Month: February 2016

NC GOP: The weird turn pro
by Tom Sullivan

This is your state on power-drunk Republicans.

What a cluster (of districts) North Carolina GOP has already made of the 2016 elections. Under a federal court order that ruled two existing congressional districts unconstitutional, state Senate Republicans yesterday approved new, more compact congressional districts (above; the old map is here). The NC House proposed moving the congressional primary from March 15 to June 7. And reports indicate a state Court of Appeals panel is poised to strike down as unconstitutional a law passed by Republicans to change the way the state elects supreme court justices. Not exactly a gold-star week for Republican governance in the Tar Heel State.

The U.S. Supreme Court might stay the lower court ruling that required redrawing the districts. It would appear that primaries for all thirteen seats in Congress will be postponed until June.

But in a major change, the House proposal also said no runoff elections would be held in March or June. Currently, if no candidate gets 40 percent of the vote, a second primary is held. But if this change is enacted, the final winner would be the top vote-getter in the initial vote this year, no matter how many candidates compete.

That could have implications for several key races, including the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and the Republican primary in the 2nd Congressional District – where a large field reduces the chance that any candidate could get 40 percent of the vote.

In another twist, candidates who won a March 15 primary then could file to run for a congressional seat June 7. If they won in both primaries, they would have to withdraw from one, within a week after the June 7 results were certified.

If passed, there will be no second chances for candidates either on March 15 or June 7. A plurality takes the nomination for the November ballot for all races in North Carolina this year. As for filing for Congress reopening after March 15, only someone with name recognition and a billionaire in her/his pocket or able to self-finance a $1 million, five-month race for Congress will attempt to file in March for a June primary.

To add to the uncertainty, redrawing the districts will affect incumbents:

Democratic lawmakers say Republicans looked at the congressional primary crisis and saw a political opportunity.

They point to changes to the 12th District, which under the new map would only encompass Mecklenburg County.

U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, the Greensboro Democrat who represents the 12th, would find herself in a new 13th District. That new district would stretch west from Guilford County into neighboring Davidson County as well as Iredell and Davie counties — both Republican strongholds.

Members of Congress aren’t required to live in their district, but lawmakers said it’s difficult to mount a strong campaign from outside — particularly if your traditional constituency is cut in half or diluted in a newly constructed district.

“So, good luck with that, Alma. Your friends in the NCGOP.”

And finally, as I wrote last year:

On Election Day 2014 while Democrats across the country were getting clobbered, there were a couple of bright spots in North Carolina (believe it or not). Democrats picked up a net 3 seats in the state legislature, including sending home an ALEC board member. But in a sweep election where Republicans should have won it all, Democrats won 3 of 3 contested state Supreme Court seats and 2 of 3 contested Appeals Court races. Republicans couldn’t have that. The GOP-controlled legislature responded in 2015 by changing the way judges are elected.

Now that last part has come back to bite them. A three-judge Superior Court panel that earlier this week heard a challenge to the “retention elections” law is poised to rule it unconstitutional.

Just another day in wingnut paradise.

Nothing to see here folks …

by digby

Looks like the hate is heating up. I wonder why?

The number of hate groups on the American radical right expanded from 784 in 2014 to 892 in 2015 – a 14 per cent increase, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The SPLC released the statistics Wednesday in a new report, The Year in Hate and Extremism.

With the increase in hate groups came an increase in domestic political violence in the U.S., both from the radical right and from American jihadists.

“They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water treatment plants and power grids,” writes Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the SPLC.

“They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives and grenades; one of them, a murderous Klansman, was convicted of trying to build a death ray.”

Using statistics from a year-end report from the Anti-Defamation League, the SPLC said a minimum of 52 people died from extremist violence in the U.S. in the past 12 months.

That was the most in a year since 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 men, women and children dead.

The SPLC reports a growth in Klu Klux Klan chapters from 72 in 2014 to 190 in 2015 and attributes the rise in the 364 pro-Confederate battle flag rallies last year.

Those took place after South Carolina took down the battle flag from its Capitol grounds following the June massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist flag enthusiast in Charleston, S.C.

