So as far as I can tell, the story around Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker going from “interesting 2016 dark horse” to “steaming pile of horse manure” happened in about 72 hours, and involved tweeting. It goes something like this:
1) Walker hired GOP consultant Liz Mair as his digital outreach guru on Monday. This was generally viewed as a good idea, since Walker has all the charisma of a room temperature 2-liter bottle of Sam’s Club diet cola.
2) Mair tweeted some stuff about Iowa politics in general and while even Nate Silver agreed with her she was immediately fired. This was on Tuesday.
3) Liz Mair has a lot of friends over in right-wing blogger country. She also has a lot of enemies. They got into a big ol’ fight over whether Liz was treated unfairly or if she was a squishy amnesty RINO. This happened Wednesday.
4) And all this has led directly to today, where conservatives are now openly wondering if Walker should now even bother to continue his campaign:
Forcing Mair out was like amputating your finger to deal with a paper cut. Instead of having a problem with a few Iowans and a writer at Breitbart.com, Walker has now baffled his admirers across the right. Mair’s resignation signaled that Walker’s team either didn’t do its homework before hiring Mair, or that it was too spineless to defend her. It is hard to believe the former, since Mair consulted for Walker before during his 2012 recall.
Walker’s unwillingness to defend his own hire will give other consultants and policy experts jitters before joining the team. It totally undercuts his reputation as a tough-minded fighter who stands on principle. And it may contribute to an alternate interpretation of Walker as a ‘fraidy cat. Earlier this month, Walker caved to Iowa ethanol interests by reversing his position on the federal mandate.
The problem, in other words, wasn’t the tweets of a single staffer, but the way Iowa’s parochial concerns act like kryptonite on Walker’s convictions and reputation. He can certainly recover from this, but if Walker thinks his path to the nomination runs through Iowa, he needs to figure out how to win that state’s caucuses without turning into Tom Vilsack before he arrives in Nashua, New Hampshire.
So yeah, apparently last week Walker was somebody who may have been a contender. As of today, he’s dog food. It just reinforces the notion that whoever survives So You Wanna Be A Candidate 2016 here is going to be completely unelectable in the general.
John PM
I find it hard to believe that anyone who has been paying attention would think that Scott Walker is a tough-minded individual who stands on principle.
Richard Mayhew
I think we could be overthinking this a bit; who remembers Melissa Ewan and Amanda Marcotte getting fired from the Edwards campaign in the Spring of 2007…. was something that small and inconesquential enough to doom Edwards?
RaflW
“It totally undercuts his reputation as a tough-minded fighter who stands on principle.”
Maybe because he is not even remotely that?
Welcome to this tiny, temporary corner of reality, wingnuts.
beth
@Richard Mayhew: I think you’re right. It’s so far in advance of the actual election that no one will remember it by then. Didn’t Romney have to fire some gay person on his campaign? I’m not sure it played any part in his loss though.
MattF
I think there’s some dawning realizations on both the left and the right about where Walker sits in the political spectrum (I won’t say stands) and about the less attractive features of his personality. This is what campaigns are for, and if it continues (and I think it will), then Walker is indeed toast. I think a similar drill has taken place about Cruz and Crhistie, but C&C have got a thicker skin.
NonyNony
@Richard Mayhew: On the one hand I know that you’re probably right. On the other hand, Walker needs the hard core faithful to pump him up for the next few months so that he can compete with Jeb’s MoneyMachine. And it wasn’t like Amanda and Melissa had a lot of entrenched party machine pals who were outraged by their treatment the way that Mair seems to.
On the gripping hand – Edwards didn’t do well at all in 2008 in part because he made a lot of bad decisions (in fact it turns out that “making bad decisions” was probably the thing he was best at!). So if this truly is some insight into Walker’s decision making ability then I’m back to being happy again. With Jeb having the money advantage, Walker needs to be flawless. If Walker is stumbling around he becomes another flavor of the week like all of those guys that ran against Romney were.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Shortest pubcycle ever?
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Richard Mayhew:
Do you mean President Edwards?
PaulW
Part of this is why we shouldn’t even start campaigns until the actual damn year of election.
We’re wasting focus and attention on BS things while 1) California dies, 2) everybody blows up overseas, and 3) The GOP Congress destroys government altogether.
Helmut Monotreme
Scott Walker is a man of principle and an excellent judge of character. That principle is ‘money talks’. And he judges characters based on loyalty, utility, plausible deniability and disposability.
OzarkHillbilly
Slightly OT but I have to leave this here before I go:
Tenn. GOPer slams Volkswagen: Creating 200,000 jobs is ‘intentionally’ a ‘magnet for unionized labor’
Yeah, jobs are only good jobs if the pay is lousy and come without benefits.
muddy
@Richard Mayhew: It’s McEwan.
Ryan
“since Walker has all the charisma of a room temperature 2-liter bottle of Sam’s Club diet cola.”
Perhaps if it was uncapped for a day or two, so as to have lost its fizz.
rp
@Richard Mayhew: I don’t remember the circumstances of that. Did their firing foreshadow some of Edwards later problems in any way?
I don’t think firing Mair is going to hurt Walker on its own, but it’s possible that it’s a sign of deeper problems.
