two began their main assaults against each other (Rubio saying then that Cruz is “willing to say or do anything in order to get votes”), and now it is ugly.  With immigration as the central issue, Cruz is trying to portray Rubio as a capitulator and supporting what he terms “amnesty,” while Rubio maintains that Cruz’s entire campaign is “built on” a “lie:” Cruz’s sly, morphing position(s!) on immigration.  The two seem to have landed some good blows against each other, with neither clearly standing above the other, but Rubio is now trending up while Cruz is trending down.  In the final days before the caucuses, Cruz has directed most of his attacks against Rubio, seeing him as the biggest threat since he could emerge as a second second-place Trump-alternative over time, the position Cruz is currently tenuously occupying.  Cruz, then, is not running a campaign to beat Trump so much as he is trying to make himself appear as the only viable alternative to Trump.

e.) Most of the other Republican candidates vs. Cruz

Not only Trump and Rubio, but most of the rest of the candidates seem to be going after Cruz now, especially Rand Paul, because they see Cruz as the biggest obstacle between them and Trump; it seems no one wants to hurt Trump if it will only help Cruz run off with the nomination, something that says a lot about how fellow politicians—the people with whom a President Cruz would need to work—view him.  Maybe they also just don’t like him and see through his blatant posturing…

f.) Cruz vs. the media

Cruz has always portrayed the media as his enemy, and has tried, unsuccessfully, to play negative coverage and questions on his flip-flopping on immigration, his loan scandal, and about his constitutional eligibility to run for president as smears by the media.  His attempts to outright dismiss these issues  when pressed by the press (especially during and after the last Trumpless debate) have fallen flat.

g.) Iowa Republican leaders vs. Cruz 

Iowa’s long-term Republican governor, while not endorsing anyone, has come out strongly and somewhat unprecedentedly against Cruz.  And his Secretary of State has condemned Cruz’s campaign for mailing out false, manipulative flyers (see section 2.)

h.) Cruz vs. The Republican Establishment

While it is not clear who The Establishment will rally behind, this much is clear: it hates Cruz (see below)…

i.) The Republican Establishment vs. itself

Early in Trump’s candidacy, The (vaunted) Republican Establishment was decidedly anti-Trump and some of them had helped Gov. Jeb Bush build up a well-over $100 million war chest.  My, how things have changed: now, on one level, many of Bush’s donors are looking to bail on him and find a new candidate; on another, The Establishment is so anti-Cruz that some of themhave begun supporting Trump against Cruz as the lesser of two evils, though it remains to be seen both if this is a temporary measure or not, i.e., if they will turn on Trump if they can first vanquish Cruz.  For those who aren’t resigned to, or leaning towards, Trump, there are too many other candidates they favor collectively to be able to say any one of them has a clear advantage (“buzz” about Rubio has been constant, especially from Fox, but as of yet this has not materialized into enough support to mean anything significant for Rubio).  Where The Establishment will end is anyone’s guess, although we can certainly rule Cruz out.

j.) Rubio vs. Bush

Bush and Rubio have been going after each other for months, but one of the most intense moments was at the last, Trumpless debate, when Rubio hypocritically called out Bush for changing his position over immigration, citing Bush’s book; Bush had one of his best moments of the debates as he literally laughed off the charge, saying “So did you Marco!”and sold himself well as someone able to get things done, while Rubio just feebly repeated the same charge against Bush, again citing Bush’s book (where was this JEB! before?).  As the race goes forward, this rivalry between a former mentor and his former protégé looks only to get worse.

k.) Rubio vs. Christie

For whatever reasons (most likely because they are now competing for some of the same Establishment support) Gov. Christie and Rubio have been really getting into it recently.  Both in recent debates and on the campaign trail, the two have sharpened their attacks against each other are attacking each other more and more frequently.  At least in the debates, Christie seems to have gotten the best of Rubio usually; like Bush, Christie has skillfully pointed out Rubio’s hypocrisy, even sort of coming to Bush’s defense.  How these two interact, especially coming up in New Hampshire, where they are neck-and-neck, will be worth watching.  

Rubio may very well become the next Cruz, both to his benefit and to his detriment…

l.) Evangelicals vs. themselves

Evangelicals are divided.  But Evangelicals are more divided in Iowa than in they are nationally; Cruz’s higher margin of support with Evangelicals over Trump is weaker in Iowa than it is nationally.  In Iowa, Trump, by various measures, has the support of slightly more than two Evangelicals for every three Evangelicals that support Cruz.  Since Cruz is placing almost his entire candidacy on the support of Evangelicals, this is something of a problem for him.  Jerry Falwell Jr.’s recent endorsement of Trump also suggests problems for Cruz.  Additionally, Dr. Ben Carson is also taking a significant chunk of the Evangelical vote, even though he is far behind both Trump and Cruz.  It Trump wins Iowa and does well among evangelicals there, does this translate into more support for Trump among Evangelicals nationally?  It very well may…

m.) The Republican base vs. The Republican Establishment

No surprise here: this was one of the major stories of 2015 and even before that (just look at John Boehner’s tenure as Speaker of the House and the rise of the Tea Party) and will continue to be a major theme this election year; Donald Trump’s rise is only the main manifestation of this trend…

Reuters/Brian C. Frank

2.) The Last Stands of Ted and Bernie?

First, let me be clear: I am not making an outright comparison between Sens. Cruz and Sanders.  While Cruz is clearly an amazingly calculating liar, I will show in an upcoming piece that Bernie is not as extreme as some would make him out to be.  But the one thing they do have in common, other than being sitting senators, is that they need to win Iowa to give their campaigns any real chance of being competitive going forward.

