Trump adviser says Republicans won't have contested convention

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Journalists watch Republican U.S. presidential candidates Donald Trump (L) and Ted Cruz debate on large video monitors in the media filing center during the Republican U.S. presidential candidates debate sponsored by CNN at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida March 10, 2016.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump's new top political strategist predicted on Friday the Republican presidential front-runner would amass the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch his party's nomination well before the Republican National Convention in July.

Veteran campaign tactician Paul Manafort was chosen by Trump on Thursday to oversee a fractious nomination process that many Republicans expect may not yield a clear winner before the convention.

Manafort said on CNN's "New Day" program that rival Ted Cruz, the U.S. senator from Texas, will not be able to dent Trump's delegate lead before California's June 7 primary.

"The reality is: Ted Cruz has seen his best day," Manafort said. "The reality is: this convention process will be over with sometime in June, probably June 7, and it'll be apparent to the world that Trump is over that 1,237 number."

Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet on social media after his double-digit loss to Cruz in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, which followed a series of missteps on the campaign trail including his statement, later recanted, advocating punishment for women who have illegal abortions.

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In elevating Manafort, Trump said he would add more staff before the convention in an expansion of his campaign team beyond the close-knit group of advisers who have been at his side since he jumped into the presidential race last June.

"People that I know that want to get involved and wanted to before but didn't have a way in," Manafort said.

The next presidential nominating contests before the Nov. 8 election include a number in East Coast states seen as more fertile ground for the real estate tycoon, including in his native New York on April 19.

Manafort cited Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland as states where Trump would do well.

"By the time we get to California the momentum is going be very clear and Ted Cruz' path to victory is going to be in shambles," he said.

Cruz, appearing on the CNN program earlier, said he had a clear path to 1,237 delegates.

"It's difficult. We've got to win and we've got to win consistently," Cruz said. "He's right. He has to win," Manafort said.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Bill Trott)

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GOP showing signs of backing down from vow to block Obama’s Supreme Court nominee automatically

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and others have vowed to block any Obama nominee, saying the next president should select Justice Scalia’s replacement. (Associated Press) more >

President Obama called on SenateRepublicans Tuesday to give his eventual Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing in his bid to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as cracks emerged in the Republican leadership’s position of automatically blocking any nominee.

“I expect them to hold hearings. I expect them to hold a vote,” Mr. Obama said at a press conference. “There’s no unwritten law that says it can only be done on off years.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and others including presidential candidates Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida have vowed to block any Obama nominee, saying the next president should select Justice Scalia’s replacement.

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Mr. Obama blasted that rationale.

“This is the Supreme Court, thehighest court in the land,” the president said. “It’s the one courtwhere we would expect elected officials to rise above day-to-day politics. I understand the stakes. I understand the pressure that Republican senators are undoubtedly under. This would be a deciding vote. But that’s not how the system is supposed to work.”

Even before Mr. Obama stated his case, there were signs that Republican unity was wavering on the notion of blocking any nominee out of hand.

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SenateJudiciary CommitteeChairman Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, didn’t rule out confirmation hearings and a vote by his panel on an Obama selection.

“I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decision,” Mr. Grassley said Tuesday in a conference call with Iowa radio reporters. “In other words, take it a step at a time.”

Asked whether he thought the controversy over filling the court vacancy might endanger his re-election chances this fall, Mr. Grassley said, “I think I have a responsibility to perform, and I can’t worry about the election. I’ve got to do my job as a senator, whatever it is. And there will be a lot of tough votes between now and the next election.”

His comments appeared to be a softening from a statement shortly after Justice Scalia’s death, when Mr. Grassley said it was “standard practice” not to nominate or confirm candidates for the Supreme Court in an election year.

“It only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the nextSupreme Court Justice,” Mr. Grassley said in a statement Saturday.

Sen. Thom Tillis, North Carolina Republican, voiced caution about blocking any Obama nominee automatically.

“I think we fall into the trap if [we] just simply say, sight unseen, we fall into the trap of being obstructionists,” Mr. Tillis said on Tyler Cralle’s radio show.

But Mr. Tillis added of the president, “If he puts forth someone that we think is in the mold of President Obama’s vision for America, then we’ll use every device available to block that nomination.”

A top aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, responding to Mr. Tillis’ comments, predicted that Mr. McConnell will eventually retreat from his stance of blocking any Obama nominee without a hearing.

“Sen. McConnell’s rash and unprecedented decision to deny aSupreme Court nominee a fair hearing and floor vote has put Republicans in an untenable position, so it is not surprising to see cracks appear so quickly,” said Adam Jentleson, Mr. Reid’s deputy chief of staff. “The next step in this process will be for Sen. McConnell to back down and give President Obama’s nominee a hearing and a floor vote. That’s a simple reality.”

The White House said Mr. Obama will nominate someone to fill the vacancy after the Senate returns from its recess next week. Justice Scalia, 79, died while on a hunting trip in Texas last weekend.

Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. said Mr. McConnell and other Republicans are making a mistake by vowing to block any Obama nominee, and they should “recalibrate immediately.”

“Mitch McConnell has been joined by [presidential candidates] Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump in saying the president’s nominee to thecourt should not be considered by theSenate,” he said. “That’s an awful lot of Republicans making a big mistake.”

The No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, Charles E. Schumer of New York, said he expects Mr. Obama to select a consensus candidate who could get bipartisan support and predicted that a “huge public outcry” would force Mr. McConnell to back down.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said, “Refusing to do anything means you’re voting maybe. That’s a cowardly way out.” In Richmond, Vermont, Mr. Leahy said the last time the court was down a jurist was during the Civil War.

But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, said he supports the idea of blocking any Obama nomination to the Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court is not an extension of the White House,” Mr. Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The president has absolutely every right to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, but Congress as an equal branch also has every right not to confirm someone.”

Mr. Ryan said an election year is a poor time to make such an important decision.“We are knee-deep into a presidential election, and I think the precedent for not filling a Supreme Court vacancy in such a time is justified,” he said.

The speaker also said Mr. Obama’s nominees to the high court, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, have shown tendencies to support the president’s overreaching on executive power.

