Month: February 2016

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

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The Republican primary in South Carolina as well as the Democratic Caucuses in Nevada are now concluded. Candidates have left the race, and the Republican establishment continues the waking nightmare that is the ascendancy of Donald Trump. I will deal with the Caucuses tomorrow, but first the Republican South Carolina primary.

So what happened? 

Donald trump won big. Very big. Again. This was not meant to happen. By this time in the cycle we were meant to be watching the Bush juggernaut grind towards the nomination with glacial inevitability. But, to paraphrase the poet Burns, shit comes up. In this instance in the form of Donald Trump. If you take away only one thing from this primary let it be that The Donald is sailing towards the GOP nomination. Like an object in Newtonian physics he will remain in motion unless acted upon by an exterior force. Those waiting for his candidacy to self destruct will wait in vain, i’m afraid. Disillusionment with the operation of the American political system and the elites and establishment that surround it has reached such a stage that a plurality of voters on one side simply want someone to tell it like it is and break heads on their behalf.

What about the rest of them?

Well lets go through the candidates in order of vote total.

1st Donald Trump

With 36.9% of the vote, Trump walked away with the gold medal. This is an important development. Firstly, it was the first primary in the South. Remember that the Republican party of today is essentially a Southern party. Don’t misunderstand me, there are many northern and blue states with Republican governors. But the influence of Southern voters is unavoidably greater on those who represent Southern states and districts. A congressman from Boston cares very little how popular he is in rural Alabama. To fail to win the South is to fail to connect with the foundation of the Republican party and the bedrock of its electoral support. Trump proved that he could win Southern primaries, that New Hampshire wasn’t a fluke and that his candidacy isn’t some media soap-bubble that expands meteorically only to pop. His campaign is real and, looking increasingly inevitable, swelling like a dying star before exploding in a crescendo of in this case electoral  annihilation.

2nd (But not really) Marco Rubio 

Expectations are key in shaping the all-important narrative of the campaign, and Rubio managed to beat them by scraping in to what some are calling second place. I say this because beating someone by (at time of writing) .2 of a percent in a crowded field is not a rational barometer for ascendancy. Rubio and Cruz got circa. 165,000 and 164,000 respectively. That is not statistically significant. But, expectations for Cruz were high. While Rubio, off the back of his disastrous debate performance and subsequent pummeling in New Hampshire by John Kasich, had set expectations very low. This is why expectations are important. Because of them, a statistical tie for both of them is a victory for Rubio and a defeat for Cruz. Rubio’s strong showing in South Carolina helps him in his ambition to become the standard bearer for the non-tea party and non-trump conglomeration.

3rd (But not really) Ted Cruz

This was a disappointing result for Texas’ least amusing son. His campaign is predicated on support from the movement conservatives of the hard-right and the evangelical wing of the party. South Carolina is overwhelmingly favorable ground in that regard, with the evangelical vote dominating the primary. His failure to come closer to Trump’s vote total, if not beat him again as he did in Iowa is a serious obstacle in Cruz’ path to victory.

 

4th Jeb Bush

After calling on his elder brother and his mother to campaign for him, and after having spent vast piles of cash on advertising in South Carolina Bush was able to muster only a desultory 7.8%.He staked it all on South Carolina, a state with a history of support for the House of Bush, and lost crushingly. Swiftly afterwards, and to the surprise of nobody he suspended his campaign. The crucial question now is where does that support go?

5th John Kasich

The expectation game is working for John Kasich in this primary. Having essentially no support in the state before the New Hampshire primary, nobody seriously expected him to win or even place highly. He is not a good fit for the South Carolina primary, either in style or in terms of policy. His more pragmatic and conciliatory message largely fell on deaf ears. Kasich was, however, able to catch up to Bush, ending with virtually the same result. Because of this he can claim there is momentum behind his candidacy, that his campaign is growing and survive long enough to make a stand in the mid-west where his appeal is thought to be greater. Whether he can survive long enough to be a factor in such states, or demonstrate any significant support at all in places other than New Hampshire are open questions. Personally i don’t like his chances. In previous cycles Kasich would be just the sort of man to be a first-tier contender. But the adults lost control of the show a long time ago.