Cruz’s desperation, in particular, is showing, as his pitches grow weirder, his tactics more extreme, even downright dirty: the Republican Secretary of State for Iowa has even called out Cruz for sending out misleading flyers to voters likely to support him falsely claiming that they would be guilty of voting “violations”  that would be on their “public record” if they did no go to the caucuses, essentially scaring voters who favor him into turning out.  Here, we truly see the level of respect that Cruz has for people in general and his supporters specifically.  Incredibly and tellingly, Cruz essentially defended the move by saying that the end justifies the means: “I will apologize to nobody for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote.”  The latest polls in Iowa have shown a steady Trump lead, a Cruz drop, and surge for #3 Rubio, while in New Hampshire, Cruz, far behind Trump, also appears to be losing ground, where others are gaining on Cruz or pulling even with him; if Cruz fails to prevail in Iowa, he could very well fall out of the top few places in New Hampshire, making it ever harder in a crowded field to build support nationally, where Cruz has only held a distant second place to Trump for less than two months, a spot he gained only just after rising to the #2 spot in Iowa, suggesting the two situations are related.  As I wrote a week ago, all the major signs point to a Trump win, whose support is also deeper than Cruz’s.  However, if Cruz does manage to defeat Trump—most likely by poaching other candidates’ supporters—he might be able to go forward successfully as the main anti-Trump candidate, as his success there would make it difficult for Marco Rubio or anyone else to build much momentum going forward.

Andrew Burton—Getty Images

As for Bernie, I don’t think a single sane commentator would suggest otherwise than that his campaign has surprised all and outperformed expectations by a large margin.  That being said, seventeen out of twenty-three polls since January 1st, including the six of the last seven polls (and one of those seven is the gold-standard final poll by polling virtuoso Ann Selzer), have Clinton ahead of Sanders, and her support is also more committed.  It seems the only way Bernie could beat Hillary is if he was able to have an Obamaesque effect on voter turnout, and while he does seem to have generated substantial enthusiasm, the level seems to fall far short of the unique, historic, Obama-level Iowa caucuses support.  Still, it remains close, and since, unlike Cruz, he was not trending down in the final polls, it would seem Bernie has a better chance of prevailing than Cruz.  At the same time, if Bernie cannot win in Iowa, it is extremely difficult to envision a path for him to the nomination save for some disaster for Clinton, like a health problem or an FBI indictment regarding her e-mail situation, both of which seem highly unlikely.  Why is Iowa so crucial for Bernie?  That’s because Bernie’s core support comes from white liberals, and, apart from his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire, no state has a higher percentage of white liberals than Iowa, and only Massachusetts ties it; these four states are also the only states out of fifty where white liberals make up at least half the Democratic electorate.  So Bernie is quite fortunate in that the first two contests for the nomination are in states that are as favorable as possible to him, two among the four states that are most predisposed to support him; if he is unable to win in Iowa, it would reconfirm the suspicious of those who have reasonable doubts about his ability to have widespread appeal and to win a general election, let alone a nomination.  It will be close, but Clinton has reason to be confident in victory (though hardly overhwhelmingly so), while, at the same time, Bernie really needs this a win here to stay relevant.

3.) “Iowa, You’re Fired!”

One final thought: especially if Trump (but also, to a lesser degree, if Sanders) wins in Iowa, expect (respective) Party elites to seriously begin a discussion about demoting Iowa from its current spot as the lead state in the nomination contest calendar.  This would be quite welcome and healthy, as Iowa in 2016 does not represent America as a whole well and Iowa’s caucuses are inherently undemocratic and involve a lot of social pressure and no privacy in voting.

Read follow up article: Politics From Iowa to New Hampshire: Out Of The Frying-Pan Into The Fire

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter(you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 26, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 26th, 2016

Also by Brian: Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

Eric Thayer/The New York Times

AMMAN — Unless something crazy happens, Donald Trump will win in Iowa on Monday night, the first official contest of the Republican race to be the party’s nominee for the presidency.  There are several major quantitative and qualitative factors behind me making this prediction (and, frankly, any election prediction): 1.) recent developments, 2.) long-term developments, and 3.) polling data; all three point solidly towards a Trump triumph.

1.) Recent developments

Recent developments alone are, combined, pretty damning for Cruz and solid for Trump.

a.) As I wrote before, Trump solidly swatted away Cruz’s attempt to dislodge him from the lead spot both in Iowa and nationally, with some help from Sen. Rubio and from Cruz himself, the latter of whom did not have a single effective response when attacked or questioned.

b.) The thing about Iowa and New Hampshire is that, being the first two states in both parties’ nomination contest calendars, candidates spend more time there than in any other states during the nomination process. Since Iowa only has about 3.1 million people New Hampshire only about 1.3 million people, and no other states of comparable size get that much personal attention from candidates, this mean that Iowans are seeing more of both Trump and Cruz per capita than people in any other state other than New Hampshire, and will therefore have a much more up-close-and-personal view of the candidates than voters in almost any other state.  And they will realize that Trump is just more likable in comparison to Cruz.  Even I feel like I’d rather grab a beer or watch a game with Trump instead of Cruz.  And Iowans tends to care more about this kind of stuff since personal interaction with candidates actually factors into their thinking in such a way that most voters and most states can only dream about.  In drawing more and more to Trump as the days to the caucuses become fewer and fewer, Iowans are mirroring something which many Republicans realized long ago: that Cruz is intensely and widely disliked, even by many of his Republican colleagues.  In fact, outside of the Republican base, pretty much everyone hates Ted Cruz: I am talking about the people, including Republicans, who actually know Cruz well personally and work with Cruz professionally, from his college roommate all the way to his Senate and congressional colleagues, including the only recently former Speaker of the House, John Boehner.  Even Iowa’s own Republican governor just recently came out against Cruz, a highly uncommon move for a governor in the middle of his state’s contest.  What passes for the Republican intelligentsia (which seems to have hit a real nadir in influence this election cycle) has taken something of an ideological stance against Trump and seems to favor Cruz.  However, more significantly, mainstream and/or Washington Establishment Republicans, though not necessarily happy with Trump, seem to prefer him over Cruz, and seeing Cruz within striking distance of winning Iowa, seem to now be surprisingly (and sometimes energetically, in the case of 1996 Republican presidential nominee and former Senator Bob Dole) coming out swinging against Cruz and expressing a preference for Trump over Cruz, just in time to have an impact on the Iowa race.