“The president has tried everything he can to empower the executive branch at the expense of the legislative one,” he said. “His Supreme Court nominees have all contributed to that, those that he has placed on the bench already. So not only does Congress have the authority to stop a nominee, it has an obligation to defend itself against a president and a radically altered court that would continue to seize its powers.”

Mr. Obama said Republicans are being hypocritical and that a delay forSupreme Court nominees in election years is “not in the constitutional text.”

“I’m amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters of the Constitution suddenly reading into it a whole series of provisions that are not there,” he said.

Nearly all of the most vulnerableSenate Republicans support blocking a vote on any nominee, even as Democrats vow to make it a flashpoint in the battle for control of the upper legislative chamber.

Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and John McCain of Arizona said they owe it to the American people to delay the nomination process until voters elect Mr. Obama’s successor.

As Mr. Obama pushes ahead with plans to nominate a successor toJustice Scalia, more attention is focusing on Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 56, as a possible candidate. Last year, she became the first black woman to hold the nation’s top law enforcement post.

“The fact that Lynch was vetted so recently for attorney general also makes it practical for the president to nominate her in relatively short order,” said Tom Goldstein, publisher of the SCOTUSblog. “There is some imperative to move quickly, because each passing week strengthens the intuitive appeal of the Republican argument that it is too close to the election to confirm the nominee.”

But Ms. Lynch drew criticism last year for defending Mr. Obama’s executive order on deportation amnesty. She also is under fire for her handling of the Justice Department’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s classified emails. She has resisted Republicans’ calls to appoint a special prosecutor to evaluate the matter.Nor was her confirmation process free of drama.

A former U.S. attorney in New York, Ms. Lynch was nominated by the president on Nov. 8, 2014, to replace Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., shortly after Republicans won control of the Senate in the midterm elections. Democrats offered to wait until Republicans took over the majority in January to consider her nomination.

Her confirmation process then became mired in political feuds over Mr. Obama’s executive action on deportation amnesty and an abortion provision in legislation against human trafficking. As the debate over Ms. Lynch’s confirmation grew more heated, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat and a close ally of the White House, said Republicans were making her “sit in the back of the bus.”

The Judiciary Committee voted 12-8 in favor of her confirmation on Feb. 26, 2015. The full Senate confirmed Ms. Lynch by a vote of 56-43 on April 23, 166 days after the president nominated her.

The lone senator who didn’t vote wasTed Cruz, Texas Republican, who had scheduling conflicts. He voted against Ms. Lynch in a procedural vote and said the majority Republicans could have stopped her nomination.

Others on Mr. Obama’s short list include Judge Srikanth Srinivasan, 48, who was approved by the Senate on a 97-0 vote in 2013 for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Judge Jane Kelly, 51, also given unanimous Senateapproval in 2013 to the appeals court; Judge Paul Watford, 48, of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, formerly a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and California Attorney General Kamala Harris, 51, who is running in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

⦁ This article is based in part on wire service reports.

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End of the Old Order: GOP Apparatchiks Boo Insurgents as Outsiders’ Poll Numbers Soar

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by Matthew Boyle 15 Feb 2016CHARLESTON, South Carolina

CHARLESTON, South Carolina — There’s a new world order emerging during this presidential primary, but it’s not the one the Bush apparatus envisioned.

Here , on Monday evening, former U.S. President George W. Bush—the second in his family to win the presidency—will campaign with the third in his family to seek the presidency, his younger brother former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush also brought out his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush in the final days in New Hampshire.

With the Bush clan comes, an army of entrenched political consultants—people who have made lucrative careers off the family name, working for the father then the first son and now the second son, and the whole network of operatives connected to them—and a whole generation of politicians who have risen up to the national level as part of the Bush network.

The most prominent of these, of course, at this time is Jeb Bush’s protege Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio has come forth to challenge his mentor on the field of political battle, and the two thus far having dueled to a draw with a slight advantage to the elder. Student almost overtook teacher after Iowa’s caucuses, but mentor regained control of his part of the Republican Party in New Hampshire’s primaries and the move to bring out the big guns—the former U.S. president himself—couldn’t come at a more crucial time for Jeb Bush.

In any ordinary election year, this internecine battle between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—student attempting to become teacher, Padowan takes on Jedi Master—would be the story of the century. But in 2016, two and a half decades after George H.W. Bush famously repeatedly called for a “new world order” in presidential addresses—a mission his son President George W. Bush carried on in the early 21st century after eight years of Democratic President Bill Clinton split between them—the story is entirely different as voters nationwide have begun formally rejecting the establishments of both political parties.

The story this year is the American people’s complete and entire rejection—via the ballot box—of failed political dynasties. Iowa Republicans selected Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a thorn in the side of the Washington establishment and the Bush apparatus for the entirety of his national political career. Iowa Democrats ground their race to a stalemate between Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of Vermont, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—Bill’s wife, and the former First Lady. New Hampshire Republicans further rejected politics as usual by selecting billionaire Donald Trump as their candidate, while Democrats there overwhelming picked Sanders.

“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations,” George H.W. Bush saidin a nationally televised presidential address on the first Gulf War on Jan. 17, 1991. “When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.”

The phrase “new world order” has taken on a life of its own over the past couple decades since, as conspiracy theorists have repeatedly used it to describe some vaunted overarching mysterious Illuminati-or-Bilderberg-like global elite that controls everything like a puppet master pulls strings of a doll. While that meaning of it is far-fetched, and indeed conspiracy-theory level, there is an element of truth to the idea that the Bush family has obtained control over Republican politics over the past two decades—and similarly the Clintons over Democratic politics.

Americans, this election cycle, are repeatedly rejecting what they see as failed royal rule by a pair of high-profile political families and those closely associated with them—turning instead to outsiders they see as pure from the political corruption with which the Bushes and Clintons are so commonly associated. It’s why Iowa went to Cruz and a contested election on the Democratic side, and New Hampshire went to Trump and Sanders. It’s also why in South Carolina GOP presidential primary polling Trump and Cruz are so solidly ahead of their opponents in recent surveys. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump up 20 points over the field, with Cruz in a solid second place up another 3 percent over the next best candidate.