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, black separatist hate groups also gained strength, going from 113 chapters in 2014 to 180 in 2015. The SPLC says the growth followed the explosion of anger fostered by highly publicized incidents of police shootings of black men.

“But unlike activists for racial justice such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, the black separatist groups did not stop at demands for police reforms and an end to structural racism. Instead, they typically demonized all whites, gays, and, in particular, Jews,” Potok writes.

“Conspiracy-minded anti-government ‘Patriot’ groups rose from 874 in 2014 to 998 in 2015 as well.

Potok notes that terror can breed hate crimes. After a jihadist couple in San Bernardo, California murdered 14 people in December 2015, it triggered a string of physical attacks on mosques and Muslims.

“Several political figures have harnessed that fear, calling for bans on mosques, Muslim immigrants and refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East,” Potok wrote.

To be sure, the report offered less than flattering portrays of the Republican presidential front-runners when it came to fanning the flames of dissent.

Partly fueling the new rise in hate groups are such Republican presidential candidates as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, experts contend.

The SPLC went so far to use Trump’s image on the cover of its report.

Inside, the SPLC makes no apologies, noting: The armed violence was accompanied by rabid and often racist denunciations of Muslims, LGBT activists and others — incendiary rhetoric led by a number of mainstream political figures and amplified by a lowing herd of their enablers in the right-wing media.”

The group says that the right-wing politicians are fostering a sense of polarization and anger in the U.S. that might be unmatched since the political upheavals of 1968.

“Donald Trump’s demonizing statements about Latinos and Muslims have electrified the radical right, leading to glowing endorsements from white nationalist leaders such as Jared Taylor and former Klansman David Duke,” writes Potok.

“White supremacist forums are awash with electoral joy, having dubbed Trump their ‘Glorious Leader.’ And Trump has repaid the compliments, retweeting hate posts and spreading their false statistics on black-on-white crime.”

The report noted that Donald Trump described President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brutal “Operation Wetback” as a “very humane” way to accomplish mass deportation, and responded to the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally by saying, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”

It’s not really fair to blame Trump. He’s just riding the zeitgest and giving them voice.

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Trump’s role model

by digby

In this article about Trump’s ongoing jealousy of the Pope, Sarah Posner concludes:

It’s almost as if Trump sees himself as the Henry VIII of reality TV (though he didn’t need any permission for his divorces). He’s hinting, not too subtly, that allowing immigration would tie the country closely to Rome, an ugly insinuation given the history of anti-Catholicism in American politics. He wants to divide — Catholics from each other, Americans from Catholics, immigrants from “real” Americans — and create a new American church, one in which he is the divinely ordained King, and reading the Bible is optional.

He hasn’t ruled out beheading either.

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Still waiting for the partiers to sober up

by digby

Chris Cilizza asks a question for the ages:

Barring some sort of cataclysm, Donald Trump is going to easily win Saturday’s Republican presidential primary in South Carolina. It would be his second straight large victory out of three contests so far in the presidential contest. In the other — the Iowa caucuses — Trump got the second most votes of any Republican candidate ever, but he finished second behind the guy who got the most votes in the history of the caucuses: Ted Cruz. Three days after the South Carolina vote, the race will move to Nevada where a poll released on Wednesday showed Trump ahead by almost 30 points. Then comes the March 1 “SEC” primary, when voters in 13 states across the country — including six Southern states — vote. Polling puts Trump first in most, if not all, of those states.

If Trump wins SC, he is virtually certain to have won more than 50% of all delegates allocated in IA/NH/SC—may be as much as 65%.

— Taniel (@Taniel) February 18, 2016

All of which raises a simple but profound question: Why isn’t Trump being covered as the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee?

Let’s just say upfront, that it’s not written in stone that Trump is going to win. Polls aren’t elections and he could lose in the gothic fever swamps of South Carolina. (They’ve got a different way of doing things down there …) But if the polls are right and people vote the way they indicate they’re going to, it’s more likely than not that he will win.