MomSense
@NonyNony:
I’ve decided to refer to him as JEB$ from now on. The thing is the base Republicans will bitch about him all the way through the primary/caucus season and then vote for him with gusto in the general. By the time Nov. 2016 rolls around he will be the One foretold in the bible to restore this Christian nation to glory.
terraformer
Don’t write off this nitwit. He has powerful friends and he is quickly turning my state – arguably the genesis of the progressive movement – into a conservative wonderland (see recent “right to work” law).
That he has been able to do that in this state, to rather handily beat a recall election, and to make drastic cuts to education in a state that is known for it – and to use the “savings” to apply quite openly and strictly for both property tax “relief” and for six-figure plus tax cuts, is manna for the unthinking set.
kc
@rp:
Nah. They were fired due to the poutrage that ensued on the right when some of Marcotte’s foul-mouthed anti-religious posts were dug up.
Jake Nelson
Everyone in the Midwest found the idea of Walker as a serious candidate laughable. DC pundits who didn’t actually know anything about him kept going “he’s a serious candidate, I don’t think you should count him out”, etc, etc. Cue more laughter. Then slowly stuff keeps happening to get it through to them how much of a lightweight he is and they go “hmm, oh, I see…” (Yglesias had a rather bad case of this for a while.)
Bobby Thomson
I fail to see how caving to the RIGHT hurts any Republican. Caving to the left, sure.
Bobby Thomson
@Richard Mayhew: biggest thing in the world to a few bloggers, no one else noticed or cared. SAIEW.
Lee
Scott Walker should never live this down
cmorenc
CAUTION HERE: We’ve had our hopes before that “this time Scott Walker is dog food”, only to have them dashed. He’s like some alien slime monster that feeds on decay and radioactivity rather than being killed by it.
Ironically, if he did still manage to win the GOP nomination, he’s the one candidate Hillary Clinton would likely be most ably suited to slice into hamburger – and that’s before taking into account the fact that Walker actually makes Hillary look charismatic by comparison.
gelfling545
I would really like to see Walker wash out fairly early as when he’s lined up against Carson, Santorum, Trump, et al. he could come off looking almost sane by comparison & convince people he’s vanilla enough to be elected. I doubt this will do it, however.
NonyNony
@RaflW:
They need him to be that, though. They need the guy who fits into their fantasy Ronald Reagan mold.
And this is why they’re going to flail and fail this time around. Because state governors and Senators cannot be the kind of person that they want. There always have to be compromises made for them to climb the political ladder – even if they are only in their own state or their own party (which is what’s going on with Walker here).
I think the next Republican nominee that gets a lock on the nomination the way George W Bush did is either going to be a governor from Texas (where the governor’s office is nearly powerless and so the governor doesn’t actually have to do a lot of compromising) or a retired general. Because neither of those types will have had to compromise nearly as much, or will have to compromise during their campaigns. Beyond that it’s going to be a clown car process for the foreseeable future, I think.
LinusK
I laughed and how!
First this : “Walker has all the charisma of a room temperature 2-liter bottle of Sam’s Club diet cola.”
Then this: “…last week Walker was somebody who may have been a contender. As of today, he’s dog food. It just reinforces the notion that whoever survives So You Wanna Be A Candidate 2016 here is going to be completely unelectable in the general.”
Class!!
Lee
@NonyNony:
I had not thought of that before.
Scott S.
@Richard Mayhew: Actually, that was the point where I realized I couldn’t support Edwards. Someone who caved that hard and that fast to malicious rightwingers wasn’t someone who could be trusted to be able to stand up to them on any topic.
Elizabelle
I’m worried John Kasich of Ohio is in the wings, and much more mediagenic. Had a Fox show for years. He sees himself as the second coming of Reagan, and can see people falling for that.
MomSense
@NonyNony:
I think the money guys pick the next nominee. If that weren’t the case Walker, Jeb$, Christie et. al. wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to court them.
The money guys pick the nominee. The base hates them until they have to choose between the candidate the money guys pick and the evil Democrat. It happens every time.
ETA The money guys are not going to pick Santorum, Trump or C’mon down to Huckabees. They just aren’t. Those three are just out there for the grift/ratings. I think glasses won’t save Perry because he is too likely to choke when the election gets tough. Christie is a wait and see how much the scandals will stick. Jindal is a no even with the vocal coaching.
Redshift
The timeline here is a bit off. The article linked in item 2 days that the tweets were in January, not on Tuesday. Perhaps you knew that, Zandar, and only meant it to mean that she was fired on Tuesday, but as it’s worded, it makes the firing sound more defensible. Being unfortunately honest about Iowa on the day you’re hired by a candidate would be really dumb, having done so in the past, not so much.
Cervantes
@Richard Mayhew:
Some people are, that’s for sure.
ruemara
I’m not going to be afraid of this twat because he’s screwing Wisconsin hard. Wisconsin had chances to pass on him, so maybe it’s not as progressive as it’s past history was.
As far as Walker and the rest of the GOP candidates, I sincerely wish the purity tests involved them and the base quaffing strychnine. Only the purest will survive! The liberals totally fear this!
mdblanche
Why, it’s almost as if being flavor of the month 20 months before an election isn’t a recipe for success. IIRC correctly the Republican flavor of the month this time four years ago was Donald Trump. What ever happened to him?
jonas
@NonyNony:
At the outset, maybe. But then it will simply come down to the money. Romney bought the primary in 2012 and Jeb will buy the primary this time around. The other guys are just pikers looking for a gig at Fox when it’s all over. I can see Trump being given a primetime rantshow after O’Reilly leaves.