Rubio, Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich combined in the polling average still lose to Trump alone. Throw in Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson, another outsider, and the non-politicians reach nearly 60 full percent—landslide territory—in South Carolina.

Perhaps that’s why the RNC and other elements of the GOP establishment decidedon Saturday evening to make one last ditch effort to throw the kitchen sink and more at Trump and Cruz—a desperate ploy—by stacking the debate audience in Greenville at the Peace Center with donor class pro-amnesty establishment hacks. Incredibly, the crowd cheered as Bush and his protege Rubio repeatedly made the case to grant amnesty to illegal aliens—and booed as Trump and Cruz eloquently debunked them.

It turns out that out of the 1,600 plus tickets handed out to the debate audience, only 600 of them were distributed to the six remaining candidates to provide to their supporters. The rest were split among distribution by the RNC and the state and local parties—which basically handed them out to a bunch of donors, as the local GOP chairman admitted on local television. What’s more, rumors continue to swirl thatSen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—a onetime candidate himself who endorsed Bush upon dropping out—and Gov. Nikki Haley packed the audience with anti-Trump and anti-Cruz activists. It’s no secret that Graham and Haley both despise Trump—and Graham equally despises Cruz.

Sanders’ rise has establishment Democrats as panicked as establishment Republicans are at the rise of Trump and Cruz. And just like the RNC seems to have engaged in questionable tactics designed to tip the scales in favor of the establishment backed Rubio, Bush and Kasich, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has engaged in questionable tactics designed to bolster Clinton over Sanders. Despite Sanders’ blowout victory in New Hampshire, for instance, the DNC—thanks to so-called “super delegates”—has awarded the same amount of delegates from that state to Clinton as were given to Sanders.

The Bush dynasty’s control of GOP politics in many ways comes down to what happens in South Carolina. The Greenville News’ Amanda Coyne ran a post-debate story with the headline: “Without strong showing, SC could be end of line for Bush.”

In it, Coyne writes that Bush’s decision to come right after Trump in Saturday’s debate comes amid lagging poll numbers for the man who was supposed to easily become president.

“Faced with poll numbers that have him in fourth place, Jeb Bush came out swinging against GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump at Saturday night’s debate in Greenville,” Coyne wrote. “Bush needed to change strategies if he is to vault to at least second place in South Carolina’s primary and get out of the Palmetto State alive, some experts say. In a packed event room at the Anderson Civic Center last week, Bush asked South Carolina to switch the trajectory of the Republican presidential race by choosing him in next Saturday’s primary.”

Never count the Bushes out until the clock stops, though. They’re ferocious, tough fighters—and they’ve proven throughout history that they are not only more than capable of winning but they have actually won the presidency three times. They’ve also led the CIA, held two governorships of major U.S. states—Florida and Texas—and built a global presence that stretches from Washington, D.C., throughout the world. The same goes for the Clintons, who have won the presidency twice, held a governorship, a U.S. Senate seat and the Secretary of State position and have similarly built a worldwide presence through the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative and more. In other words, these two families are the most powerful people in the world.

What happens in the days, weeks and months ahead is going to be one of two stories: The comeback of one or two of America’s most powerful political dynasties, or the death of one or both of those dynasties and the birth of a new power structure in either or both party’s politics.

That new power structure will leave several—really, most if not all—players from the old power structure, the Bush and Clinton apparatuses, behind. Most GOP political consultants fighting Trump and Cruz right now are doing so for self-preservative purposes. If either wins the GOP nomination, and the presidency afterwards, most of them will be out of jobs. As the legendary pollster Pat Caddell so astutely noted on Breitbart News Sunday in late January, Cruz and Trump are the only campaigns who haven’t hired from the pool of recycled failed political consultants. That signals to the electorate and to the political class alike that things will be different—and new leadership will take over at all levels of government—if either is elected president. The same hacks who have promised voters they’d fight President Obama’s executive amnesty or Obamacare or liberal judges or overregulation or higher taxes or giant omnibus spending bills—and then didn’t do anything to do so—won’t be in positions of power under a Cruz or Trump administration. And the political class—the lobbyists, the consultants and politicians—know that, and it’s why they’re terrified of what might happen next. Their cushy deep-into-six-figure salaries, evening cocktail circuit tours, high-class parties rubbing elbows with high-level officials, and their television appearances and self-glorification in media are all in jeopardy. So, naturally, what they are doing is using their positions of influence and power in any way they can to protect their control of things—to keep the good times rolling for the “in crowd” in Washington.

Much of the same can be said for what’s going on on the left, in the Democratic party. It would have been unfathomable just a few years ago to see someone who is proud of his self-identification with socialism even getting close to winning a presidential election. Now, though, Sanders nearly beat Clinton in Iowa and crushed her in New Hampshire. Thanks to her race card ploys, Clinton still holds a significant lead in South Carolina over Sanders—but she’s hardly done with him yet after this state votes a week after Republicans.

In Nevada, where Democrats caucus on Saturday while Republicans here vote in the South Carolina primary, Sanders is quickly gaining on Clinton. Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports, writing in the Reno Gazette Journal, detailed how this is now a razor-thin race.

“It seems like yesterday. The Hillary Clinton juggernaut arrived in Nevada last spring, making all the right moves,” Ralston wrote. “She hired Emmy Ruiz, a skilled operative who worked for Clinton and Barack Obama here in 2008 (Clinton won the popular vote but lost the delegate fight), to helm her effort. Ruiz brought a Nevada-centric team together, people who knew the state and its burgeoning Latino community, which made up 15 percent of the caucus universe eight years ago. And in May, Clinton held a memorable event, a roundtable with DREAMers, who just recently endorsed her for the nomination. Nevada was Clinton Country, mostly because of her organizational strength designed to construct a firewall should Bernie Sanders do well in New Hampshire. Indeed, Sanders apparently couldn’t place Nevada on a map – he had no offices, no staff, no footprint at all. Race? What race? Now, one week before Nevada Democrats break the tie between Iowa and New Hampshire and decide if the Sanders Surge is real, yesterday has vanished and Hillary Clinton can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”

Both the Bush and Clinton campaigns in their respective primaries have done everything right—by the book—in terms of hiring staff, orchestrating events, conducting speeches, fundraising from big donors, and amassing heavyweight political campaigns. But that’s just not what the voters have wanted.