c.) Another quality that Iowans getting relative major in-person time with candidates tend to care about is the nebulous “authenticity” vibe; while Trump is seen as exceptionally authentic because he has almost no filterbetween what pops in his head and what comes out of his mouth (or his Twitter feed, for that matter), Cruz appears to be an actual human filter: incredibly inauthentic and ridiculously hyperbolic; almost every move of his seems to be incredibly calculated, from his speech to Middle Eastern Christians and his filibuster speeches to his debate performances and immigration statements, Cruz may actually be one of the most cynically calculating and disingenuous politicians to ever be so prominent nationally. Even an answer to a non-political question about what music he listens to was turned by Cruz into an opportunity for him to pander and divide in the most calculated of ways.  Iowans will have been seeing this forced, rehearsed aspect of Cruz for weeks now, and I doubt it will help him in relation to The Donald; in fact, I suspect that the longer they are exposed to him, the less they will like him, just like his colleagues in Congress.

d.) Palin’s endorsement (and Falwell Jr.’s): for some reason, Palin is still big with Evangelicals and there are lots of Republican Evangelicals in Iowa. In fact, the Iowa Republican constituency is tailor-made to be influenced by a Palin endorsement far more than populations in many other states, and it comes just at the right time for Trump, even allowing for the newest episode of Palin family drama. Not long after Palin’s endorsement, Trump also just today won a key endorsement from Evangelical heavyweight Jerry Fallwell’s son, which will only help him even more with Evangelicals, Cruz’s key target constituency.

e.) Finally, there are no serious scandals plaguing Trump right now, while Cruz has both loangate and birthergate 2.0 (a large chunk of Republicans now doubt Cruz’s constitutional eligibility to run for president), neither of which can yet be dismissed and neither of which Cruz has responded to effectively, especially for self-styled no-nonsense Iowans; he certainly has not done anything to mitigate their impact in time for the February 1st.

2.) Longer-term trends are also in Trump’s favor

Even before Trump announced his candidacy, there was a clear and deep anti-establishment mood among the Republican rank-and-file.  In addition, there was a clear and deep anti-immigrant mood among the same.  While Cruz, contrary to his narrative, long waffled and calculated what position would benefit him the most politically and shamelessly but skillfully flip-flopped, Trump barged in and harnessed both moods more commandingly than any other candidate; he harnessed them to ride to the front of the pack and has not looked back since, even when it seemed he might be overtaken, and thus far, he’s maintained his lead consistently.  Trump has also absolutely dominated media coverage since he entered the race, and very much to his benefit, in a way no candidate has even come close to matching.  On top of all this, as I wrote before, having such a large number of Republican candidates also favored Trump, mainly because Trump is such a unique candidate while the others are largely having trouble differentiating themselves and/or simply cannot attract wide support.  But perhaps more than anything else, Republican elites from media bosses to Tea Party politicians have been fueling a number of trends—anti-intellectualism, disdain for experience and professional politicians, Islamophobia, an embrace of wild conspiracy theories, an increase in extreme rhetoric and extreme positions and even extreme congressional redistricting, and others—that laid the groundwork for the rise of a Trump when before such a thing would have been unthinkable, even just a few years ago; indeed, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster did share a name for a reason.  Much like with the creation of the Tea Party itself, those fomenting these trends thought they could control the effects of their actions, but they utterly failed to grasp the situation and seem to be suffering a figurative fate similar to the French Revolution’s Jacobins, with Trump becoming the Napoleon who will undo them.

3.) Polling

Almost exactly one month after Trump announced his candidacy in mid-June, polling averages began having Trump in the #1 spot since mid-July, and with the exception of November 5th and November 6th, when Dr. Ben Carson ever-so-briefly held the lead in the Real Clear Politics polling average, Trump has held onto that #1 spot since mid-July.

As the FiveThirtyEight podcast for this week noted, yes, the final weak has been volatile and unpredictable in the past for Iowa, with surprise wins for candidates who were behind, but, at the same time, clear trendlines were already visible that favored those who won; in the case of the Iowa Republican caucuses, all polling trends have Trump rising and Cruz dropping, not just in Iowa, but nationally, too.  In fact, Trump just in the last few days had his highest support in any of CNN’s polls: 41% (and only one other poll since he entered the race had him that high, one from mid-December), which was more than double Cruz’s support, which was only at 19%.  A television discussion of the CNN poll also showed that Trump had both the most enthusiastic and the most loyal supporters, and by far.  Additionally, the lowest lead margin for Trump in all national polls for all of January is a whopping 13 percentage points.  In over sixty polls since Trump took the lead in polling averages, Trump has only trailed in four polls, to Dr. Carson, between late September and early November, and has been #1 in every single national poll since then.  Furthermore Trump is now dominating Cruz with Evangelicals, a group on which Cruz is very much strategically betting his campaign.  

He is dominating and has dominated in in early key contests, too.  In Iowa, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held the lead there when Trump entered the race, but Trump overtook him in early August; then, Dr. Carson overtook him there in late October, only for trump to retake the lead from him in early November; Trump kept the lead until Cruz rose above him in mid-December, but lost that lead just two weeks ago.

This unfolding narrative fits in with what I wrote in early August: namely, that Trump’s competitors were more likely to be competing for support with each other for similar voters than with Trump, who would tend to draw different types of voters, and that the middle-of-the-pack was polling so lowly that very few candidates would drop out anytime soon since it would not take much for them to rise to striking-distance and they would continue to divide the non-Trump vote in such a way that no one would be able to rise to really compete with Trump in a sustained way.  So far, when he has been competing for similar voters (e.g. with Carson and Cruz), he seems to be fending them off after these candidates enjoyed a peak period that was followed by their declines that correlated with Trump surges.  This was the case nationally, and appears to be the case with Iowa, too.  