Redshift
@MomSense: Which is a real shame, because it allows the “not a real conservative” myth to continue to thrive. I’d love to see the base get their pick, and have to watch a true wingnut crash and burn, so I’d be harder to blame their loss on the failure to nominate a “real conservative” who would win in a landslide because they know the whole country is conservative.
(Yeah, I know – they’d immediately declare that the loser wasn’t a real conservative, rinse, repeat. But I can dream, right?)
Petorado
Much ado about nothing. The Koch brothers will continue to throw money Walker’s way, if only as a vehicle to get their message out. He’s a very useful idiot.
Gene108
Saw a bit of a Walker rally in NH on CSPAN a few days ago. If he was uncharamatic he is working to improve there. The crowd was enthused by him hitting the right talking points and he was no way as boring or stiff as say Mitt Romney, who got 47% of the popular vote for President.
the Conster
The guy just looks like a doofus. He has zero magnetism and along with being a moron, he’s going nowhere.
Alex S.
Walker wants Iowa (I am not sure if he needs it). Firing her might even help him there. Nationally, it hurts him with primary voters who want him to be a conservative meanie who doesn’t yield to liberal pressure or something like that. But in national terms, this firing isn’t very important. It depends on whether this episode shortly but significantly impacts his fundraising and Iowa base enthusiasm. I don’t think it says much directly about the current state of the Walker campaign, but it demonstrates that fanatics always find ways to split their movement into ever more “pure” factions from which any deviation needs to be purged.
kindness
The fantasy meme on the right regarding their heroic warrior Princes frequently runs head on into the brick wall of reality. When that happens, the right denounce and deny reality and continue to worship the fantasy meme. ie – everything Fox News ever does.
NonyNony
@Gene108:
Let’s be honest – the floor for the popular vote for a Republican president is 46% (John McCain’s vote tally after George W Bush drove the country off an economic cliff). And that was in an election where the sitting President was a Republican – when the sitting President is a Democrat the floor is higher – which is why Mitt got 47%.
The Republicans could nominate the chair that Clint Eastwood talked to at their last convention and it would probably draw 47-48% of the vote in 2016. Hell it would probably do better than Jeb or Walker or any of the other candidates the chattering class are going on about right now because it wouldn’t have a record of compromise and attempts at actual governance that it would have to defend to the base.
Lizzy L
@mdblanche: It would appear that Trump is coming back to the fight. Moar popcorn.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
When other people see him seeing himself this way, he’ll be out.
Roger Moore
@RaflW:
When your candidacy is based on a lie, revealing the truth will undercut your candidacy.
NonyNony
@jonas:
I think this is largely right, unless Jeb turns out to be less popular than Romney was.
I don’t think he will – I actually think that the current “anybody but Jeb!” push feels a bit less enthusiastic than the “anybody but Mitt” push felt leading up to ’12. There are STILL quite a number of nuts out there who think that George W Bush was a better president than Obama has been, and they’re going to be voting enthusiastically for Jeb. That plus the money will probably be enough to counter the “anybody but Jeb!” momentum.
feebog
I think this is a good point, but for another reason. Walker has an abysmal record as Governor of Wisconsin. I know that wingnuts see this as a feature rather than a bug, but he is going to get torn up in the debates. His job creation promises, his budget woes, the cuts to education, are all going to come up, and it will hurt him with a certain segment of the party.
The Ancient Randonneur
Must read for anyone who cares about the women in their life: Beneath the Clinic Wars, the Hidden History of Miscarriages
The comment section is just as good. You need to read them Really.
Bubblegum Tate
My favorite moment in all of this: Apparently Mair also put her name on the amicus brief filed by a bunch of conservatives telling the Supreme Court, “Eh, just legalize gay marriage and be done with it.” Wingnut I know was outraged by this, and he went on a huge tirade about how Mair was consorting with the enemy and was throwing in with people who want to eradicate Christianity (uh-huh) and what’s the point of being conservative if you won’t conserve good old fashioned straight marriage, anyway? And how did he conclude his tirade? “We have to stop this circular firing squad among conservatives!” It was a solid performance all around, 7/10, would laugh at again.
boatboy_srq
@Richard Mayhew: That move cost Edwards a good deal: folks began to think he wasn’t the ideal candidate a lot sooner than his implosion, and that event was a lot more serious because of his earlier missteps. The Left isn’t as wedded to the Cult of Personality as the Right: our leaders are human and accepted as such, while the Right is all about the Messiah du jour and far more likely to turn on someone for something like this. Perry, Cain and others in ’12 dropped out for failures hardly more significant than this, and from appearances the tone of the GOTea primary race is louder and nastier than that race. We might be overthinking this a hair – but not more than that.
scav
Dogfood today? Well, Proverbs 26:11 “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” As they seem to keep needing the “rising” part of the “Rising Republican Star”, there seems to be a lot of necessary churn, inseting a lot of political micro-trading on the teeny wheels of fortune to keep the entire machinery employed, profitable and in the news.
mdblanche
@ruemara:
Would that be the past history of electing Joe McCarthy?