This is post-party politics. Voters aren’t falling into traditional Republican and Democrat lanes. It’s hard to see the entire GOP base show up to support Bush, Rubio or Kasich in a general election—and it’s hard to see the Democrat base show up for Clinton. Voters feel extraordinarily disenfranchised, and question whether a distant Washington, D.C.—which, again, is enriching itself at the expense of the rest of the nation, as evidenced by the fact the D.C. metro area is one of the only economically growing regions in America—has their best interests in mind.

Globalist trade deals, like the George H.W. Bush negotiated and Bill Clinton ratified North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico saw many factories across the United States—including many in the textile industry here in the Carolinas—close down and reopen in Mexico. As the Clinton years dragged on into another Bush presidency, and now Obama’s presidency with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) front and center, the process of the hollowing out and transferring of America’s middle class and manufacturing sector—among other job fields—to foreign countries has only accelerated.

One of the most egregious examples, Carrier Corporation in Indiana, just emerged this week as cell phone video of a company executive en masse laying off more than a thousand workers in Indianapolis—and informing them the company was moving its operations to Monterrey, Mexico, as a cost-cutting measure that will leave most if not all of them unemployed—was posted online.

It’s not just trade policy where Americans feel like the Bush and Clinton dynasties have them down. Immigration is another prime example. Now 30 years after Ronald Reagan, who agreed to an amnesty for illegal aliens in 1986 only if it came with border security, the U.S. border with Mexico remains entirely insecure. Reagan’s border security pledge would have needed his vice president, George H.W. Bush, to follow through on it as the nation’s next president. He failed.

A national security and economic risk, both President Bushes, President Clinton, and Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton left the border wide open. In addition, while both political parties used to fight for lesser immigration to America because of the known impact high levels of imported foreign workers have on American workers’ job prospects—like simple supply and demand, an increase in the labor supply leads to decreased demand for labor which means lower wages and higher unemployment and joblessness among Americans—under the Bushes, Clintons and Obama, both political parties have moved away from nationalist populism when it comes to immigration. The last time now Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), for instance, backed reducing immigration—something he once supported strongly, but no longer does—was in 1993, just after George H.W. Bush’s only term as president and as Bill Clinton began his first term as president. That was before the establishment of both parties officially veered away from protecting American workers toward the bitter–and often meaningless–partisan bickering on Capitol Hill, back when Congress used to represent Americans not special interests.

Open borders style trade and immigration combined are a double whammy against American workers. While many jobs are being lost nationwide due to companies relocating overseas, the establishment backed immigration policy brings hundreds of thousands if not millions more workers into the U.S. economy from foreign countries to compete for what few jobs Americans still have a shot at.

Somehow, during the Clinton, Bush and Obama years, seemingly every politician except a handful including most prominently Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have lost that America-first worldview that used to be prevalent among elected officials. The Middle East, since Reagan’s administration, has tumbled into chaos—getting ever-so-worse with each successive administration since the late 1980s. George H.W. Bush, of course, as he laid out in that “new world order” speech, began much of this with the first Gulf War. Since then, things have spiraled worse and worse out of control in the Middle East where during the Bill Clinton administration Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations formed—then they attacked the United States during the George W. Bush administration—in the wake of which the U.S. invaded Iraq again. Under Obama’s administration—which including Hillary Clinton at the helm of foreign policy—the region has devolved even further as the Islamic State has risen from the ashes of failed U.S. nation building in Iraq and elsewhere like “Hillary’s War” in Libya. That’s not to mention that while this has all been going on, Muslim migration to the United States hasn’t just not stopped: It’s increased over the past two plus decades—and increases in H-1B visas and other visas designed to import foreign workers into U.S. jobs.

Meanwhile, the size and scope of the federal government has rapidly increased over the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama years. The national debt is now more than $19 trillion. The government keeps spending more and more of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars on meaningless minutia while Congress—and complicit presidents—continues passing several-thousand-page-long omnibus spending bills that only serve to exacerbate and perpetuate the problem. Now there’s imminent worry of a serious financial crash, as analysts begin to fret over the potential of a market meltdown.

The only candidate who has consistently and repeatedly hammered all of these points home is Donald Trump. It’s clearly why he’s winning so decisively in polling—skyrocketing higher and higher almost every time. Cruz, meanwhile—who’s in second place—has hit some of these topics but hasn’t been as laser-focused as Trump on the campaign trail. His somewhat of a focus on these matters, however, is clearly paying dividends for him.

Sanders, on the other side of the aisle, has hit some of these issues.

The differences between the Bushes and the Clintons—and both of their close allies, like Rubio—are minimal at best. All of them, the whole lot of career politicians who have spent their lives suckling on government while amassing as much power and money as they possibly can for themselves, represent the same thing: Continued trudging of America down the same tired pathway. No change. Nothing different. Business as usual.

But if Trump, Cruz or Sanders wins, as Trump has implied by essentially appropriating The Beatles’ classic “Revolution” into his campaign, there’s a revolution under way. And that means a new world order—newer than what George H.W. Bush pushed for as president—takes over government. And not sadly to many ordinary Americans, this newer world order can’t co-exist with the previous one.

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Iowa GOP Chairman: Party Will Support Donald Trump ‘One Thousand Percent’ if He Wins Nomination

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by MATTHEW BOYLE24 Jan 2016Muscatine, Iowa658

MUSCATINE, Iowa — 2016 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump received support from yet another major GOP player, state GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann, in the all-important first caucus state of Iowa.

Kaufmann, who wasn’t officially endorsing Trump for president but is appearing with him on stage and introducing him, said that if Iowans select Trump on Feb. 1, the party is fully committed to electing him president of the United States. Kaufmann has appeared with other GOP candidates at their events, including according to Iowa GOP spokesman Charlie Szold in a comment to the Des Moines Register: Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rick Santorum. Szold told Breitbart News this is a “courtesy we extend to all candidates.”