*****

Yes, all the stars are more-or-less aligning in Trump’s favor, and just in time for him to win the first contest for his party’s presidential nomination, in Iowa on Monday, February 1st.  Expect with a high degree of confidence for Trump to win by a slim to medium margin.  And, with the weird nature of caucuses, which are not a blind voting system but actually a series of conversations between supporters, some of Cruz’s supporters may bolt to Trump if they are feeling like flocking to a winner, meaning Trump has a decent chance to even exceed the margin by which polls will be predicting him to win.

Of course, there is one final late development that must be discussed: after (and, it seems, because) Fox News released a shockingly inappropriate tongue-in-cheek statement mocking and targeting Trump, Trump, who had already flirted with boycotting the debate because his pseudo-media-nemesis Megyn Kelly (who had, to be fair, very aggressively questioned him more intensely than other candidates in the first debate, touching off a feud) was going to be a moderator, went from flirting to making it very clear that he was “most likely” not going to participate in Thursday’s debate (almost immediately after he said this his campaign  let it be known that he was officially not participating).  To be fair to Trump, he was not unreasonable, with Kelly being selected as a moderator combined with the Fox News statement, in suspecting that the debate setting might be less than fair for him.  But at this point, with Trump having more or less dominated in six previous debates, with the debates already having shown voters hours and hours of each candidate, with him being up in all the early states (including Iowa), and with the prospect that the other candidates would rip each other apart (especially #2 Cruz and #3 Rubio being the likely targets) while he could remain aloof and apart from such a spectacle, and with him having very little to gain as the man clearly in first place, it is hardly an illogical move on his part; besides, the narrative of Trump vs. the Media and The Political Establishment has worked very well for him before and will continue to work well for him going forward.  That he will apparently be trying to raise money to help wounded veterans instead of attending the debate is not a bad touch, either.

Even if Trump does attend the debate, it far less likely that this debate will affect Trump’s position than it will see those trailing him shift their collective support among them slightly-to-moderately in attacking each other.  Others will likely go after Cruz fiercely to chip away from his weakening support to augment their own, especially Rubio, while those who have a chance to overtake Cruz will likely be careful about picking a fight with Trump, who has shown himself to be an excellent brawler to the degree that those attacking him are more likely to have such attacks backfire on them and hurt them than they are likely to hurt Trump.  If he does not participate, ironically, though, it may embolden his opponents’ attacks against him during the debate.  How these attacks and a Trumpless debate would play out remains to be seen. 

Whether he is in the debate or not, expect a Trump victory on Monday night, as even before this debate it seems that Trump has already proven, if the polls are being solidly conducted, that that he has by far the support of the most Republicans nationally for months and currently increasingly has the support of the most Republicans in Iowa, while his closest competitor was already losing support on multiple fronts for multiple reasons.  The reasons Trump has his support increasing now, and the reasons that Cruz has his support dropping now, will virtually certainly not be reversed by Trump’s non-participation is that is indeed how Thursday’s debate proceeds. For these trends to reverse, Cruz would have to shine spectacularly as the clear winner and then some, and his many other opponents are not about the let that happen.

For all these reasons, the political gods seem to favor Trump, and Trump should emerge as the clear winner Monday night, barring any shocking last-minute developments or some unforgivable collective oversights by many leading polling firms.

What would a Trump victory in Iowa mean for the race in general?  That will be explained another day…

Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

Also by Brian: Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

The events of the past summer and fall have clearly shown that there is only one major political party for rational, thinking adults in America, and here you will see the eleven major events from this period that have shown beyond all reasonable doubt that the Republican Party is no longer a serious political party and that only the Democrat Party provides Americans with an actual ability to govern.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 13, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 13, 2015

Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

AQABA, EILAT, HAIFA, and TEL AVIV — An extraordinary series of events has occurred over the past few months: more so than at any other time in recent decades and possibly far longer than that, the American people have been treated to an exceptionally clear, stark contrast between its two major political parties. The contrast clearly shows there is a moderately-left-of-center Democratic Party that is inclusive, interested in governance, and pursues data/study-informed policy competing with a far-right, being-pushed-farther-to-the-right Republican Party that is exclusive, hates government, and is increasingly basing its positions on fear, irrationality, emotion, and anti-intellectualism.

Several events of late have made this contrast absolutely clear:

1.) Trump and Trumpism

When Donald Trump exploded onto the scene this summer, he immediately catapulted to the top spot in the Republican race and has held steady nationally there and in most states ever since, only recently sharing that spot with Dr. Ben Carson. There is no equivalent to The Donald on the left, or anywhere else, for that matter. That a loud-mouthed, brawling TV personality and real estate magnate like Donald Trump could rise to dominate the Republican Party is a uniquely Republican phenomenon.

The contrast is clear: if there was someone like Trump running for president now on the Democratic side, he would be shunned as a fringe candidate by Democratic voters and would likely not have even been invited to participate in the debates. There is not a chance the Democrats would flock to a Trump the way Republicans have, and this is a glaringly obvious difference.

Furthermore, his style of trading playground insults, making grandiose claims without providing details, and constantly describing one’s self in an unending stream of superlatives (“HUGE” and “THE BEST”) is simply anathema to the Democrats’ style: they have preferred candidates who are more measured, wonkish, and specific for many years.