@jonas: Money may win in the end but it won’t be an easy win. Look at how much trouble Romney had smothering the klown kar kavalcade last time around. He kept losing primaries left and right (well, right anyways) to Gingrich and Santorum for FSM’s sake. There were a couple states he only won because his opponents were too incompetent to remember to fill out the paperwork to get on the ballot. If anything, money was hurting Romney by letting rogue billionaires keep his opponents afloat. The Base may have voted for him in November but only after being dragged kicking and screaming to him in the primaries. By that time his artless pandering had ruined whatever electability advantage he originally had. I see no reason for Jeb Bush’s fate to be any different.
Just Some Fuckhead
Walker can overcome this by pointing out no one knows where in Africa Obama was born but he needs to be stopped before he tries to nuke South Carolina again.
I think this particular story ascribes too much sophistication to Republican voters.
mai naem mobile
I think whatever is wrong with Scott Walkers eyes is a bigger issue than this. I don’t know if it’s what’s around his right eye or his actual right eye but he ends up looking cross eyed and shifty.
burnspbesq
@PaulW:
Not dead yet. Not goin’ on your goddamn cart, muthafuckah.
Tractarian
I’m sorry, but this is just wishful thinking.
Politicians (representing the entire spectrum of charisma levels) routinely survive scandals much worse than this. This is a low-level tempest among hardcore conservative political operatives, nothing more.
And the first primary is still more than 8 months away. While you and I can clearly see that Walker is a raging douchenozzle, we’re talking about Republican primary voters here. Don’t misunderestimate them.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@OP:
I wish I were as confident of this as you seem to be.
the Conster
@mai naem mobile:
His eyes are close set, and there’s no warmth in them, like a shark’s eyes. He’s beady eyed, and it makes him look mean and dumb. He doesn’t have a nice face, or project any warmth, and his policies are mean. That won’t get him anywhere far except with people exactly like him, ie., the base.
burnspbesq
Here we go again. Are Democrats ever going to learn that complacency kills?
Frankensteinbeck
I think it’s too long in the future for this episode to make a difference. It will be forgotten. BUT, if it leads to future episodes, Walker’s in trouble. GOP voters hate weakness. Here in Kentucky, they didn’t give a rat’s fuck about Aqua Buddha, but when Paul canceled a debate his numbers tanked. He got enough of it back to win when he went through with the debate after all, but the trend is clear.
@NonyNony:
See, I disagree with this completely. Romney didn’t win because he was establishment or because the money guys lined up behind him. The money was all over the place. Any lunatic could find a deep pocketed sugar daddy.
Romney won because he was the only guy who could tie his shoes in a race of clowns and ninnyhammers. Try to remember just how incompetent his opponents were. These people didn’t have campaign staffs and couldn’t get on the ballots in all states. Romney had MBA disease, but at least he could put together a functional machine, even if it went ‘WOOB WOOB WOOB’ a lot.
EDIT- Jeb will probably have this same advantage, but it’s not that the establishment will be behind him. It’s half-wit vs. no-wits.
@PaulW:
California is not dying. It’s not going to die. ‘Running out of water’ doesn’t mean actually running out, it means running out of the backlog that allows water to be sprayed around willy-nilly. If the supply isn’t fixed, there will still be plenty of water for people, but agriculture will get new restrictions and some of the less efficient crops will probably become economically unviable. Rumors of the end of the world remain greatly exaggerated.
Germy Shoemangler
@mdblanche: You are more optimistic than I am. In 1980 I remember thinking “no way will that idiot Reagan get elected.” In 1999 I said “Gore is going to kick Bush’s ass in the debates. No way will Bush win.” In 2003 I said “after all this bullshit, Kerry is going to win in a landslide.”
Is it possible for a democrat to win the presidency in 2016, after eight years of a democratic president? Does the average voter (the ones who don’t read blogs like this and don’t really pay attention to details) think it’s time a different party in charge, for “balance”?
I hope I’m wrong. I worry about my old age, and I worry about my kids’ future.
mdblanche
@burnspbesq: You will be soon. You’re very ill.
Frankensteinbeck
@mdblanche:
I feel… HAPPY!
gf120581
@the Conster: Walker has dead eyes (so does Tom Cotton). They’re eyes that scream, “I have several bodies stashed in my basement.”
mdblanche
@Frankensteinbeck: You’re not fooling anyone, you know.
Brachiator
I don’t think anyone outside the Pundit Industrial Complex cares about this or sees this as informative about much of anything. Consultants and policy experts are below even toadies and hangers-on in the hierarchy of a politician’s entourage.
Walker may not be much of a candidate, but it is still very early, and stuff like this is little more than empty clickbait on a slow news day.
Sherparick
@John PM: It is the stories that Conservatives tell each other when hippie punching, union busting, or minorities bashing, that doing so means they are tough. Just like Dick Cheney thinks it was “tough” of him to send thousands of Americans to die in Iraq on a false premise.