6th Ben Carson

The core of Ben Carson’s national support are evangelical Christians. Since they are the dominant group in this primary it should be unsurprising he got quite a lot of support considering the parlous state of his campaign. 7.2% is obviously not a winning number, but it is certainly enough to move the dial. That is why most of the discussion in the media surrounding his campaign is about when he will drop out, to see where that support will go. Under usual conditions that would be some time ago, but his campaign recently announced a larger than expected fundraising haul so perhaps the good doctor will continue his seemingly semi-conscious presence on the trail.

So why did Trump win? 

The crucial factor to understand in this season is that Trump is winning because the field is divided. He isn’t winning absolute majorities, merely the largest plurality of voters. If you take the votes of what are perceived to be the ‘establishment’ candidates (Rubio, Kasich and Bush) you get a number that eclipses Trump’s. But Cruz splits off the Conservatives and many Evangelicals, Trump takes the anti-establishment angry and disillusioned crowd and then the other three candidates fight over the remaining ‘governing’ wing of the party, concerned with governing the country in a conservative fashion rather than ideological crusades or populist preaching. Unless and until candidates follow Bush’s lead and drop out to allow the anti-trump blocks of the party to consolidate, Trump will continue on to victory.

God help us all.

 

 

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

New Hampshire Rundown

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Over the next few days I plan to post more detailed analysis of each candidates place in the field, biography and potential hurdles. I was holding off on this on the assumption that the fine people of New Hampshire would winnow the field down still further, and in this they have obliged me. So to begin with lets just nail down the event that was the New Hampshire primary, who won, why and what it means.

 

What is a New Hampshire, and why does it matter?

New Hampshire is a small irregular rectangle on the north-eastern edge of the United States. As they never tire of repeating, they hold the nations first primary. But what about Iowa i hear you say? Well, technically Iowa is a caucus. A caucus in American political parlance signifies a big meeting where you demonstrate support for your candidate by standing in certain parts of a large room in front of your friends and neighbors, resisting their appeals to shame, greed and avarice with the white hot flame of your political commitment. Unless you have a job. In which case, you basically can’t play. It’s a bit of a problem. New Hampshire, by contrast, opts for the more traditional ‘vote by putting a piece of paper in a box’ method we all know and love.

But which people? And what box? 

Iowa and New Hampshire are the one-two punch of primary politics. Very seldom does a candidate win both, largely because of the diversity of those two states. Whats important to note about New Hampshire is that there is a much smaller evangelical electorate in that state. While Iowa has a reputation as being up for grabs for the insurgents and the populists, New Hampshire is traditionally seen as the domain of the moderates (with a few notable historical exceptions). If you are not a firebrand conservative, New Hampshire is the state you need to do well in early to demonstrate your viability. What most candidates go there looking for is a ‘ticket out’ of the state, as the saying goes. They want the right to compete and be taken seriously in later contests.

So who got a ticket?

Most obviously Trump, but others as well. But lets just settle on that point for a second. Donald Trump won a primary. We are living in a world now where he of the inimitable hair and perpetual bankruptcy  is amassing delegates. Any lingering doubt you may have about whether or not the Trump Show was actually a real presidential campaign or simply a bad joke should be put from your mind. Because this was a big victory. The Donald won working class voters, younger voters, older voters. His victory could, if one was so inclined, be called emphatic.

Does that mean Trump will be the nominee? 

Not by a long shot. His support seems to have a ceiling of around one-third of the GOP primary electorate. He will need to expand that if he wants to win the nomination. What this victory does mean is that you we will be seeing more of New York’s less than favorite son.

What’s all this about John Kasich? 

John Kasich overcame the handicap of nobody outside of Ohio knowing who he was to come in second in New Hampshire. To be honest it wasn’t even a terribly strong second, but he was the person with the most votes whose name wasn’t Trump. This apparently entitles him to the adoration of much of the press corps. That shouldn’t be important, but it is. This is what i mean about the narrative nature of this process. The fact his second place finish is being treated as a big deal makes it a big deal because in many of these cases perception and reality are intimately intertwined.