“This morning I woke up and the headlines were ‘There is a civil war in the Republican Party,’” Kaufmann said on the Trump stage. “Folks, we’re not having a civil war. We’re having a vigorous debate because the last eight years has made us mad.”

Kaufmann, who met with Trump before the rally in Iowa at Muscatine High School, said Trump is a “humble, a patriotic and a capable guy.”

“Most of our conversation was about how to get voices again for people that don’t believe they have a voice—I can’t think of anything more Republican than that,” Kaufmann said.

“As the Republican Party chairman, if you’re a Democrat and you’re going to join us on caucus night, I’ve got one word for you: Welcome,” Kaufmann added, an allusion to the fact Trump is likely to win many crossover voters.

“Donald Trump has brought some energy into this party, he has brought some energy into this country and I’ve lived in this particular county for seven generations,” Kaufmann said.

I’m here to tell you right now, on caucus night you’re going to hand somebody to me. And at the end of this process, the nominee is going to be handed to me. Let me be perfectly clear, I don’t want any ambiguity whatsoever. If you vote for him, Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, the Republican Party of Iowa and this Republican chair will be behind him one thousand percent!

Kaufmann appearing on stage with Trump at this time comes after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the longtime Iowa U.S. Senator, joined Trump on stage last week and said that he supports making America great again.

Grassley’s appearance was not an official endorsement, but an unofficial statement of support for Trump’s campaign.

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Donald Trump is poised for the strongest primary performance in modern history

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For months, the press and the Republican

establishment alike have been expecting the Trump bubble to implode. Now that it's clear Trump isn't going anywhere, we're seeing stories about a long slog of a campaign or even a brokered convention. But there's a very real possibility that, far from those kinds of days of reckoning, Donald Trump could actually "run the table." Ironically, Trump not only could win — he could win more decisively than any non-incumbent Republican contestant for the nomination since the dawn of the modern primary system.
Let's see how that might happen.
New Hampshire
First, let's look not at Iowa, but at New Hampshire. Trump has been leading in New Hampshire by double-digits since August. If those polls are to believed, Trump is poised not only to win, but to win decisively.
Conventional wisdom is that whichever establishment-friendly candidate places second — at this point John Kasich islined up behind Trump, but Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and even Jeb Bush are all said to have a shot — is going to be Trump's most-viable challenger for the nomination. But if Donald Trump dominates with 30 to 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, and they come in 15 to 20 points behind, how is that possible?
More logically, whoever wins Iowa is going to be Trump's biggest challenger, and if that candidate does poorly in New Hampshire then whoever comes in second there (assuming it's somebody else) will be a long-shot third for the nomination.
So let's look at Iowa.
Iowa
In recent weeks, Iowa has seen a neck-and-neck race between conservative stalwart Ted Cruz and Trump. But the political junkies have been saying that in fact, Cruz has the edge because he has a far more extensive ground operation.
And so he does. But it's worth pointing out that the Cruz campaign has raised expectations considerably by touting this fact. A narrow Cruz win at this point would hardly be an exciting upset.
And Cruz could still lose Iowa. His rise in the state came during a period when he faced virtually no fire from the Trump campaign — and when he was directing virtually no fire Trump's way. That's no longer true. Moreover, Trump has actually led in four of the last five Iowa polls. And that was before the Palin endorsement.
Because of heightened expectations, a Cruz loss in Iowa would be devastating. He's been counting on a victory there to propel him to second or third place in unfriendly New Hampshire, and to possible victories in subsequent primaries in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday.
If Cruz loses Iowa, and the air goes out of his balloon, who benefits? Who's the leading second-choice candidate of Cruz supporters? You guessed it.
And if Cruz does win, it's worth noting that Iowa frequently doesn't vote for the nominee. It voted for Bush in 1980, Dole in 1988, Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum in 2012. There's a common assumption that a narrow Cruz victory would puncture the Trump hype balloon — and it might. But that's not the way Iowa has ever played out before.
So, as the race stands now, the most likely outcomes are either a Trump victory in both Iowa and New Hampshire, or a Cruz win in Iowa followed by a Trump win in New Hampshire. How might the rest of the race play out? Let's look at the two states after New Hampshire: South Carolina and Nevada.
South Carolina, Nevada, and beyond
South Carolina was decisive for every GOP nominating contest until 2012. It gave 55 percent to Reagan in 1980, 49 percent to Bush in 1988, 45 percent to Dole in 1996, and 53 percent to Bush in 2000. McCain just edged past Huckabee in 2008.
And how's Trump been polling in the South Carolina? I thought so.
Of course Gingrich won South Carolina in 2012, and that predicted nothing except a change in the South Carolina electorate, which had, prior to 2012, showed a markedly deferential attitude toward the Republican establishment. The vote for Gingrich signaled a profound dissatisfaction with the party establishment that has clearly not abated.
And even if the establishment wanted South Carolina to perform its usual function in 2016, party leaders are not doing the things necessary to make it happen. Consider the role of Lindsey Graham. From the beginning, his campaign's main impact was to prevent party leaders in South Carolina from throwing their support to another, more viable candidate. Now he's dropped out — and endorsed Jeb Bush's struggling campaign, which will likely hobble the more-viable Marco Rubio's campaign even further.
If Donald Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, why wouldn't he win South Carolina? And if he loses Iowa and wins New Hampshire, why wouldn't he still have a strong shot at winning South Carolina, even against a surging Ted Cruz?
It's a similar story in infrequently-polled, less-crucial Nevada, which Marco Rubio has targeted as his "best early state" without much evidence of impact. And so on through Super Tuesday, throughFlorida, and on through the entire primary calendar.
The usual response to these sorts of claims is that polling this far out doesn't really mean much. Contests can get especially volatile as we approach an election date, nobody is paying attention yet, and Trump is riding primarily on name-recognition. But the distinctive feature of the 2016 Republican primary polling has not been its volatility but its stability — at least at the top, where Trump sits.
Volatility in recent prior GOP primary contests has been driven by dissatisfaction with the presumptive nominee: McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. But there is no establishment candidate or presumptive nominee to be dissatisfied with this time. Instead, there's a candidate from far outside that establishment, who is running explicitly against that establishment, but not running a particularly ideological campaign — certainly not one that lines up with traditional conservative shibboleths (which is what Cruz is doing). The extraordinary stability of the Trump vote may be a sign not merely of the high name-recognition of the candidate, but the wide and deep appeal of that stance — or of Trump personally.
And if voters in later states aren't paying attention yet, then what will cause them to pay attention? Primarily, the results of the early contests. Primary contests are partly ways of signaling to the partisan electorate who they are supposed to vote for. So early Trump victories could well signal to the less-engaged portions of that electorate that the party has decided — and decided for Trump. Even though, in the minds of those supposedly in charge of the party, they most certainly haven't.
Cruz is the only challenger to Trump who has gotten any kind of traction, but his rise has been overwhelmingly on the right, a path that numerous insurgents have taken and failed in. Maybe he'll succeed this time — but why assume that Trump will be easier to defeat in this manner than candidates who were manifestly more disliked by the rank-and-file GOP electorate? Isn't it more likely that, if voters in New York or Pennsylvania see their choice as "Trump or Cruz or some loser," they'll mostly go for the angry but non-doctrinaire Trump?
The rest of the crowd of candidates needs to take advantage of the nomination's "blue wall" that supposedly stops conservative candidates from winning. But Trump already has the advantage in scaling that wall. His strongest regions are the Northeast and Midwest. He polls just as well among self-described moderates as among self-described conservatives.
The mainstream candidates can't get any traction because Trump is ahead of them in their lane, while Cruz is the classic ideological conservative challenger. How does that story — a stronger-than-usual poll-leader blocking the moderate path to the nomination, and a more-divisive-than-usual candidate playing conservative insurgent — not imply that the less-ideological but charismatic poll leader is the favorite to win?
Here's the bottom line.
No non-incumbent has won both the GOP's Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary since the dawn of the modern primary system. Trump has a real shot to be the first. And no recent candidate has overcome the kind of deficit most of the other candidates face in both national and state-by-state numbers at this late date, against a candidate with as strong and stable numbers as Trump has, and gone on to win.
If Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, and then goes on to win South Carolina and Nevada — as he is favored to do — he could very conceivably win every contest, or at worst lose a favored son state or two like Cruz's Texas. Nobody has run the table like that — not Nixon in 1968, nor Reagan in 1980, nor Bush in 2000.
And if he loses Iowa to Cruz, and wins New Hampshire decisively, there's little historical reason to believe that Cruz has a better chance at the nomination than Trump does, much less that anybody else has a better shot than either.
A Trump nomination would be unprecedented. But an upset victory by any of his opponents would, in many ways, be even more so.