Regarding his current troubles, the Son of a Preacher, Scott Walker, has been living a friendly media bubble in Wisconsin, where for the local Talk Radio Hate spewers and plutocratic owned daily newspapers and TV/Radio stations think Governor Walk shats gold. And before the run for the Presidency began, the national conservative media/Fox News Wurlitzer loved to promote the “ballad of Scott Walker” because whether Libertarian or Neocon or Theocon, they all love themselves some union bashing and hippie punching and all the favors to the Koch Brothers and their like. But now he is competing for the Presidency, he is finding that when he tilts to the Iowa corn raising Theocons and appeases them on ethanol, he pisses off both the Libertarians and the Oil -Cons who regard corn ethanol as the poster plant for “crony capitalism.” He is now discovering making one group buddies means the other group becomes enemies.
gene108
@feebog:
I don’t think his actual results will be an issue. I think the Republican Party has parted ways with what little reality based people, were left in their Party, when Bush, Jr. pushed through the second massive tax cut, in 2003, with Cheney casting the tie breaking vote in the Senate.
It’s all about adhering to their ideology, results be damned.
Tax cuts (for the rich) always make things better. Public school teachers suck. Unions are a creation of Satan and must be burned at the stake.
The problem will come from which governor or Senator strayed the furthest from ideological purity, not whether or not the state’s unemployment rate is better or worse than the national average or better or worse than neighboring states with Democratic governors / legislatures.
Huckabee got killed in 2008 because he raised taxes to better fund education in Arkansas. He had to do this because of a state Supreme Court ruling that said the unequal levels of funding for education throughout the state needs to be corrected. The Club for Growth went after Huckabee with hammer and tongs and killed his nomination, even though Arkansas’ education results seemed to be improving after the tax increase and better funding for poorer districts.
shelley
What’s that line from the ‘American President’?
“The time it takes from being a player in this town to being a cocktail party joke can be marked with an egg timer”
(paraphrasing)
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Considering how much the base hated him, and how most of the primary consisted of them frantically flipping through an entire roster of Not-Romneys in the desperate hopes that somewhere in the pile was their salvation, I think Romney wouldn’t have lasted a month if it wasn’t for all that money and establishment support. Regardless of whether he could tie his shoes.
“What do you call a conservative with half a brain?”
“GIFTED!”
JPL
@gf120581: Thanks for that comment. Now when one of them appear on TV,
I’ll have to check to make sure my doors are locked.
MomSense
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Really good. Thank you for sharing.
Seanly
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hmm, that’s one way to be logically consistent.
It reminds me of a story related to me by a Catholic school teacher friend. One of his co-workers was a single woman who was considering adopting a newborn. Other teachers were angry that she’d be an unwed mother (this was back in the early 2000’s when single mothers were the scourge of culture scolds). Another funny item was that the friend was living on the down low with his significant other and his two adopted kids – Catholic schools aren’t known for being tolerant of gay teachers…
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
That’s kind of the point. If any of those dumbasses hadn’t tripped over their own feet and gone down like the Hindenberg, Romney would have been dead in the water. They were all, every one, so wildly incompetent that the moment they had the spotlight they exploded. Romney was at least smart enough to count to three on stage.
Tom Q
To cite some now-ancient history: Reagan massively shook up his campaign team between Iowa and NH in 1980; it didn’t seem to hurt him in the end.
I think too many people are locked into narrow views of our electorate, both primary and general. It’s true the most electable GOPer, with money help, prevailed in the most recent primary races, but that doesn’t make it a certainty the same will happen in 2016. The crazy wing has got closer each time to snatching the nomination. Romney had massive structural advantages in ’12: not just the money, but the fact his opponents were of such low stature (Santorum had the strongest qualifications, and he’d lost his last race by double-digits), and that they split the right-wing vote well into early Spring. Yet the crazies made him sweat for the nomination way longer than anticipated. This time around, the righties are just as loony, but they have better electoral credentials (sitting Governors and Senators), and the base may find one to rally fully around.
In which case, I wouldn’t assume the 47 percent is guaranteed. First off, demographic changes every four years slightly delete firm GOP votes in favor of Dem leaners. Second, a far-right candidate (Walker, Cruz, etc.) can lose votes that the seemingly-moderate Romney got. And third, Hillary may be a woman, but she’s a WHITE woman, and she’s shown an ability to corral some of the Appalachian Valley voters who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote Obama. All that can combine to make a far more comfortable Dem margin. (Not guaranteeing it WILL happen; just that it COULD)
gene108
@NonyNony:
The way I look at it is all Republicans need to do is peel off 2%-3% of the vote from Democrats and they have a real chance at winning the White House, whether through more votes for their candidate or a third party candidate sucking off votes.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Sure, but could Romney have even outlasted the dumbasses without all that money and establishment support keeping his campaign going? Or would he just have been another one of them?
Barry
@Bubblegum Tate: ” And how did he conclude his tirade? “We have to stop this circular firing squad among conservatives!” It was a solid performance all around, 7/10, would laugh at again.”
She’s not a conservative, she’s a traitor.
Right now that’s a huge difference between liberals and conservatives.
Liberals have learned the hard way to tolerate quite a bit of dissent. Those who are ‘excommunicated’ worked very hard to become so.
The right will happily write somebody out of the group for minor offenses.
mdblanche
@gf120581: Joe McCarthy meets Ed Gein.
I think the real question is how Wisconsin ever got a nice reputation to start with.
Tripod
If he can’t leverage the neighboring state advantage (see 2008 Obama in the Iowa caucus, Indiana general) he’s toast. If he flubs Iowa, he won’t turn it around outside the Midwest.
