5 takes

5 takes on 2016 as the campaign kicks into high gear

Trump could win, Cruz runs the best campaign, and Rubio has to start fighting to survive. 

By Glenn Thrush

The untamable 2016 campaign has settled into a kind of comprehensible chaos with 60 days until the Iowa aucuses.

Donald Trump, a contender who embodies the ultimate cross-pollination of politics and entertainment that began with Ronald Reagan, continues to easily outpace Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio in what has become essentially a four-man field (with Jeb Bush and his millions lingering outside the circle of power). Hillary Clinton is still outrunning the wolves of scandal, but she hasn’t entirely dispatched Bernie Sanders yet — or shown signs of crossing over to capture independents in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and Iowa in the general election.

As befits the season, America is still very much in shopping mode, with major swaths of both parties still willing to jump from one candidate to the next. Here are five state-of-the-race takeaways, 60 days ahead of the first balloting:

1. Trump remains all the rage. The mystery of why Republican voters love Donald Trump more each time he makes up a story about Muslims dancing on rooftops after 9/11 or slimes a disabled reporter isn’t really very mysterious after all. All that engineered outrageousness isn’t about fact, or politics, or messaging, it’s about channeling the rawest emotions of his fans (and they are fans, not political supporters in a conventional sense). Nobody’s got a firmer grasp on the GOP’s amygdala — perhaps nobody ever has — or given voice to the sense of creeping decline so acutely felt in white America.

The base is seething, for real, with a recent Pew poll finding three times as many Republican voters describing themselves as anger-motivated compared with Democrats. Trump may be the ultimate it’s-all-about-me candidate, but the piercing paradox of 2016 is that it actually isn’t about him — but about his ability to capture the mood of his voters, and that, more than anything, explains his pundit-defying durability. He’s earned every percentage point of popularity: When Ben Carson swooned, who picked up much of his support? Trump, it seems.

“He's going to tell us exactly the way it is,” a South Carolina defense contractor named Richard Hippey (yes, that’s his real name) told my former colleague Dave Cantonese recently. This, about a candidate with a zero percent “true” score on Politifact. “We're tired of political correctness… [We] want to hear the truth.”

Here’s what those of us trapped inside the gilded New York-Washington brain cage miss: Trump may not be telling the truth, but he’s sure as hell telling their truth. This allows him to shatter most conventions of presidential campaigning, especially the notion that you have to run a positive campaign (or at least outsource your vitriol to surrogates) in order to win. Jeb Bush’s super PAC has spent millions to get out his positive message, all to get into the mid-single digits. Pluck off the happy-talk hat, and Trump has ridden up to 30 percent on almost unrelentingly negative, Reagan-on-downers message: Build a wall to keep out Mexicans; my opponents are fat, stupid, ugly, nasty, sweaty and poor; keep your “Morning in America,” I’m calling my campaign book “Crippled America.”

The question is no longer whether Trump can win the GOP nomination. He can. It’s whether his message will appeal to general election voters (or those Republicans most concerned with winning back the White House) who don’t share his anger or definition of the truth.

2. Ted Cruz is running the best campaign. The only thing less popular on Capitol Hill than Cruz is a cash bar. That’s just fine with the Texas senator, whose pitch-perfect attacks on the Dem-publican “Washington Cartel” are increasingly resonating in red states. If Trump tosses rhetoric as though he’s firing a T-Shirt cannon, Cruz has a political professional’s knack for packaging stiletto sound bites that burnish his image.

D.C. types find Cruz smarmy and stagy. No matter. Cruz often writes a script other candidates (especially Trump) later follow, sans credit: At last month’s CNBC debate, it was Cruz who whipped up the faithful by drawing first blood on the moderators whom he accused of sowing discord. “You look at the questions,” he intoned to applause so loud it nearly drowned him out. “Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here. Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”

All of this suits a larger strategic purpose: Cruz, despised as an unprincipled rabble-rouser by Republican Hill leadership, has transformed himself into a much more dignified figure in the primaries, a self-appointed guardian of Reaganesque party unity. Cruz has been almost painfully respectful to those sitting above him in the polls, especially Carson and Trump, the better to make himself a palatable alternative when, or if, they fall. It’s paying off: Last week, he vaulted over Carson into a statistical dead heat with Trump in Iowa — a seismic shift if it holds.