 

What is the next thing to watch? 

The next contests are in South Carolina for the GOP, and Nevada for the Democrats. I’m currently preparing a long post about South Carolina for both parties, and will also do one on Nevada for the blue team. In the meantime i’ll be posting some more detailed analysis of each candidate and where they stand now that the field is down to a more manageable size. I have been desperately hoping Ben Carson will drop out so i can be spared writing about him, but sadly the good doctor has disappointed me.

 

 

 

New Hampshire Rundown

Alas, poor Paul

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Rand Paul has joined the list of Republican ‘also ran’ candidates for this cycle. Like Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki and Lindsey Graham the Kentucky Senator has ended his campaign. He has the dubious privilege of actually surviving long enough to be rebuffed by the electors of Iowa, many of the others having had their candidacies strangled virtually at birth either by incompetence or The Donald sucking down all the metaphorical oxygen with a kleptomaniacal relentlessness.

 

Who Cares?

Well, i’m sure the people of Kentucky will be delighted to have their Senator back. Laws, rules and regulations were all bent and altered to allow Rand this run. After sacrificing so much, going to such great lengths to simply pursue the presidency his failure must be galling. But this raises a question crucial to this whole presidential cycle. His father, Ron Paul, achieved considerable success in Iowa. In 2008 Paul Superior got 21% in Iowa, within 5 points of victory. So where is all that support now? Where is the libertarian, small government, non-interventionist wing of the party we all saw grow in the post-Bush years? There were patchy performances on the part of Rand at some of the debates to be sure, but this hardly explains shrinking the family escutcheon in Iowa by three-quarters, down to a measly four percent. Especially because Rand was meant to be a younger, more forceful, more establishment-friendly and ultimately more electable version of his father.

So why didn’t he do better?

The sad truth is that the Republican primary electorate this year is not buying what the Saints Paul are selling. Medieval Islamist psychopaths are despoiling the cradle of civilization, Russia is nicking off with parts of other countries it likes the look of and America is being ruled over by a radical socialist hell bent on making the USA into Sweden. Now here comes Rand to talk about cutting back on the military, isolationism and civil liberties. Anger is the dominant emotion of this campaign. People are after a tribune to go crack some heads wherever heads need cracking. Randbot simply does not ship with such functionality.

What happens next?

The first major public poll of New Hampshire since Iowa comes out. Paul and Huckabee, both now gone from the race, had a combined total of 3 percent in the Granite state. Not much, but each narrowing of the field means more voters forced back into the undecided box. That box will be emptied shortly, and minds will have to be made up. They can’t choose Paul any more, so who will it be? And who will drop out next? The endless drama continues.

 

P.S. My money is on Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. To be honest, i don’t understand why he hasn’t announced it already. Or perhaps he did and nobody noticed.

Alas, poor Paul

Much ado about what, exactly?

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The Iowa Caucuses are over. But what does that, when we get down to it, really mean? For those who observe the American presidential process only casually the importance of this event might be difficult to fathom. After all, Iowa is a not very large, not very diverse and not very representative section of the vast American electoral architecture. Iowa has only 30 delegates to award on the Republican side, of a total of 2472. But such is the power and influence of this small corner of the American experiment that it has, at a stroke, rendered the preceding months of campaigning and polls and speculation functionally irrelevant. The sad truth belying the oceans of ink and mountains of text already produced covering the race is that, until now, none of it was real. Until Iowa all things are possible, all parts are moving and the often mentioned ‘race’ is really only occurring in the heads of pundits and talking heads. Nothing counts, until now.

Why is it important?
Iowa is first. That is really the core of it. It is where the metal meets the meat. A good showing here in the land of corn farms and pickup trucks can propel a candidate to the top of the pack, just as a poor performance can destroy ambitions nurtured over decades. This is because, as is often noted, the primary sytem is a process, not an event. American politics is driven by narrative, position and momentum. In this sense Iowa is important because it demonstrates viability, winning potential and forces the media to spend eight days between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary talking about the victor of Iowa.