Matt McIrvin
@Barry: I recall hearing the exact opposite as an explanation for Why Liberals Lose All The Time, sometime in the early 2000s: “the Right seeks converts, the Left seeks heretics.”
Brachiator
@Germy Shoemangler:
I think that the average citizen votes his or her pocketbook, and probably pays more attention and knows more than bloggers give may credit.
If the GOP run the tables on the Democrats, it will be because voters think that the GOP will do better to improve the economy than the Dems, will create more jobs, and will make life better.
No regular person ever gave a rat’s ass about “balance,” except maybe some of the most moronic talking heads on a Sunday news show.
revrick
Once again, a poll (CNN/ORC) pitting Hilary Clinton against theoretical Republican opponents has her cleaning their clocks by anywhere from 11 to 16 percent. She has the best favorable ratings of all the possible candidates.
Since she’s been in the public eye for over 20 years now, she’s a known quality. Republican attempts to portray her as something other than what the general public already believes/feels about her will not gain much, if any, traction. Hurling Benghazi and pearl-clutching about emails at her has not pushed the needle against her.
We’re talking potential landslide here.
She’s the most popular non-incumbent Presidential candidate since Eisenhower, thanks largely to her solid support from the white working class.
I think we should concentrate our efforts on making sure her coattails bring in Democrats to the Senate and House.
SFAW
@burnspbesq:
Some did, but thought it would be too hard to get the rest to pay attention, so they said “Screw it, it’ll all work out in the end.”
JCJ
@ruemara:
I think this is it. I have only lived here for 22 years and I live in Waukesha County which is probably the most conservative part of the state, but I am surprised Wisconsin has a reputation of being progressive. Maybe 30 or more years ago it was. I remember a few years ago when Russ Feingold was re-elected, maybe it was 1998, he only had a majority of the vote in two counties – Milwaukee County and Dane County (Madison.) So maybe there are two actual progressive counties while the others are minimally so or absolutely not at all.
SFAW
@mdblanche:
Bob LaFollette, probably
SFAW
@the Conster:
President Gore’s team said the same thing about whomever it was that Gore ran against. What was his name again?
rikyrah
IF Walker doesn’t get Koch Instructions, he’s lost.
All this shy this past week – all him.
Proving he’s the small-time amateur the rest of us thought he was.
mdblanche
@JCJ: You got me curious enough to look up that race. It looks like those weren’t the only counties Finegold won, but the race was very close and his entire margin of victory came from Milwaukee. It would appear that the difference between the presidential and the midterm electorates is even bigger in Wisconsin than in most states.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
But the money and establishment support didn’t overpower the popular support. Especially since anyone could get money. The GOP is notorious for its lunatic billionaires. Money and establishment support were a factor, but what enabled him to overcome the Cultural Conservative Frothing Masses was the utter incompetence of their chosen figureheads.
Tom Q
@mdblanche: Wisconsin in a presidential election IS progressive: going Dem in every such year since 1988, and electing Tammy Baldwin over seemingly unobjectionable Tommy Thompson in 2012.
But the state is practically ground zero for the gap between presidential and midterm outcomes in this current era, as a Randian lunatic knocked off three-termer Feingold in 2010, and Walker has squeaked by twice. I’d argue that Walker’s electoral stength is way overestimated due to his always having run in the GOP-favoring environments.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
FTFY. Raising taxes decreases revenues, and more money can’t fix education. That is Republican orthodoxy, and any evidence to the contrary must be buried.
Citizen_X
@revrick:
That. Sure, it’d be nice to have a primary challenger to push her farther left, but a bluer Congress will do the same, and for several years.
We need to regain lots of ground in state governments, too. The left needs to get over its obsession with the Presidency.
raven
I don’t want to intrude on Richard and, unlike when I landed here, few people give a shit but MARCH MADNESS is on!!!!!
Matt McIrvin
@revrick: It’s a year and a half before the presidential election, and most people haven’t really tuned into the campaign yet. Hillary Clinton is one of the most famous politicians in America (and has been for over two decades); everyone knows who she is. Though one of the Republicans has a familiar last name, they’re not nearly as well-known… but they will be.
That could work out either for the Republicans, or against them. But it will be a different situation. Be suspicious of head-to-head comparison polls at this stage.
Applejinx
Huh. But this is what Walker does! See the last part of This American Life, here. He purges dissidents, even if they are on his side or working for him!
I’d have thought that would go GREAT with modern republicanism, but evidently not! I guess you can purge a powerless kid like you were Stalin, and that’s fine, but purge someone with connections and you have immediate trouble.
Couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate guy.
Cervantes
@Applejinx:
Is she a kid?
Linnaeus
@JCJ:
That’s the kind of rural-urban divide that exists in a lot of other states. My state, Washington, has something of a progressive reputation (although with our state senate in the hands of the Republicans, it will be less so for the time being), but so much of our population is concentrated in four counties along Puget Sound (Snohomish, King, Pierce, and Kitsap) that that’s where statewide elections are effectively decided. Once you get out of the Puget Sound region, Washington looks like a much more conservative place.
mdblanche
@Tom Q: Yeah, I was being tongue-in-cheek there. Between folks like Baldwin and Feingold on the one hand and folks like Walker on the other Wisconsin seems to have multiple personalities.