2.) Everything about the Iran nuclear deal

I have written about this before, so I will just reiterate here: on an issue of such momentous and historic importance as finally being able to thaw our-decades-long cold war with Iran, the Republican Party has shown itself to not only to be blindly ignorant of the real world consequences having this deal or not having this deal, but also of the very basics of how diplomacy and international negotiation work. As I wrote previously, there simply is no logical argument against this deal when it stacked up against the real-world feasible alternatives. Republican (and Israeli) opposition only takes us far closer to war, further instability, and nuclear proliferation. In addition, the Republicans showed they were far from above treating this issue in the most partisan manner possible. That the GOP is willing to play politics with global war and peace and issues of national security is not something lost on the experts, and even some major Republicans who have held significant security-related positions in the past, like Gen. and Sec. of State Colin Powell, Sec. of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and NSA Director Zbigniew Brezinski, have come out for it. But the people in the driver’s seat of today’s Republican Party did not seem to notice this. Many others will.

3.) The Republican debates

One after the other, the Republican main-stage debates provided a juvenile attempt at kow-towing to the base and trading insults in an atmosphere of fantastical illogic, devoid of substance and reason. The most substantive candidates were relegated to the sidelines, while the least qualified and most foolish were front and center. The leading Republicans candidates tended to focus on issues that are hardly the main issues affecting the American people: a blatant distortion of Planned Parenthood resulting from some highly edited videos, thus returning to the culture-war issue of abortion, along with a heavy and illogical focus on illegal immigration and vague talk of “leadership” in international affairs. The first two debates, especially, had a real circus-like atmosphere, while the third saw the candidates behave as if they finally realized they looked like a circus in the previous two and then saw them unite to whine about the so-called “liberal media” asking unfair (i.e., tough) questions. This is from the party that says Obama is not tough enough to stand up to ISIS, China, and Putin, but who cry like babies because of a few low-stature cable news moderators giving them a tough time. Most recently, Dr. Carson has engaged in a megawhinefest just because the media is asking reasonable questions about his background and his rather shocking claims on everything from boyhood fights to the Egyptian pyramids. I have not seen the latest GOP debate, but from all the coverage I have seen, little seems to have changed.

4.) Relative position of more extreme candidates in terms of support in Republican, Democratic Parties

While I touched on this in the last section, this point is important enough to make it separately: in the Republican race, generally the crazier less serious the candidate, the more popular that candidate is with Republican voters: hence, Trump and Dr. Carson are vying to be #1. Rubio seems to be a semi-exception in the #3 spot, but the champions of irrationality and foolishness can be happy again with Ted Cruz solidly in the #4 spot. That’s right: 1, 2, and 4 are extremists who say the most outlandish things. One can accuse Bernie Sanders with some fairness being a relatively extreme candidate in terms of his rhetoric, and he is a declared socialist. And yet, Sanders has pretty much always been far behind Clinton nationally, and never been close to being supported by a majority of democratic voters. He has only led temporarily in two states (Iowa and NH) and has since lost ground to Clinton who now leads handily in Iowa and is neck-and-neck in NH. Clinton is a moderate, pragmatic, and practical politician who is focused on results and not ideology or crowd-pleasing rhetoric. So, with the Democrats, the electable, mature, more serious candidate has dominated almost entirely, while the on the Republican side the candidate who is a verbal brawler and has no political experience—Trump—has dominated the race national and locally since he announced his candidacy and now shares the top spot with Dr. Carson, who has zero political experience as well and is a virtual wind-up-toy that spews nonsense and offensive commentary non-stop. The contrast in the thoughts and composition and maturity of the two parties could not be clearer.

5.) The Planned Parenthood “scandal”

It is a well known fact that in general, Republicans oppose abortion. Less well known factually is that Planned Parenthood is not an organization whose primary purpose is to provide abortions and access to them, but, rather, focuses on a variety of other health services to women; abortion accounts for only about 3% of its activities for roughly 12% of its clients. But Republicans don’t seem to want to know such details, and seek to 1.) frame the organization as “an abortion factory” and 2.) to completely defund all government funding for the organization regardless of how it would negatively impact the 97% of non-abortion activities and how that would harm millions of women who otherwise have limited access to certain health services. The Republicans have made so much noise about this you would think it is both the #1 issue on the minds of Americans and the #1 issue in terms of importance (it is hardly either). They have also engaged in outright massive distortion of the issue, trying to portray Planned Parenthood as some sort of organization that is focused mainly on abortion and on harvesting organs from live babies to sell to research organizations based on a few isolated, misinterpreted anecdotes. Republicans even went to the extent of the threat of a government shutdown over the funding of this organization; basically, the House, controlled by the Republicans, would refuse to pass any spending bill that would include funding for Planned Parenthood, including routine bills to increase the debt ceiling (without which the United States would default on its debt payments and jeopardize its credit rating) and keep the government fully open and functioning; such bills completely defunding Planned Parenthood would not pass the Senate and would not come anywhere near enough the two-thirds support required in either the House or the Senate to overcome a presidential veto from Obama.

And as far as the Democrats distorting an issue and an organization that provides invaluable services to women’s health and trying to defund said organization by using the threat (on ANY issue!) of a government shutdown and/or the U.S. defaulting on its debt obligation? Yeah, that’s just the Republicans, 110%.

6.) The first Democratic debate

By the time the first Democratic debate occurred, the Republicans had made clear to the world what they were about and how they conducted themselves. In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton engaged with Bernie Sanders in a relatively substantive discussion that showed they had a command of the issues and that was mostly cordial, polite, and focused on problems that Americans are actually concerned about. The discussion was more about policy and less about rhetoric, slogans, and talking points. Even the “attacks” that came most often from the (distantly) second-tier candidates were low-intensity and far more civil than the insults being flung at the Republican debates. But even the fringe candidates came off as serious and able to discuss issues of substance in a way the Republican front-runners have generally been unable to do. Jim Webb, the conservative Democrat who dropped out after the first debate, would immediately be one of the more substantive candidates in a Republican debate.