Donald Trump slams Virginia GOP for loyalty oath

www.cbsnews.com

Last Updated Dec 27, 2015 9:42 PM EST

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went on a Twitter tirade Sunday after learning that voters wishing to cast a ballot in the Virginia Republican presidential primary will have to sign an oath affirming they are a member of the party.

It begins, Republican Party of Virginia, controlled by the RNC, is working hard to disallow independent, unaffiliated and new voters. BAD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)December 27, 2015

R.P.Virginia has lost statewide 7 times in a row. Will now not allow desperately needed new voters. Suicidal mistake. RNC MUST ACT NOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)December 27, 2015

The voters the Republican Party of Virginia are excluding will doom any chance of victory. The Dems LOVE IT! Be smart and win for a change!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)December 27, 2015

Straighten out The Republican Party of Virginia before it is too late. Stupid! RNC

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)December 27, 2015

Trump's frustration likely stems from the fact that he performs especially well among voters who have not declared a party affiliation. In a recent survey by American Research Group, for example, he got the support of 15 percent of registered Republicans in New Hampshire, but 29 percent of those who were not registered with either political party.

Virginia voters are not required to register with a particular party, but with the approval of the State Board of Elections, the Republican Party will be able to ask primary voters to sign a party oath.

The state GOP considered a loyalty oath for the 2011 presidential primary. That pledge would have required voters to promise they intended to support the party's nominee during the general election. State Republicans ultimatelyscrapped the plan after it came under heavy criticism.

Trump has publicly flirted with the idea of mounting a third-party bid if he feels the Republican Party is treating him unfairly. At the last GOP debate earlier this month, however, he said he "really" is ready to commit to not running as an independent.

"I've gained great respect for the Republican leadership...[and] the people on the dais," he said.

COMMENTS

The GOP's New Hampshire nightmare

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BERLIN, N.H. — Chris Christie is mocking Marco Rubio for not showing up. An hour’s drive up the road, Jeb Bush is hammering away at Donald Trump — oh, and there he goes attacking Christie, too. Just a few blocks up the road, Rubio is quietly lashing Ted Cruz, reminding the people at his town hall that “some Republicans” voted to cut defense spending.

Welcome to New Hampshire, where the fight for the establishment lane of the GOP presidential primary is turning into a circular firing squad.

As the year winds down, four Republicans have crisscrossed the state, pointing their attacks in all directions. And with less than 50 days until the first-in-the-nation primary, it’s only going to get worse.

Forget Iowa, which Cruz appears to be locking up. It's New Hampshire that will cull this field. And with Christie, Bush and John Kasich making the Granite State the singular focus of their campaigns, and Rubio, should he lose Iowa, needing a top-tier finish, the fight to be the mainstream alternative to Cruz or Trump could end here.

“At the beginning of the year, we seemed to have an embarrassment of riches, and I thought it was a sign of strength of the party. And then Trump gets in and all of the sudden that strength has worked itself into something of a weakness,” said Drew Cline, the former editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s biggest newspaper. “He has left all of the candidates in his shadow for months. And it’s trickier for a Trump alternative to emerge when the field is just so crowded.”

If Trump wins the Feb. 9 primary a week after Cruz wins Iowa, only one or two candidates finishing behind him will likely have the momentum to carry on. If four or even five candidates split the vote of an establishment electorate that never coalesces behind one standard-bearer, there may be only hollow victories to declare on primary night because none will have the firepower to challenge Cruz or Trump in South Carolina.

Just ask Cruz; he’s counting on it.