Cilizza thinks the reticence to admit this is because the establishment still thinks their marauding, drunken voters are going to sober up and realize that he’s a pig. Clearly that isn’t happening, at least not yet.

So, it’s probably time for the Village press try to smooth out The Donald’s rough edges. We can’t have the GOP led by a crazed, neo-fascist white nationalist. That would make life among the cognoscenti very uncomfortable. The only wild card is Trump himself. He gets his strength from shocking people and he seems to know that. On the other hand, he also loves to be loved.

This should be an interesting development.

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Yes, Latinos know the score

by digby

Here’s some interesting info on the Latino vote from Latino Decisions:

10 Reasons Why Immigration Politics Will Affect the Latino Vote

by David Damore, Latino Decisions Senior Analyst on 02/16/2016 

As immigration rhetoric in the Republican presidential nomination campaign continues to escalate and GOP candidates who were once perceived as immigration moderates tack to the right, it is worth considering how immigration politics and policy affect Latino voters; a voting block that is positioned to be influential in 2016. We at Latino Decisions have conducted over 100,000 interviews with Latino voters in the last several years and have an extensive reservoir of public opinion data assessing these voters’ immigration preferences and measuring how immigration politics shape Latino voters’ decisions to turn out to vote and for whom to cast their ballots. Below, we highlight the top 10 data points from our archives.

Immigration is a Latino policy priority. In the Latino Decisions 2014 Election Eve Poll, 45% of Latino voters indicated that immigration was the most important issue facing the Latino community that should be addressed by politicians. In the recent impreMedia/Latino Decisions Battleground States Survey, 36% of likely Latino voters indicated that immigration is the most important issue facing the Latino community that should be addressed by politicians.

Immigration affects Latino political behavior. In the Latino Decisions 2014 Election Eve Poll, 67% of respondents reported that immigration was the most important or one of the most important issues affecting their decision to turn out to vote and their vote choice. In political science paper published in the journal Electoral Studies in December 2015, Loren Collingwood and Matt Barreto find that Obama’s 2012 executive action on immigration (DACA) was the single most important variable in predicting the Latino vote for Obama, more relevant even than calling yourself a strong Democrat or being a Liberal.

For most Latino voters, immigration is a personal issue. In the Latino Decisions 2014 Election Eve Poll of Latino Midterm voters, 58% of Latino nationally and 65% in the key swing states of Colorado and Nevada reported that they know a family member, friend, co-worker, or someone else who is an undocumented immigrant. In a June 2013 national survey of all Latino registered voters 67% said they personally know an undocumented immigrant. Half of this 67% said it is someone in their family – that’s 1/3 of Latino registered voters who has an undocumented immigrant family member.

Latino voters oppose a piecemeal approach to immigration reform. In the July 2013 America’s Voice/Latino Decisions Congressional Battleground Poll 65% of respondents were unlikely to support legislation that only extended a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and 71% were unlikely to support legislation allowing for legal status contingent upon 90% of immigrants being either stopped at the border or arrested. Indeed, among midterm Latino voters, 64% see Republicans’ efforts to require border security prior to considering a pathway to citizenship as an excuse to block that pathway altogether.

Latino voters overwhelmingly support the comprehensive immigration reform that passed the Senate in 2013, and how candidates have voted on comprehensive immigration reform is very important to Latino voters.. In the July 2013 America’s Voice/Latino Decisions CIR Poll 84% of Latino voters responded that they supported legislation that increased border security and enforcement of our existing immigration laws, required employers to verify that all employees have legal status, and provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, as long as they passed a background check, studied English, and paid a fine. In the same poll, 81% indicated that Congress should address border security and a path to citizenship together.

Immigration can be a positive for Republicans. In the July 2013 America’s Voice/Latino Decisions 2016 Presidential Survey, 54% of Latino voters indicated that Marco Rubio’s role in helping to pass legislation including a pathway to citizenship in the U.S. Senate made them very or somewhat likely to consider voting for him for President. However, Rubio’s more recent shift to the right ­— including his calls for the elimination of the DACA program — has not been lost on the Latino electorate. In the impreMedia/Latino Decisions Battleground States Survey just 32% of Latino voters residing in battleground states have a favorable or very favorable view of Rubio and his net favorable rating among these voters is minus eight.

