Introducing the Jimmy Carter Outsider Index, 2016 Republican Primary Edition

Politics & Elections
21

Well Super Tuesday has come and gone and Trump won. The only hope of the #NeverTrump crew involves a contested convention. Or the GOP could just change their rules midstream. Legally and constitutionally there’s nothing barring them from that.

But Americans are wedded to the 2 stage election, with the first stage being the primary. So any attempt to choose someone other that the plurality winner (Trump) is likely to result in a third party run. Unless Trump doesn’t feel like it. He might not. It’s hard to say. He is after all an eccentric actor who plays a successful businessman on television. (Trump is a businessman of course. But when you earn less than market rates of return for yourself and your investors lose money hand over fist, you are something other than a success. Trump is great at sales though.)

At any rate, I’d be happy with a third party run by Trump. Also anything that can undermine the primary system is a good thing. Let’s face it: the minority of the Republican Party who vote during the primaries have terrible judgment. It’s not just Trump. All of the outsiders listed here never should have been on the debate stage. They were patently unqualified. And don’t blame the choices on offer. Kasich, Jeb Bush and George Pataki were all credible competitors for the Presidency. In another world, Rubio would have been considered a little unseasoned for the role: he would have run half of a campaign and not resigned from his Senate seat. He would have been angling for 2024 or 2028.

But Rubio says he hates the Senate. That’s right. The establishment’s current desperation pick doesn’t like legislating, but he wants to be President. And we’re past the point where any Republican would bat an eye at that.

Stop Trump. End the primary system.

But don’t pin everything on Trump. The latest CNN poll shows our outsiders at a whopping 74% of the total, with Trump polling at a lower 49%. Now that could be a blip: the latest 3 poll average is a more typical 65%. Trump may be a master of reality television, but he didn’t create the Republican primary electorate. He’s just exploiting their evident lack of sound judgment.

Latest chart:
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22

The two leading candidates for the GOP nomination - Donald Trump and Ted Cruz - are both broadly unacceptable to the Republican establishment. How did this happen?

Ezra Klein argues that the establishment tried to stop Trump and failed. So it follows that the Republican Party is broken.
Article: http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11103704/the-republican-party-is-broken
More recent article: The Republican Party is truly, profoundly broken - Vox
Video: The Republican Party is truly, totally broken | Donald Trump's astounding wins tonight — and Marco Rubio's many losses — proved something profound about American politics today. The Republican Party is... | By Ezra Klein | Facebook

Cruz is despised by the entire Republican Senate. Trump is ideologically unreliable when he isn’t heretical and he is expected to do poorly in November and he is alienating the rapidly growing Latino voting block. Yet he has only been seriously ad-bombed over the last week or so. What took the donors so long?

Two charts explain. The first shows the 5 poll centered average of Trump plus Cruz:

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Sure it broke 30% in early August. But it hovered between 30 and 40 percent until late November. That might have looked manageable. And it only broke the disastrous 50 percent threshold in late December. The National Review’s attempted take-down occurred in late January, which isn’t that slow for an alarm that went out in late December.

And that’s where they erred. Implicitly they were looking at the wrong chart. The outsider index showed that the Republican electorate had gone off the rails. Here it is superimposed with combined Trump and Cruz polling:

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Outsiders -all of whom never should have been on the debate stage - crossed the 50% threshold in mid August. They crossed 60% in late August have mostly stayed within the 60-70% range since. That should have been alarming as it showed a shocking absence of sound judgment by fairly solid majorities. A patriotic donor class would have started panicking at that stage. Instead they are panicking now. I guess they thought they could ride the tiger. They always had in the past after all.

According to Josh Marshall we can conceive this as a form of deferred maintenance. You can use racial resentment and nonsense as a route to electoral victory. But such strategies are corrosive and after a while… well you attract hostile takeovers by pure demagogues like Trump and Cruz. There are antibodies against demagoguery. Pragmatism for example. Even bipartisanship. But those sorts of qualities mark you as a RINO today.

Josh Marshall:

[INDENT]When I read the Times article, observe recent weeks as they’ve fluttered by and think about how things got to this point, I come back again and again to conversations I have with our chief tech, Matt Wozniak. Matt uses the metaphor of debt to describe the inevitable trade off we face building and maintaining the software that runs TPM.

If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a “debt” we’ll eventually have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we’ll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply be truly functional as opposed just barely doing what we need it to. There’s no right or wrong answer; it’s simply a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.

This is a fairly good description of what the media is now wrongly defining as the GOP’s ‘Trump problem’, only in this case the problem isn’t programming debt. It’s a build up of what we might call ‘hate debt’ and ‘nonsense debt’ that has been growing up for years.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/gop-overwhelmed-by-debt[/INDENT]

Debt isn’t a bad thing. All companies have it. And the proper level is a business decision. But it’s understood that too much leverage -too much debt- can lead to institutional collapse. The crazies have been edging out the adults in the Republican Party for decades now. Interestingly, I haven’t heard any conservative voices providing straight talk about minimum qualifications for running the Federal government. And here we are.

Dump Trump. Crush Cruz. End the primary system as we know it.

23

With Trump securing the nomination in Indiana and #NeverTrump becoming #OKWhatTheHellGoDonald, I thought I’d post one final chart.

Not too much news. There’s a bump for the establishment in Feb-Mar, which might be an artifact of my missing a few candidates with my copy/paste of RCP polling data. It also might reflect Rubio temporarily absorbing part of the Outsider vote.

At any rate Outsiders had between 60 and 70 percent of the vote from mid August 2015 to mid-March 2016. After that Cruz and Trump had something like 70-75% of the vote combined. I opine that my index was remarkably stable over the GOP primary season’s twists and turns. And quite a bit higher than similar indexes in past primaries.

With the exception of a brief bump in Feb/Mar (see above), establishment candidates typically hovered around 20%.
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24

I’d like to ask you a hypothetical. What would the Democratic race have looked like if it was say, Sanders vs. O’Malley because Clinton stayed out? Or a more crowded Democratic field that included Sanders and several establishment options?

25

Without Hillary, the Democratic field would have been much more crowded. I think we can agree with that.

I’d like to say that Sanders would have had his support cut into. But I’m honestly not sure. I don’t have a good handle on it. I will claim that if Michael Moore had run, he wouldn’t have polled over 15%. I don’t see Sanders as an outsider in the mold of Trump, Cruz, Fiorina, Huckabee and Carson.

Is there some underlying voter anger that benefited Sanders and Trump? I’m skeptical. Voter anger is an evergreen story: you read about it every election. And to the extent that it exists, it’s on the GOP side. Polling shows that most Democratic voters like both Hillary and Bernie.