“Marco is perceived by many to be the most formidable candidate in the moderate lane. But he has serious competition in the moderate lane. Look, the winner of the moderate lane has to win New Hampshire,” the Texas senator said in a wide-ranging interview with National Review about his political strategy last week. “And at this point it is not clear to me who will win.”

A new poll of 500 likely New Hampshire Republican-primary voters, conducted by Tel Opinion Research and first reported Tuesday by POLITICO, underscores how competitive the state is: Trump leads with 24 percent, followed by Cruz at 16 percent, Rubio at 14 percent, Christie at 13 percent and Bush at 9 percent. Kasich didn’t even merit a stand-alone mention in that survey, getting grouped instead into “other.”

According to the Real Clear Politics polling average of New Hampshire polling, Trump stands first (26.5 percent) followed by Rubio (12.8 percent) and Christie (11.5 percent). Kasich and Bush both sit south of 10 percent.

“The race is absolutely wide open,” said Steve Duprey, New Hampshire’s Republican National Committee committeeman, who is neutral in the primary. “In some ways, Donald Trump leading is very legitimate. He’s done the best job of capturing people’s anger with a government that doesn’t work. But I’m now seeing voters saying we want details on these issues.”

Another important takeaway from the Tel Opinion poll’s cross-tabs is that Rubio has the best shot of winning New Hampshire in a narrower field. In a three-way GOP race, Trump’s support ticks up to 30 percent, Rubio's jumps to 28 percent — doubling his numbers — and Cruz’s support grows by 10 percentage points, to 26 percent.

“If the establishment coalesces, that can put someone else in the top tier,” said Tom Rath, a longtime GOP operative in New Hampshire who is backing Kasich. “But, that’s a big if.”

Indeed, New Hampshire is in fact quite far from uniting behind one more mainstream candidate to take on Cruz and Trump, if the polling is to be believed.

Cline, who has endorsed Rubio, says he thinks the Florida senator and Christie, buoyed by late-year momentum, have the best shot to consolidate establishment support in the state. “I think there’s a real opportunity for one of them to emerge as the strong alternative to Trump,” he said. “Especially, if Cruz just blows off New Hampshire and focuses on Iowa, it helps one of those two become that strong alternative to Trump.”

But Rubio has been reluctant to prioritize any one early-voting state, concerning his big-dollar donors. He went on a three-day swing across New Hampshire before Christmas but, to date, he has been made just 44 stops here this presidential cycle — a point his rivals are eagerly highlighting for New Hampshire voters as the year races to a close.

“We’ve been looking for Marco, but we can’t find him,” Christie said Monday. “We’ve had the bus all over New Hampshire. We haven’t been able to find him.” Bush, too, has bragged of late that he plans to outwork his rivals in a state that has long rewarded candidates who exhaust themselves in the rigors of retail politics: answering all the questions, shaking all the hands, taking all the selfies.

But all that bluster from Bush and Christie about how they’re working four times harder merits a question about why they’re not polling four times better than Rubio. He is still running slightly ahead of or even with Christie (131 stops in New Hampshire), Bush (71 stops) and Kasich (108 stops).

While he plans to increase the number of town halls and retail stops here, Rubio has positioned himself as a top-tier candidate largely through his success in nationally televised debates and interviews. His supporters, recognizing that as many conversations take place these days in the virtual communities of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as elsewhere, work hard to spread positive items across their social networks.

But that might mean nothing in New Hampshire, where voters, infamously, don’t commit until days, perhaps moments, before primary election day. Four years ago, 46 percent of voters decided on a candidate in the final days before the primary — a figure that could be even higher this year.

“A lot of people in New Hampshire were tuned to the last debate,” said Jody Nelson, the Derry GOP vice chairwoman and a Rubio backer. “Rubio and Cruz dominated that debate, and we’ve seen their support go up here. People are smart enough to see Christie’s all in in New Hampshire, but we also wonder what he has in other states. Cruz and Rubio aren’t here all the time, but they are investing time. ... We know we need to pick a candidate who can win the nomination and beat Hillary Clinton, not just camp out in New Hampshire.”

After Rubio’s town hall Tuesday, a number of the people who waited in line to shake his hand indicated that they were leaning toward supporting him but that they planned to take a bit longer to make up their minds.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has positioned himself as a leading candidate largely on the strength of his performances in nationally televised debates. | Getty

“There’s so many choices, that’s part of the problem,” said Paul Graney, who came to see Rubio with his wife and planned to attend Bush’s town hall a mile up the street later that afternoon.

Diane Taupier, who also took advantage of the two candidates being in her small town on the same day, is torn among Rubio, Cruz and Bush and planning to take her time. “I prefer waiting to get as much information as possible.”

Bush, after underperforming for months, maintains a financial advantage and is fighting on multiple fronts to regain a foothold in the race. The former Florida governor has asserted himself as the one Republican candidate willing to stand up to Trump. And last week, he began, however tentatively, to sharpen the contrast between himself and Christie, who has leveraged the Union Leader’s endorsement into broader support.

First in an interview and later with a group of reporters, Bush emphasized his record of having had Florida’s bond rating upgraded to AAA on his watch, in contrast with New Jersey’s, which has fallen under Christie. After asserting that he is “the most conservative, reform-minded candidate” among the governors or former governors still in the race, Bush was asked point-blank whether Christie’s record stacked up to his. “No,” he said, as his voice lowered significantly. “He has not had the level of success of being a conservative governor implementing conservative policies.”

Bush has steered clear of attacking Rubio since late October, when his botched criticism of his former protégé in the third GOP debate sent his campaign into a downward spiral. But the Florida senator continues to take heat from Christie, Cruz and Rand Paul. While his campaign engages in an intense back-and-forth on policy, Rubio often makes it through his hourlong town halls without mentioning a single Republican rival by name.

That’s partly because Rubio doesn’t want to be grouped with the lower-polling mainstreamers. In fact, he’s spent considerable time in December sparring not with Bush or Kasich but with Cruz, seeing the contest not as one of conservative vs. moderate but old vs. new.

“We are being asked to do what every generation before us did,” Rubio said here last week. “The people who came before us did what they had to do —they confronted their challenges and embraced their opportunities.