While Latino voters blame both parties for the failure of comprehensive immigration reform, more of this blame is directed at the Republicans. In the July 2013 America’s Voice/Latino Decisions CIR Poll 39% of Latino voters responded that Republicans would be responsible for blocking comprehensive immigration, 9% blamed the Democrats, and 48% blamed both parties. Latino want to see both parties work together to address this issue like the bipartisan bills in 2007 and again in 2013.

With the failure of comprehensive immigration reform legislation, Latino voters support executive action aimed at easing deportation. In the June 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund/Latino Decisions Immigration Poll, we asked Latino voters about a number of potential executive actions with 61% and 59% of respondents indicating that the two most important steps the president can take are stopping the deportations of undocumented parents of US citizens and stopping the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for over ten years.

The immigration rhetoric of individual Republicans hurts the entire Republican Party. In the impreMedia/Latino Decisions Battleground States Survey, 80% of Latino voters responded that Donald Trump’s assertion that Mexico is sending immigrants who are drug dealers, criminals, and rapists and calling for the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants made a very or somewhat unfavorable impression of the Republican Party. Ben Carson’s likening immigration to a war that should be prosecuted militarily (“one drone strike, boom, and they’re gone”) resulted in 69% of respondents having a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the Republican Party. The July 2013 America’s Voice/Latino Congressional Battleground Poll provides other examples of how the language used by individual Republicans to discuss immigration can either help or hinder the party’s impression among Latino voters.

The Republicans’ handling of immigration makes it difficult for many Latino voters to consider supporting GOP candidates. In the Latino Decisions 2014 Election Eve Poll, 40% of Latino voters agreed with the statement that “The Republican Party has now become so anti-immigrant, and anti-Latino that it would be hard for me to consider supporting them.”

Republicans think Latinos are stupid and will just pull the lever for Rubio or maybe Cruz because of their last names. (They thought women would flock to McCain because he picked Palin.) All things being equal Latinos might choose a Latino candidate. If a liberal Latino were running in the Democratic primary it would be completely understandable if they did. But Republicans are DREAMing if they think they’ll vote for them in the numbers they need to win the election because they understand the stakes and know exactly who supports their community and who doesn’t.

The Republicans had better hope they find a whole lot of those “missing white voters” because their policies are insuring that Latinos won’t vote for them. And they’d better hope those “missing white voters” are a bunch of bigots otherwise, they might just vote Democratic too.

Update: @pastordan sent me this. It happened just today:

Dairy production in famously cheesy Wisconsin may be slowing to a drip today.

Thousands of Latinos from across the Badger State have mobilized today, walking out of their jobs and schools in protest of two bills in the state legislature that activists say are anti-immigrant and by extension anti-Latino.

Organizers at Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin immigrant-rights group, are calling the action “A Day Without Latinos.” Some Latino-owned businesses have closed in support, while others around the state are closing in solidarity.

Here’s what it looked like at the state capitol in Madison:

Keep demonizing Latinos, Republicans. It’s going to work really well for you.

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So about those ratings …

by digby

It looks like it didn’t pan out all that well for Morning Joe and his BFF last night:

MSNBC’s choice to host Donald Trump in an exclusive town hall on Wednesday did not result in a ratings win against competitors CNN or Fox News.

During the 8pm hour, when MSNBC’s Trump town hall was up against CNN’s GOP town hall (which kicked off with Ben Carson), it was actually Fox News that had the highest total viewers, with 2.3 million, despite the fact that “The O’Reilly Factor” was helmed by a guest host, Eric Bolling. MSNBC’s Trump town hall had 1.4 million total viewers, while the first hour of CNN’s three-part town hall had 2.05 million viewers.

CNN though, nearly doubled Fox News in the all important demo of 25-54 year-olds, with about 629,000 viewers compared to Fox’s 373,000 viewers. MSNBC has 341,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo.