So what happened this time?
I have been saying for a while now, when asked about the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, that his candidacy wasn’t real until he started amassing delegates. All the national polling advantages in the world can’t save you if the voiters of Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids and so on decide to pick the other guy. There is something both charming and terribly strange about that fact.
The big story of the night is obviously the winners. Let us begin with the Democratic side of the ledger. Trust me, the Republican side will take a while so lets start slow. At the time of writing, Clinton is ahead in Iowa on the ‘delegate equivalent’ count. This number is arrived at by arcane and esoteric means with which i won’t bore you, but sufficed to say it is the result, rather than the process. The numbers that Sanders and Clinton are getting are not votes, but the number of delegates pledge by caucus to attend the state convention which decides who the delegates to the national convention will be. The democratic side does not take or publish vote totals, only results. If this seems odd or unsatisfactory, rest assured you are not alone. In any case, the result is 49.89% Clinton, 49.54% Sanders and 0.57% to Martin O’Malley. If you don’t know who Martin O’Malley is, don’t feel bad. He is the man who has been desperately wishing for the last 12 months he was running in a cycle that didn’t include a septuagenarian socialist rock-star with a Brooklyn accent and a woman who has been spoken of as the likely first female president for so long people could be forgiven for thinking its already happened. In this instance, being a photogenic straight white Liberal man with an accomplished record in your home state is tragically not the golden ticket it used to be. Life is tough, no?

The truth is that not much hung on the Democratic caucuses. Clinton can win without victory here. The game we are watching on the Blue side of the aisle is all about how long it will take to put Bernie Sanders back in his box. His ability to fight to within a statstical dead heat puts off that event for a time, but there is little realistic posibility of him accumulating a majority of delegates. There is a great deal more to say about what Sanders is doing in the Democratic process, the long-term value of his contribution and what his candidacy says about the state of American politics and society but i will save that for another time. Right now it is essentially status quo ante bellum, minus the presence of Martin O’Malley as Mr. Cellophane has announced he is winding up his campaign.

But what about the GOP?
After announcing his candidacy Donald Trump shot to the lead in national and Iowa polls. The first essential rule of American presidential politics is that national polls scarcely matter. Don’t pay attention to them. It is popularity state by state which counts. First Trump lost his Iowa lead to Carson, then to Cruz and only regained it in the closing days of the Caucus campaign. The question Iowa was meant to answer was this: Is Donald Trump actually happening? Can this walking, talking Id really be romping it in so convincingly, buoyed to seemingly endless heights each time he smashed the predictions of his demise? The answer, delivered by the humble caucus-goers of the Hawkeye state, is no. Not only did Trump fail to win, but he almost failed to come second, only barely holding Marco Rubio down into third place. Here is why.

Iowa is, actually, a reasonably conservative state. Nearly half the Republican caucus goers there are Christian evangelicals. It is this constituency that propelled Rick Santorum to win Iowa in 2012, and Mike Huckabee to win in 2008. Ted Cruz, darling of the Tea Party and the hard-right of the GOP began putting his eggs in the Iowa basket early on. He courted and acquired the early endorsements of pastors, radio hosts and evangelical activists. The Cruz campaign opened up multiple field offices in Iowa, ferried in volunteers from outside and inside the state and even arranged accommodation for them amusingly nicknamed ‘Camp Cruz’. This sort of organisational muscle matters in Iowa, where the pool of voters is small and the battle is all about how many people you can get to stand in a school gym and fight for you. Activists hold much more power in Iowa than in larger and later contests. Even with the popular governor of the state campaigning against Cruz, and the whole weight of the ‘The Donald’ directed against him, these committed cadres were able to fight to victory on Cruz’ behalf. This is very important. For the first time, someone has hit Trump and survived the blow-back, and for the first time Trump has failed to crush and emasculate his opponent. Like all bullies, Trump’s greatest enemies are impotence and ridicule. I would be willing to bet his life will feature more of both for the rest of the primary season.