Calouste
So reading up on this affair a bit, it seems that Walker hired a digital outreach guru without checking the digital outreach that this guru had done so far (i.e. they didn’t check her twitter account). Seems like typical GOP hiring, loyalty over past results.
Nutella
@mdblanche:
If I remember correctly, Romney was an obvious and early lock because he was the only candidate with a campaign organization in all 50 states. The others had very few states covered. Gingrich didn’t even bother with Virginia, his own state of residence.
But no one in the MSM or anywhere else mentioned that because the horserace is so much more fun and profitable to cover.
If we had adequate journalists as debate moderators (hah!) they’d ask every candidate to give the number of state organizations and call them out when they lie about it.
If we had adequate journalism in this country, that is.
(ETA: As @Frankensteinbeck said above.)
the Conster
@SFAW:
Gore actually won the popular vote. Also, Dick Cheney was “serious”, and people felt like the fuck-up dry drunk Bush would have his father’s VSP team to lean on. Walker’s got… what exactly?
Cervantes
@Calouste:
In addition to making those comments about Iowa, she also worked for McCain/Palin, Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina, among others.
Kay
It’s hard for me to feel a lot of sympathy for her. I looked at her Twitter posts and she was just brutal about Clinton’s handling of the email issue.
It was all that horrible uber-savvy “political malpractice” crowing they do.
I know she’s supposed to be clever and cage-busting and all, but she just comes off like a real jerk, IMO. I’d like to get away from the idea that “successful” or “competent” or “clever” = arrogant, sneering asshole. We can aim higher than that as far as defining success.
burnspbesq
@mdblanche:
I think I’ll go for a walk. I feel happy!
John M. Burt
This is a good thing only if the notion is true.
Remember 1980, when the “unelectable” Ronald Reagan got the nomination.
catclub
@John M. Burt:
The economy contracted by 5% and inflation was high in 1980. That was an incredible headwind for Carter. I see very little likelihood of 2016 having a 5% contraction.
boatboy_srq
@Cervantes: IOW, all the winners. (/snark)
catclub
@mdblanche: Iowa had Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley. Now that have relatively sane conservative and crazy person. Still split.
boatboy_srq
@catclub: The US doesn’t need a 5% contraction. All that’s necessary is a 5% contraction for metro DC. Congresscritters will get inundated with complaints from contractors losing projects and staffers losing jobs, and convince themselves it’s a national phenomenon. Same reason loons like Inhofe can complain that AGCC is a fraud because there’s snow on Capitol Hill: once they get inside the Beltway, the rest of the country blurs to insignificance.
Kay
“Why do national candidates have to run in states, anyway? Can’t they just run in the United States?” :)
I don’t know how they fix this “parochial concern” problem, I really don’t. Everywhere he goes, there will be a state making… demands.
Germy Shoemangler
If we had adequate journalists as debate moderators (hah!) they’d ask every candidate to give the number of state organizations and call them out when they lie about it. If we had adequate journalism in this country, that is.
Excellent point.
Even Gwen Ifill disappoints me when she focuses so COMPLETELY on the politics and the optics and the horserace, rather than the facts and issues and policy.
She recently asked someone “if the ACA is repealed, how will this hurt Obama?” I was half listening. My wife piped up “Why doesn’t she ask how it will hurt people who lose their insurance instead?” It was all about the chess game with Gwen.
Tom Q
@catclub: Plus there was the ongoing humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis — spotlit every day by Ted Koppel and Walter Cronkite — and a bruising intra-party challenge from Ted Kennedy that went all the way to the convention. If you collect all the things that threaten a presidential re-election, you find they applied to Carter. The wonder is that pre-election polls were as close as they were, and that I ascribe to the voters’ reluctance about Reagan. If Howard Baker or HWBush been the nominee, Carter’s fate would have been obvious from September.
burnspbesq
@SFAW:
That’s worked out well so far, hasn’t it.
Barry
@Frankensteinbeck: EDIT- Jeb will probably have this same advantage, but it’s not that the establishment will be behind him. It’s half-wit vs. no-wits.”
I’ll bet that the establishment backs him early and hard; it’ll be the various rogue billionaires who cause problems.
Remember, in the end he’s a hard-core right-winger. His brother campaigned as a ‘compassionate conservative’, and wasn’t, so it’s a Bush family trick.
And a GOP President, Senate, House and GOP is worth so much to these guys……….
Barry
@Brachiator: “Consultants and policy experts are below even toadies and hangers-on in the hierarchy of a politician’s entourage.”
And consultants who twitter things which offend important groups are frankly too dumb. The smarter ones will step over their metaphorical bodies and take the job.
Germy Shoemangler
@Tom Q: I remember that time. Every time I’d put on the evening news: “Day Five! Day Six! Day Seven!” the Iranian hostage crisis! “Day Eight!”
But then when we had people taken hostage during Reagan’s term… anyone out there counting???
Bubblegum Tate
@Barry:
I think you are correct in general about the ongoing purity purges on the right. In this particular case, he kind of softened it by insinuating that she’s not really a traitor, but is just misguided because she doesn’t really understand the stakes: (emphases–and cluelessness–his)
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Q: Yeah, it was really overdetermined.