So, on the Republican stage, you have a massive clown car stealing center stage, and the substantive people are kept of the car and struggle to be relevant in the race; on the Democratic stage, the most serious candidates dominate, and even the lesser candidates behave like relatively substantive adults. That’s about as different as it gets.

7.) The Benghazi hearing fiasco

I wrote quite a bit about this before, so I will just give a brief summary here: a bunch of junior upstart House Republicans decided it would be a great idea to investigate Hillary Clinton on Benghazi even though there have been eight previous investigations (one State, two Senate, and five Republican-led House investigations) that did not succeed in tearing her down. Their committee uncovers Hillary’s ill-fated decision to use a private e-mail server in her home for her work as Secretary of State and, rather than focus on Benghazi, it focuses on her e-mails. Several Republicans came out and admitted that this is a political witch hunt. The Republican upstarts then confront Hillary Clinton, one of the most seasoned and experienced and articulate politicians still in service in America, in an eleven-hour public hearing that totally exposes them for the ill-prepared, ignorant, imbalanced, rude, and partisan hacks that they are while practically turning the hearing into a campaign commercial highlighting Clinton’s many strengths. On top of that, her fellow Democrats on the Committee fully exposed the hypocrisies, falsehoods, and inconsistencies in the behavior of the committee’s Republicans. Basically, the GOP came off looking like total ignorant fools whose partisanship knows no bounds and in front of the whole nation and they succeeded in enhancing Clinton’s national position greatly by sending such underwhelming nobodies to take on the force of nature known as Hillary Clinton.

8.) Pope Francis comes to America

Pope Francis came to America recently. Besides moving Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to tears (repeatedly!), Pope Francis reminded Americans that Christians can at least have the ability to be loving, kind, inclusive, open, warm, and fun. In other words, cool. Like Pope Frank. We even found out that the Pope did not want to meet right-wing intolerantand religiously crazy Kim Davis and that his people distanced the Pope from herafter the “meeting” was made public. Basically, Frank was letting America know that he did not endorse her views, actions, or brand of Christianity. Yet Kim Davis’s Evangelical version of Christianity—intolerant, hypocritical, imposing, harsh, exclusive, judgmental, and white ethno-centric/nationalistic—is the version that the Republican Party has embraced; Francis’s Catholicism, on the other hand, was a stark contrast as he surrounded himself with the poor and people of color and all nationalities during his visit. A Republican Francis ain’t.

9.) The exit of John Boehner

Partly moved by the Pope’s visit, partly frustrated with being one of the only pragmatic, practical, and realistic voices in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and getting little love on the right or the left for his heroic and taxing roles in preventing government shutdowns, longtime conservative and Republican leader and Speaker of the House John Boehner surprised Washington with his resignation. The Republican base cheered, making it clear they felt there was no room in their party for pragmatic compromisers. As a parting gifts to America, Boehner avoided a shutdown and then rammed through a spending bill to prevent further shutdown fights for the next two years, with mostly Democratic and only modest Republican support. When the Republican party base and many of the Republican presidential candidates complaining that Boehner isn’t conservative enough and cooperated too much with Obama, it’s clear something is rotten in the state of Denmark…

10.) The rise of Carson and Carsonism

Add the inexperience of trump, but take away Trump’s brawling approach and the desire to actually govern and add a whole lot of right-wing Christian religious gibberish, and you get the soft-spoken Dr. Ben Carson. Carsonism combines the lack of political and governance experience of trump with an even higher level of irrationality and the big addition of the Evangelical Christian worldview, based wholly on nonsense. His unexpected rise to the tophas confounded all stripes of pundits and is even more shocking than the rise of Trump (I personally predicted Trump would be a force to be reckoned with but dismissed Carson almost immediately and was definitely wrong about his ability to gain voter support). Together, he and Trump speak for half of Republicans, and when you add in support for the super-Christians Cruz and Huckabee, you get closer to two/thirds of Republicans that are for Trumpism, Carsonism, or a governing style awash with Evangelical Christianity. Carson is a combination of Trump and Cruzism/Huckabeeism, which can be said to make him worse because there is even more content undeserving of respect in governance. Like Trump (and like Cruz and Huckabee), there is no equivalent on the left that has any real support. Just another crystal-clear contrast.

11.) The fall of Bush

Finally, we have the failure of the Bush campaign. Yes, I am already calling it a failure because I just don’t see how he comes back from where he is now(and where he’s been for some time) to win the nomination. I come to bury Bush, not to praise him, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, so I’m not saying Bush is great. But especially in this field of Republicans, Jeb Bush speaks with a moderation in tone and language the leaders of his field do not, and has some moderate policy positions to back that up that they do not. He has years of experience in politics and governance, and while not a good governor, it is hard to argue he was awful in the mold of, say, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and at the very least, he stakes out reasonable positions on immigration and on not using the threat of government shutdowns to achieve political goals. This makes him a dramatically more reasonable candidate that those leading the Republican field, and yet, even with $100 million in PAC money, Bush is at best in the middle of the second-tier candidates, polling in single digits; he is also in fifth-place even in Florida, where he was governor for eight years. Just like Boehner not doing well with his own party, if a man like Bush is losing to the likes of Trump, Carson, and Cruz, that says a heck of a lot about the party.

*****

Yes, when all this is added together, it is clear: we have one party with a strong majority ready to project a strong, experienced, accomplished, mature, and moderate candidate to the American people, and you have another party with a majority of voters ready to project weak candidates devoid of relevant experience, who engage in either brawling public spats of a childish nature or spew irrational conspiracy theories and extremist Christian theology as a substitute for an actual political campaign. The majority of the top Republican candidates and a majority of their voters are committing seppuku (Japanese samurai ritual suicide), disemboweling themselves in front of all of America. Hillary is looking with bemused disdain at the mess to her right, and is marching forward past the mess, along with the majority of her party and what should be a clear majority of the American public come November 2016. The nearly certain inevitable result—the return of the Clintons to the White House—will belong to Hillary and her coalition, but it will in no small part also come about because of the insanity of the Republican Party and in all the many ways this was made obvious in the summer and fall of 2015.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

Republican “Debate” Circus Round 2: Trump vs. Fiorina and Why the Kids’-Table Debate Was Better

Scott Walker’s Weak Wisconsin Record (and What His Candidacy Says About Today’s GOP)

The State of Illegal Immigration 2015: Reality vs. Republican Fantasy

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

*****

You may not respect his message, his positions, or the man himself, but you must respect his candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 10, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 10th, 2015 UPDATED (see bottom)

Also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myth.