MSNBC scheduled the Trump town hall after CNN announced their two-night town hall, no doubt hoping that the presence of Trump could take a bite out of the competition.

CNN’s town hall continued past the 8pm hour with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. From 8-11pm, CNN topped Fox and MSNBC with an average of 2.3 million total viewers compared to Fox’s 2.1 million viewers and MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers. The network also beat MSNBC and Fox in the demo with 758,000 viewers compared to Fox News’ 393,000 and MSNBC’s 281,000. CNN will host a second town hall with Trump, Jeb Bush and John Kasich on Thursday, while MSNBC hosts a Democratic town hall with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

I’m going to guess that most of Trump’s voters had no clue he was appearing on MSNBC last night. And liberals hate him. So it was an odd choice to do this, to say the least. And it looks like it didn’t pay off. I mean, more people tuned in to watch Eric Bolling on Fox and Ben Carson on CNN. It doesn’t get any worse than that.

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The king of the birthers says leaders shouldn’t question a man’s faith. Seriously?

by digby

Not that this will hurt him, of course:

Pope Francis suggested on Thursday that Donald Trump is “not Christian” because of the Republican presidential candidate’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border.

Trump fired off a statement in response almost immediately that ripped the pope’s comments as “disgraceful” and said the pope will think differently about the billionaire after the Vatican is attacked by the Islamic State.

“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President,” Trump’s statement began.

Trump continued: “I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.”

This from a guy who proposes to ban people of an entire faith from entering the country.

If social media is any example, Trump’s supporters believe the Pope is out of line and that Trump is the man who is best positioned to say who is a real Christian and who isn’t.

For instance:

With Ted Cruz surging in Iowa and some national polls, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump took a jab at the Texas Senator’s faith, saying, “not a lot of Evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
[…]
In late October, Trump questioned fellow candidate Ben Carson’s Christian faith when Carson was tied with him in Iowa polls, suggesting that his Presbyterian faith is more mainstream than Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

Presbyterian is “down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about,” he said.

And there’s this:

Does Madonna know something we all don’t about Barack? At a concert she said “we have a black Muslim in the White House.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2012

King of the birthers:

Four years ago, Trump mounted a campaign to pressure Obama to release his long-form birth certificate, even saying he would send investigators to Hawaii to find out the truth. The effort helped fuel the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory that held that Obama was born in Kenya — and Trump also floated the idea that Obama’s birth documents may label him a Muslim.

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”

His accusations reached such a high decibel level that in April 2011, Obama appeared in the White House briefing room to denounce Trump and release the long-form version of his birth certificate.

And in case you were wondering:

A majority of Trump’s supporters also believe Obama is secretly harboring faith in Islam, according to a CNN/ORC poll conducted earlier this month. That poll found that 54% of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim. Among Republicans nationwide, the poll showed, 43% of Republicans think Obama is Muslim, as do 29% of Americans as a whole.

Trump was anointed by God, unlike the Pope. So he has a perfect right to question people’s faith. I’m just pointing out that he has done it.

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Cruz’s march through the South

by digby

I wrote about Cruz’s strategy for Salon this morning:

It’s taken a while for the chattering classes to come around to the idea that Donald Trump may actually pull this thing off. It’s hard to blame them. It’s as if we all went to sleep one night and woke up in an alternate universe. But they do seem to have accepted it. He came close to winning Iowa, a notoriously buttoned up electorate and won decisively in New Hampshire. All the polling going forward looks good. It’s just become impossible to deny it any longer.

But what about his nemesis Ted Cruz? Are they ready to accept that he is likely to be the last man standing who can stop Trump? Until yesterday one would have had to say no. With South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s dagger to Jeb Bush’s heart (her endorsement of Marco Rubio) the whole universe of political pundits were ready to call the number two slot for the Florida Senator. There seems to be a very deep desire to see this boyish neoconservative hawk survive despite his somewhat bizarre personality tics. (In this primary race, it’s conventional political rhetoric that’s the kiss of death.)