There’s a bit of a political myth that Carter was destroyed by the Iran hostage crisis. It maybe could have destroyed him all by itself, but if you look at his job approval numbers, he was in the doghouse long before the Iran hostage crisis broke.
And he actually got a crisis rally up to above 50% approval when the hostage crisis began! If Operation Eagle Claw had succeeded, Iran might have actually saved Carter… but it still would have been an uphill battle because of the economy.
NonyNony
@gene108:
I think a third party candidate is more likely going to subtract votes from the Democrats than a Republican candidate. At this point there’s very little of the folks who vote Democratic consistently that will “switch” to voting Republican. The Republicans are too openly racist to attract the non-white vote, and whites that vote Democratic are not the kind of people who are going to switch to voting for Republicans at this point (short of them contracting some brain damage that radically shifts their personalities, I suppose). The problem Democrats have is more inconsistent voting than anything else – figuring out how to get people to the polls every year instead of every 4 years is crucial, and yet Democrats cannot do it.
OTOH – I think voter suppression moves will ramp up in various states to try to achieve the same impact. Pulling votes from Democrats and having them go nowhere helps Republicans too. They have to be careful that their techniques don’t backfire and cause some of their own voters to lose the franchise, though (their stupid voter ID laws hurt the elderly as well as the poor, and these days the elderly are more likely to vote Republican than they used to. This will continue as long as the folks who voted Ronald Reagan into office continue to survive because they’re the core of the GOP voting base now.)
David Koch
@Richard Mayhew: It was inconsequential. but at the time, the blogosphere was going nutz over Edwards caving to the disgusting Bill Donahue.
EriktheRed
@mdblanche: I’m not from there, but I still doubt Gov. Dead-Eyes would take his own state in a Presidential election.
David Koch
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):
Go ahead and mock him, but when has the blogosphere ever been wrong?
Tom Q
@Matt McIrvin: I have no doubt Carter’s numbers would have gone up had the desert rescue been a success rather than a debacle, but I suspect it would have been a sugar high, quick-fading. The economic issues were just too daunting, and the Kennedy challenge had done much of its damage.
What could have kept Carter afloat would have been elimination of not the Iran hostage crisis itself, but the Iranian revolution in toto. It was that that caused the worldwide spike in oil prices and subsequent inflationary spiral, which led to Carter’s noble but doomed directive to Volker to stop the inflation via interest rates, bringing on the recession. And without those hideous economic circumstances, Kennedy’s challenge might never have gained traction.
Or maybe he was ill-fated regardless. The Democratic party, post LBJ and McGovern, was having a severe identity crisis, and the wings would have pulled in opposite directions no matter what. The GOP coalition was probably going to get its full shot no matter what; Carter’s spectacularly bad circumstances probably just hastened its arrival.
Cervantes
@Tom Q:
Is it your view, then, that Carter’s election was a sort of blip in a long-term rightward trend? A trend that the revelations of Watergate did very little to slow down because they attached to Nixon personally rather than to his party?
revrick
@Matt McIrvin: The thing is these poll results are consistent with prior polls. And before he dropped out Hillary racked up similar results against Mitt Romney, not exactly an unknown there.
Tom Q
@Cervantes: Yes — Dems wining the presidency in 1976 was very much in defiance of prevailing political winds; I think the years that followed were pretty much inevitable (and, believe me, I suffered through them as much as anyone here).
Contrarily, and on the brighter side, I see the GOP struggling against similarly unfavorable climates right now. However depressing it may be to see them hold as much power as they do right now, I think their future is not bright. It would take a truly lucky set of breaks for them to eke out an electoral college majority right now, and it’s only going to get more difficult for them as demographics shift. And, while they seem to have solid hold of parts of Congress right now, the Dems looked even more invulnerable after the Watergate elections, and that wiped out with surprising swiftness.l
grandpa john
@Cervantes: The powerless Kid is referred to in the linked article
EthylEster
@Germy Shoemangler:
I worry about your sucky ability to predict a winner in election for president.
Cervantes
@grandpa john:
[Sorry, I must be missing your point.]
grandpa john
@revrick: and Jeb bush is not exactly unknown either and the referenced poll had Clinton by 15 over him.
grandpa john
@Cervantes: The point was that it referred to someone other than who you referring to, a him college student, not a her working for Walker
Jeffro
@Elizabelle: Seconded. Except I believe he was/is for Obamacare in some version in Ohio, and amnesty to boot. Will never fly with GOP primary voters.
Cervantes
@grandpa john:
Yes, I had missed that. Thanks for explaining!
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Q: Looking at the election maps is particularly weird: the map for 1976 looks like 1876 (or any of the late-19th-century elections), with the Democratic power base in the Southeast and the Republicans dominating outside it. No other election in the post-civil-rights era was anything like that.
Matt McIrvin
…in fact, looking at the history of these election maps reminds you how recent some things are that we can think of as immutable: while the geographic divisions in the culture war go back to the slave system, the red-state/blue-state partisan division we know well really only goes back to about 1992 (and wasn’t called that until 2000). I suppose it really formed in the 1980s, but Republicans had the upper hand then to such a degree that the state-by-state election maps just showed “Republicans win almost everywhere”.
…yeah, and county-by-county, 1980 was actually a variant of the 1976 map, but Carter got pummelled so badly that you couldn’t tell by looking at states.