So that’s Cruz, what about Rubio?
This is where my point about the narrative nature of American presidential politics becomes important. How well you are doing is not so much measured by objective performance, but based on relative position and expectations. Ever heard of Paul Tsongas? He is the guy who beat Bill Clinton by nine percent in the New Hampshire primary. You have likely never heard of him because Clinton did better than expected, declared himself the ‘Comeback Kid’ and proceeded to bask in positive news coverage while beating the victorious Tsongas into submission in successive primaries. It is all about expectations, which is why so much of the spin around presidential campaigns is about managing those expectations. Marco Rubio’s campaign was in this instance, as in many others, very canny indeed. Not wanting to raise expectations in Iowa, they were fairly late to the party. While Trump and Cruz were slugging it out, Rubio was setting up campaign headquarters, hiring staff, and performing analytic surveys. These allowed his campaign to find the areas of the state most susceptible to Rubio’s message, and campaign intensively in those areas virtually exclusively. This was a small-target strategy. Not going for the win, not even going for second place, but trying to get the maximum in terms of delegates and votes in exchange for the minimum of time and money. The Rubio campaign said over and over that it was the underdog, it was arriving late, it was in no way going to win. Cruz and Trump obligingly co-operated with this story, needing to argue for their own purposes that it was a two horse race between Trump and Cruz to try and shake off supporters from other candidates. This allowed Rubio to come up the middle, beat expectations and come out of Iowa with a very strong third place finish. This is extremely important, as the makeup of the later race will be determined by who is able to crowd out the competition and become the standard bearer for a wing of the party. This takes Rubio several steps closer to clinching the ‘Establishment’ or ‘Moderate’ republican label, and days of positive media coverage are unlikely to hurt him in his quest to beat Kasich, Christie and Bush in New Hampshire and consolidate their supporters into a legitimately plausible coalition.

And then there’s Trump…
The Trump candidacy deserves a post all of its own, so i won’t burden this already overly long post with an explanation of his rise or alleged ‘ascendancy’. Remember all that stuff about managing expectations? Yeah, trump doesn’t do that. That is one of the many curves and edges of the TrumpCopter that should render it unable to fly by the laws of political reality, and yet there it is, stubbornly airborne day after day, driving pundits and the commentariat into fits of inchoate rage. Regarding his results, sufficed to say he failed to meet expectations. It is difficult at this stage to discuss the exact reasons why, as in a real sense the Trump campaign is a cipher. They don’t run all that many TV ads, they don’t talk about organisation very much and their expressed strategy seems limited to ‘we are going to win’. The Trump ‘campaign’ is really Donald, the Man Himself in all his glory. We were assured numerous times over the last few weeks that they had a ‘great ground game’. Whether this is true or not we can only speculate, but considering the results i am inclined to say it wasn’t as great as they thought. Can he still win the nomination? Absolutely, but one leg of the stool has been removed, and the Manhattan real estate developer wobbles precariously on his diminished perch. He can still win because, as the astute among you would have noticed, the man who won Iowa has not won the nomination in the Republican Party since George W. Bush. This harkens back to the aforementioned unrepresentative nature of the Iowa electorate, particularly on the GOP side. America is simply not 50% Evangelical. Iowa also requires relatively little money to compete in. Its TV markets are comparatively cheap, it is a world capital of face to face retail politics and the state is reasonably small. So Iowa is often captured by the scrappy conservative insurgency against the more establishment or moderate candidates who have their powerbase elsewhere. Trump never needed Iowa to win. But he does need to win somewhere to prove he is a real candidate. If not Iowa, then where? His lead remains in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina. But both of those races have tightened already, and will come into sharper contrast still as polling day draws near. If Trump fails to meet expectations in New Hampshire, for instance by Rubio vaulting into competition with him on the basis of his Iowa performance, his already rattled candidacy will be seriously derailed. South Carolina, the following state in the calendar, is a notorious bastion of social and evangelical conservatism, a base Trump failed to win over in Iowa once already.

And so the question we are left with, still, is this. Are the polls accurately predicting Trump’s support at the ballot box? In Iowa they didn’t. We have eight days until the first primary. The world was created in less.

Much ado about what, exactly?