But at the end of the day, some new numbers came out that electrified the political press corps and changed the conversation once again:

Surprise: Trump falls behind Cruz in natl NBC/WSJ poll
Cruz 28
Trump 26
Rubio 17
Kasich 11
Carson 10
Jeb 4

In Jan, was Trump 33, Cruz 20

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) February 17, 2016

There are a number of other polls which still show Trump at number one and some explanatory data about that NBC/WSJ poll which shows that they may have sampled more self-identified “very conservative” voters.  Nonetheless this was big news just three days out from the South Carolina primary where the latest polling shows Trump in the lead and Cruz and Rubio vying for second place.

NBC’s Hallie Jackson interviewed Cruz about his surprise showing in the network’s poll and he was obviously pleased as punch, enjoying his moment

Hallie Jackson: You’re topping Donald Trump nationally. You are now beating Donald Trump nationally according to your new polling. What is that like for you? What’s that moment like when you sort of see these numbers and you see what’s happening? 

Ted Cruz: It’s tremendously encouraging … To be leading the field nationally, I think as a result 

Hallie Jackson: Did you ever think you’d be here? 

Ted Cruz: That was always the plan. That’s how you win. You’ve got to get to first place to win,. I think that is the result of a couple of things. On, I think it’s the result of the breadth of support.

Actually, you don’t need to get to first place in the vote in the Republican primary to win. As Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium explains, the Republicans turned their primary campaign into a Byzantine maze of varying rules and regulations in order to facilitate an easier path to victory for the establishment front runner.  Unfortunately, that has resulted instead in a tilted playing field for Donald Trump to win with his 35% or so as long as he’s got several people in competition. That pile-up in the establishment lane doesn’t look to be clearing any time soon.

The fact remains that while Cruz may not be in first place anywhere but this one poll, he is still in the hunt and it’s an interesting question as to why that is. After all, it’s a matter of faith that nobody can stand him. I have written before about his brains and work ethic mitigating that liability. He also has a sophisticated southern strategy that’s about to get its first test on Saturday when South Carolina voters go to the polls. The Cruz campaign has taken on the feel of a religious mission. Following the strong data driven tactics of Iowa and relying on its “Camp Cruz” evangelical volunteers, he believes that he can grind out a win in Southern Carolina and ride the momentum through the March 1st states with a superior grand game and sheer will.

Eliana Johnson at national Review went inside the campaign:

At around 8:40 a.m. on Monday, the volunteers emerge from their rooms, line up against the walls, and put their hands on each other’s shoulders to form a chain that runs the length of the hallway. Handmade signs line the walls. One reads: “Conservatives, Christians, and GRASSROOTS MATTER!”

This is Value Place, an extended-stay hotel just off Interstate 385 in Simpsonville, S.C. Until the Palmetto State’s primary concludes Saturday night, it is also Camp Cruz, home to those who have flocked here to volunteer their time for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. Right now, they’re packed three to a room. I ask if roommates knew each other beforehand. “No, but they do now, very well,” says Mark Hayes, a retired chief financial officer who’s running the show here along with his wife, Nancy, a veteran of 19 Republican campaigns who also works for Joe the Plumber of “spread the wealth around” fame.

At Iowa’s Camp Cruz, dozens of volunteers packed an old college dorm in the months leading up to the caucus, at times cramming extra mattresses into rooms already housing two people. When I stayed over on the eve of the caucus, five grown men vacated a room for me. In South Carolina, Cruz’s team is scaling up the data-driven ground operation that propelled it to victory in Iowa. The campaign’s Iowa state director, Bryan English, is on the ground here coordinating with key surrogates, and a second Camp Cruz location at a Quality Inn & Suites in Greenville opened its doors on Monday.

In 2012 evangelicals made up two thirds of the South Carolina primary electorate and the Tea Party remains a strong factor. This is Cruz’s natural constituency and the assumption is that if he finishes strongly there it will give him the momentum he needs to march through the Southern states gathering delegates and momentum for the rest of the race. Conversely, if he fails there his modern targeting campaign will have been proven a bust and he may just collapse.