AP

AMMAN — In the ideal America, egocentric and eccentric billionaire and reality-TV personality Donald Trump would never have a realistic chance at getting the nomination of one of America’s two major parties to be its candidate for president of the United States. Many liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, would not dispute this statement.

However, this is not an ideal world, and America is far from an ideal society too. If you don’t understand the very real reasons why Donald Trump has a real chance at being the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, then you don’t understand the Republican Party, American politics, or American society. Below are the main reason why Trump isn’t going away and why he has a real shot at winning the Republican primaries, if not the general election.

1.) The Republican Party Is-A-Changin’

The Republican Party is in a state of open division and flux, and for all you Game of Thrones fans, remember: “Chaos is a ladder” (spoilers for GoT in this link). The whole significance of the Tea Party movement is that it was a bloody, forceful attempt to pry the steering wheel out of the hands of the establishment and the elites who had been in tight control of the party for years. This peaked in some ways with the 2010 midterm elections in which extremist Tea Party candidates (Christine O’Donnell, anyone?) lost some key and very winnable Senate races to vulnerable Democrats but still managed to win many elections and were the major factor in the Republicans taking the House of Representatives from the Democrats. However, Tea Party candidates were thought to have gone too far in the 2012 election, hurting the Republican Party and even Mitt Romney in Obama’s reelection. Much of the conventional wisdom maintains that the Republicans learned their lesson from the 2012 Tea Party-driven electoral disaster, and have since moderated. What has actually happened is that the Republican Party has lurched to the right, with the Republican Establishment coopting the Tea Party style and message (and lack of substance) out of the fear of being “primaried”: incumbents losing in primaries before even having a chance to go toe-to-toe with a Democrat and losing to extremists within their own party who accused them of being too moderate. The party was hardly moderate before, but even now, it still falls short of the extreme rightist platform and style envisioned by true Tea Partiers. So there is still a war going on within the Republican Party; before Trump’s meteoric rise, this was perhaps best exemplified by the clash between freshman Senator (and all-around disingenuous charlatan) Ted Cruz on the one hand, and more moderate republicans like Speaker of the House John Boehner, Representative Peter King, Senator John McCain, and the Republican leadership on the other. Cruz is hardly alone in his extremism, though: the likes of Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King are but a few examples.

Into this struggle for the soul of the party strode Donald Trump. Among other things, he is very aggressively taking on the Republican Establishment in a way that electrifies the base, insulting John McCain, feuding with Rupert Murdoch, attacking both George W. and Jeb Bush, and, in addition, he has enough money (“TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” to quote Trump directly) that he is not at all dependent on the establishment for financing or support. Trump also has no experience as part of the Washington, DC, political machine, thus, he can avoid having to check the rather unpopular box of “Washington insider.” So can Jeb Bush, but he has the last name Bush (and will be reluctant to criticize his brother or father) and will be tainted with that label as a result. Other candidates who want to draw the non-Washington insider vote will most certainly be competing with Trump.

2.) Divided They Fall

History is full of weird winners. In particular, it is not difficult at all to find examples of when one faction or person was able to triumph because its numerous opponents could not unite and stop fighting among themselves. Ancient Rome, for example, was eventually brought down by much weaker “barbarian” factions because its intermittent civil wars among different Romans devastated Rome’s strength and left it vulnerable in ways it should never have been. The Egyptian opposition to Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood could not unite in elections during the Arab Spring, and thus paved the way for Morsi’s victory and troubled presidency, which, in turn, paved the way for General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s countercoup/counterrevolution and the destruction of a nascent Egyptian democracy. Al Gore lost to George W. Bush because immature liberals in Florida and New Hampshire voted for Ralph Nader—a realistically hopeless liberal alternative to Gore and thus a merely symbolic vote that gave Bush victory in both states—because they viewed voting as a masturbatory act of self-gratification instead of a duty to vote with an eye towards the real world impact of voting and not as act designed to make you most pleased with yourself and your conscience, the real world be damned… I’m sure you can think of other examples easily.

As for the Republican primaries, there are currently seventeen Republican candidates. Though Donald trump is nowhere close to garnering support from a majority of Republicans, he still has a commanding lead over his rivals in the latest round of scientific national polling, and even if a full third of the candidates dropped out tomorrow, that would still leave ten other candidates among whom to divide the non-trump vote. The latest polls have trump with the support of about 25% of Republicans nationally. That means the other 75% of support is currently divided among the other sixteen candidates (if that vote is divided equally, each candidate would have only roughly 4.7% of the vote). Jeb Bush, in second place, barely broke into double-digits, and the other fifteen candidates did not break into double-digits. Trump is doubling (or more) the level of support of the candidate right behind him in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, what are supposed to be the first three contests for the Republican nomination.  And in Florida, where Jeb Bush was governor for eight years and Marco Rubio has been a sitting U.S. senator since 2011, Trump is ahead of Bush by 1 % and ahead of Rubio by 20 % as of the latest poll! The first three contests are just six months away or less, and Florida just seven; a lot can change, and a lot must change, for Trump to lose at least the first three contests. But if he manages to stay ahead—and it’s his to lose and the burden is on other candidates to rise up—and wins the first three contests (let alone carry that momentum into Florida and prevail there), it’s very hard to see him losing the nomination.