The fundamentals are in place for a big winter push. Cruz’s fundraising has been near the top of the field ($26 million as of Oct. 15) and his campaign has an efficient 50 percent burn rate with about $14 million cash on hand.

Even the enemy is starting to take notice: Several Democratic sources told me that Hillary and Bill Clinton have increasingly begun to muse about the possibility of a Cruz candidacy — after months of focusing on the fast-fading Jeb Bush.

3. The biggest threats to Hillary Clinton: Loretta Lynch and the economy. Bernie Sanders has proved to be a tough, appealing and, at times, lovably crusty foil for Clinton. But, as my colleague Annie Karni and I pointed out a few weeks back, he runs his campaign like a small improvisational jazz collective — and that can’t quite compete with Clinton’s relentless, if tuneless, marching band campaign. Sanders may say he doesn’t give a damn about Clinton’s email scandal, but voters do, and it seems highly unlikely he’ll be able to mount a serious counteroffensive without another server eruption. Fortunately for him, that’s entirely possible, thanks to a pending investigation conducted by Lynch’s Justice Department.

Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly said DOJ will exonerate her (“I’m starting to really think it’s finally behind us,” a top Clinton ally told me recently) and Lynch’s attorneys recently ruled that Clinton was within her legal rights to use her “home-brew” server, so long as she turned over documents covered by law and regulation. But it won’t take a lot to reignite the controversy — conservative critics expect a finding that she transmitted classified material, perhaps knowingly — and that could shift the narrative back to “Can you trust Hillary?” in a heartbeat.

Then there’s the not-so-minor matter of the economy, or more precisely the “Obama-Clinton economy,” which is what Republicans will call it if China drags the world into recession. Many economists say that’s not likely, but the U.S. economy is overdue for a dip — and recent estimates are for an at-best blah 2016. On the day after Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip tweeted: “Ouch: Due to ‘downward trajectory in underlying productivity growth ... our estimate of US potential has fallen to 1.5%-1.75%.’ - JP Morgan.”

4. Marco Rubio will have to attack Trump. A couple of months ago in this space, I placed a $5 wager on the fresh-faced Florida senator who seemed, at the time, to be the only Republican capable of winning both the primaries and the general election. I was hardly alone in that assessment: Rubio’s top aides are unnervingly confident he’ll win — provided he doesn’t peak too soon, and hammers away on his Obama-like message of generational change.

Discipline is no guarantee of success, not this year. Rubio’s in very solid shape in the polls, and he’s locking up some of the party’s top super PAC money men. But he remains the only top GOP contender without a firm hold on any one voting group — and it’s not entirely clear where new Rubio voters will come from, despite the claims of Rubio-associated operatives that he will eventually draw disaffected Trumpites.

Sooner or later, he’ll have to go seriously negative — and that will almost certainly involve going after Trump. So far, he’s been exceedingly cautious (apart from some light sparring with Trump over immigration) perhaps responding to sharp-elbowed allegations stemming from his 2010 Senate win. Lately, he’s appeared to be using Cruz as target practice ahead of the great Trump hunt. Over the past month, Rubio and Cruz have clashed repeatedly — and with increasing bitterness — over immigration.

But Rubio’s core rationale — that the party will ultimately anoint a young, electable, rational conservative — is no sure thing. It may rest on the flawed assumption that the 2016 contest will revert to the historical mean and that the thinker will prevail over the shouter. Case in point: Rubio, a hawkish foreign policy expert, should have been a dominant voice following the Paris attacks. Attempting to make an overly nuanced point (a rarity in 2016), he told CBS he viewed the massacre as a “positive development” that would steel U.S. resolve in fighting Islamic extremism. Unlike the never-say-sorry Trump, he quickly walked it back; Trump — making one outlandish assertion after the next — never budged, devoured media attention and enjoyed a bump in several polls.

5. This is the dawning of the Age of the Super PAC. Not. Scott Walker built his presidential campaign around a super PAC and didn’t make it to Halloween. Jeb Bush was supposed to revolutionize the business of presidential electioneering by splitting his forces into a Florida-based campaign apparatus and a California-run super PAC with $100 million in the bank. He’s at 5 percent, and struggling to scrape up enough in hard-dollar fundraising to pay his dwindling staff. The independent-expenditure cash machines may prove their worth in a general election, where Republicans can converge their scattered attacks on a common target. But the super PAC model has yet to establish anything close to dominance in the primaries, where it seems to have grown at the expense — not to the benefit — of traditional candidate campaigns.