“Now it’s time for us."

Eli Stokols is a national politics reporter.

COMMENTS

Establishment to Trump: You Can’t Afford to Run For President

Getty Images

by JOHN HAYWARD20 Dec 20153,080

Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal took a look at Donald Trump’s finances over the weekend, and suggested the outspoken billionaire might not be able to afford to keep a serious national campaign going past the first few states:

None of his offenses against propriety seem to have dinged the support that, in a crowded race, keeps Donald Trump atop the GOP primary polls.

Republicans are now talking about a brokered convention, which could be a disaster for the country, and for the GOP, and quite possibly hand the election to Hillary Clinton without a real contest or even critique of her agenda.

So goes the fear. But unless we miss our guess, our long national nightmare-cum-sketch comedy show actually has a termination date. It will end the moment campaigning begins to threaten Mr. Trump’s finances and business interests.

Actually, as Jenkins notes further in his piece, Trump’s campaign already has already damaged his business interests:

In any case, his comments have become an opening. Already Mr. Trump’s Middle Eastern business interests are under assault. He lost a few U.S. deals early on due to his slurs on Mexican-Americans. Now a handful of Silicon Valley biggies—the CEOs of Apple, Facebook and Google—have ventured criticism without mustering quite the courage to mention him by name.

What happens when important business partners start letting Mr. Trump know, publicly and noisily, they think he’s doing serious damage to the country? By Mr. Trump’s own inflated reckoning, most of his net worth resides in the value of his name.

Our guess is that Mr. Trump has always planned on being satisfied with making a splash and ventilating his high opinion of himself. He will rightly be able to claim that he gave neglected voters a voice and transformed the debate. Notice that he manages to maintain his jolly equanimity even when being vilified. He is not grimly “on a mission” as so many candidates are whose self-image is wrapped up in electoral success.

As a direct result of his presidential campaign, Trump ended up in a $10 million lawsuit with chef Jose Andres, who was supposed to be a part of the Trump International Hotel project in Washington; lost a battle against a wind farm in Scotland; lost a merchandising relationship with Macy’s department stores; and might end up losing business at some of his properties, although the actual damage from loudly-declared boycotts is open to debate.

Jenkins makes some shrewd observations about the realities of campaign financing, especially the need to win the support of big donors.  A network of deep-pocketed special interests will shower Hillary Clinton with the kind of cash Trump simply cannot provide by tapping into his own assets.

Also, the many political assets the Republican Party would bring to the table for most other nominees won’t be there for Trump if the Establishment makes good on its threats to sit out in 2016, dumping the nation into Clinton’s claws, if Trump is the standard-bearer.  The old fear was that a frustrated Trump would run third-party and dynamite the race after failing to secure the nomination; now we’ve got Trump cheerfully assuring Republican voters in the last debate that he’ll keep his promise to stay with the party no matter what, and it’s Jeb Bush talking about signing up with Team Clinton as an unofficial junior partner if Trump’s the GOP nominee.

The enormous national polling success Trump has achieved through earned media – summoning a swarm of microphones and cameras every time he feels like making a statement – will go down in the political history books, but once primary voting begins in earnest, targeted paid advertising will matter more than the kind of media pandemonium that keeps Trump on top of national polls.

Of course, the conventional wisdom about the limits of earned media could be wrong, just as every other confident prediction about Trump has been wrong so far.

Articles like the WSJ post on Trump’s finances could be one more attempt to apply conventional political analysis to a campaign that routinely defies it… or it might be taken as a shot across the bow, a warning to Trump that he ought to deliver what Jenkins envisions as “a glorious ‘I’ve got better things to do than hang around with you losers’ exit” before he suffers the kind of financial loss he can’t recover from.

The Wall Street Journal analysis backs into an aspect of Trump’s success that our political culture has a hard time accepting: his supporters think he’s immune to the corruption sickening D.C., the Big Government corruption that Hillary Clinton is the living, breathing, influence-peddling avatar of.  At this point, everyone gets the idea that Trump is taking a serious financial hit from this campaign – they hear all the stories about boycotts and busted business deals, and it only reinforces their sense of Trump’s sincerity.

They grasp that it’s not very likely he is running for President to pad his pockets, and when they hear other billionaires are furious with Trump and scrambling to fund his competitors, it reinforces their sense that whatever else the outrageous Trump might be planning to do with the Oval Office, he won’t be using government power to enrich a network of cronies the way Obama did, and Clinton absolutely would.

Democrats are, of course, institutionally oblivious to rising public anger at corruption – they think they can manage it by spending ad money on lavish campaigns to convince their gullible voters that each new socialist figurehead is motivated by nothing but compassion.  A few Republicans understand that corruption is a ripe issue – it’s been a major theme for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) – but perhaps even fewer understand just how incandescently angry taxpayers have become.

It’s easy to scoff at Donald Trump as an unlikely crusader against corruption – he was downright cheerful when he reminisced about buying influence in the first GOP debate, and never quite got around to explaining why it’s a bad thing that he needed to grease the right palms to get what he wanted.  But there is a real sense among his supporters that, whether his ideas are right or wrong, he’s enduring great personal expense to stay in the race and express them.  Just about every candidate talks about being a “fighter,” but Trump has real bruises.  Political analysts seem to be underestimating how much credit people give him for staying in the race when it’s obviously hurting him.

As for whether it will be prohibitively expensive for Trump to run a full-boat campaign, the Wall Street Journal figures he might have as little as $70 million in liquid assets, which is “less than what several candidates in the race (Bush, Clinton, Cruz) and their super PACs already have raised.”  But how much does that $70 million count for, when it’s mixed with Trump’s proven ability to hold the media spotlight?

If, as some have suggested, the transition to local political organizations and likely primary voters prevents Trump from winning any of the early primary states, it’s doubtful any amount of campaign cash would be enough to turn an implosion narrative around.  But if he does score some strategic early victories and keep his frontrunner narrative alive, he might be able to stretch a dollar further than anyone ever has.  Meanwhile, the Democrats stash their candidates in Saturday-night cellars to keep voters from getting a good look at them.

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