Normally in the Republican primaries, there is one frontrunner or two candidates duking it out, maybe one dark horse candidate, and everyone else is on the bottom. In this case, there are fifteen candidates currently averaging in single digits. Where normally the few bottom dwellers would drop out and lose campaign cash relative to those on the top, almost all the candidates here are bottom feeders feeding on scarce resources. What this means is that almost all of them are close in both polling status and resources, making the incentive for staying in the race that much higher and the incentive for dropping out that much lower. This, in turn, means that they will likely continue to divide the non-Trump vote among them for months into the primaries, only helping Trump’s chances. The battle for being number #3 (or #4?) , with enough delegates at the convention to dictate things to the eventual nominee, including maybe even forcing the nominee to pick a certain vice presidential nominee, could thus carry a significance that no recent election has shown and bring us back to the old days of backroom wheeling, dealing, and kingmaking of the old-school political conventions. A divided or unpredictable convention, in the world of twenty-first century media, would be a political spectacle like nothing we’ve seen since the Florida debacle in 2000. In such an atmosphere, a man like Trump who seems to thrive on his cantankerous relationship with the media could indeed use the chaos to his advantage and that could very well mean a Trump ascension of the Littlefinger ladder to the Iron Throne of the Republican nomination (if you’re interested, read my take on the political and foreign policy lessons from Game of Thrones).

3.) Republican Primary Voters are a Different Breed

They Republican base voters are in an active revolt against their party’s establishment, and are in a perpetual revolt against the media. Trump picking a fight with Fox News—yes, even Fox News—and debate moderator/Fox News personality Megan Kelly (who did, frankly, in some ways seem hostile and out to get him even if her questions were totally legitimate)—works brilliantly for him in important ways. See, two things members of the Republican base hate are 1.) being told by The Republican Establishment/Elites who to vote for and 2.) being told by The Media Establishment/Elite who to vote for. They way they and Trump see it, both the Republican and Media Establishment (Fox News combines both of these) are out to get Trump, and this is actually true in a number of ways. Mainstream America thinks of Fox News as representing Republicans, and compared to most media, it does in a relative sense. But the base really gets its kicks from media sources like Breitbart and Drudge that have been quite friendly to Trump. They are also even generally older and whiter than the Republican Party in general, a party already known for being older and whiter than the average American, proportionately speaking. This makes them an extreme element in a party that has, as discussed, already become more extreme. In flocking to Trump and his extreme statements, along with Trump the GOP base is giving a big proverbial middle-finger to their own party’s Establishment and to the media in general, who both seemed eager to dismiss him as a farcical sideshow. All this leads directly to the final point…

4.) Trump Knows How to Play the Media to His Advantage Like a Harp

Trump is also brilliant at playing the media here; his provocations ensure he is dominating the news coverage and this is depriving oxygen to other candidates desperate for attention and airtime and who are at risk of suffocation, while at the same time any hostility from the media plays into his narrative that the media is out to get him and is trying to control the election, a narrative that the Republican base is only too eager to believe. That the Republican Establishment’s principal way to go after him is through the media itself is not lost on the base here, either. So in many ways, what others see as mistakes that will “doom” Trump’s campaign are actually nice big plates of red meat for the Republican base, the exact type of people whose support he needs to win primary contests and win the nomination. He is the incarnation of their resentment and they seem eager to support him because of that. And the more these feuds continue, the more that the media, frankly, can’t look away from him because they know covering him will draw viewers and make them lots of money, as the recent debate’s ratings proved (see below). The satirical newspaper The Onion captured the sentiment the best with a faux piece satirically “written” by Trump for parody purposes titled: “Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?”

*****

I am not here to say that I think Trump will win. I am here to simply say that dismissing him as a sideshow is naïve. Currently, he is the show (not only was the debate featuring Trump the most-watched primary debate ever with some 24 million viewers, it was the most watched program ever broadcast [only] by cable news and easily beat the NBA finals’ and a typical Monday Night Football game’s ratings). Again, as mentioned, someone has to climb up from the pack and beat him. Bush had (see below) been the second highest in the polls, and has raised a lot of money ($100 million+ including his PACs). But he has not been impressive thus far and would need to greatly improve his performance for him to win, and his greatest advantage—his name—is also his biggest curse. Walker had (see below) been third generally, but not even generally above 10 %; he, too, would need to cover a lot of ground to reach first and hardly distinguished himself during the debate even if he did ok. Both Rubio and Fiorina had a good night (the latter only at the kids-table debate where no rivals treated her as a threat or challenged her), but one good night for candidates so low in the polls does not bestow a crown upon either, and they are both quite vulnerable in their own ways (to be discussed in a forthcoming piece). With early signs showing Republican voter support strong and not falling for Trump in multiple unscientific flash polls and in the first scientific poll released since the debate (the latter showing him still nearly doubling the second-place candidate who is now Ted Cruz!), with Bush and Walker falling to be tied now for sixth place, the burden is on one of these problematic candidates or another to make up the gulf in popular support between them and The Donald. Love him or hate him, just don’t be writing Trump off yet.

UPDATED: Another national poll just released today taken wholly after the debate has Trump up to 32 % with a big post-debate boost, almost tripling the support for second-place-Bush who is at 11 %. Ben Carson (!?) has jumped to third place with 9 %, and Walker and Rubio tie for fourth place at 6 % each. In addition, a new Iowa-specific poll has trump increasing his lead, putting him at 19 % to Walker’s and Carson’s tied second-place 12 %, followed by Bush at 11 % and a big boost to Carly Fiorina nipping at Bush’s heels with 10 % and Cruz just behind her at 9 %… As I suggested above, one can almost see Trump as a Roman emperor watching his rivals hack at each other as gladiators in the Colosseum in the sense that he rises above the (polling) fray and the rest take votes away from each other…

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

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