Cruz has been saying that he’s bringing together the “Reagan coalition” which he defines as evangelicals, conservatives, Reagan Democrats and young people. Reagan Democrats haven’t existed for 30 years (we call them “Republicans” now) and there’s little evidence that he’s attracting young people any more than anyone else in the race. And according to Johnson, the conservatives he’s targeting are more aptly referred to as the “very” conservative, which do exist in large numbers in the south but not in the numbers Cruz is going to need. So there’s a bit of wishful thinking in his plan.

As for evangelicals, it turns out that they are not a monolith either. It sounds very strange when Donald Trump, the thrice married libertine, says that he’s attracting them, but he is. And this article by Kevin Cirrilli at Bloomberg explains why. Cruz appeals to the traditional old school evangelicals, Trump to the new school disco evangelicals:

With the state’s primary just four days away, Trump is reaching out to new-school evangelicals, whose pastors become celebrities and best-selling authors and whose church choirs can rise to become chart-topping Christian pop-rock bands.

In new-school churches, altars are often replaced by elaborate stages with light shows that rival backdrops from American Idol performances. Holy water fountains are converted into jacuzzi-sized baptism pools. For the purveyors of this flashier packaging of Christianity, it’s all part of an effort to shepherd disenfranchised Christians back to Jesus, much in the same way that Trump is able to convert his own celebrityhood and financial success into a political following that attracts first-time voters.

Of course Trump would appeal to the people who believe in “prosperity theology” which teaches that Christians who are aligned with God can also attain financial success. And that presents a major problem for Cruz who needs every evangelical he can get.

Eliana Johnson points out that he modeled his campaign on an earlier southern strategy that vaulted an unknown and deeply mistrusted anti-establishment born-again candidate into the White House, a man with whom Ted Cruz would never want to be associated. It was Jimmy Carter:

The Camp Cruz phenomenon was inspired, ironically, by Jimmy Carter’s Peanut Brigade, a band of supporters who barnstormed the country on Carter’s behalf. Cruz fundraiser Paul Porter, a Florida real-estate investor, proposed the idea to campaign manager Jeff Roe on his first visit to Cruz’s Houston campaign headquarters last September. The idea, he says, is to take volunteers and “recruit them, lodge them, and organize them.”

(There are other similarities between the Cruz and Carter efforts: Like Carter, Cruz outworks his rivals on the campaign trail, and he faces massive resistance within his own party from what has come to be known as the “ABC” movement — Anybody But Cruz. In 1976, an effort with the same name was led by liberal Democrats looking to stop Carter.)

That strategy worked for Carter in 1976 and maybe it will work for Cruz in 2016.  But Carter wasn’t running against a charismatic television star with unlimited money at the time. That would come four years later. And he lost that one in a landslide.

Voting with their middle fingers
by Tom Sullivan

Bernie Sanders volunteer car in Greenville, SC yesterday.

People in upstate South Carolina didn’t get out much back in the days before Michelin, BMW, Hitachi, and Fuji. That was the way they liked it. People from outside were still Yankees. They preferred being left alone and distrusted outsiders. But off course, the textile industry had collapsed. They’d take their money.

Outside the immediately adjoining states, you almost never saw a South Carolina license plate. You didn’t ask South Carolinians where they were going on vacation; you asked them when they were going to Myrtle Beach. Unless they had money, in which case they had vacation homes on Hilton Head.

While traveling outside South Carolina (when I lived there) and people would ask, “Where are you from?” and I’d say South Carolina, they had one of two responses: 1) “What part of North Carolina is that?” or 2) “So how long have you been living in North Carolina?” When I corrected them and said South Carolina, their eyes would glaze over as they attempted to visualize the state on a mental map of the east coast. Mention Charleston and you would see a glimmer of recognition. Except for Sen. Strom Thurmond, the rest of the country might not know the state existed.

This is now. The place is crawling with press and, as I wrote yesterday, presidential campaigns.

Here in Greenville, South Carolina, a used-car salesman summed up the anti-establishment mood of the Trump-supporting electorate succinctly, “We’re voting with our middle finger.” Even after his performance here on Saturday night, people still support Trump. The Los Angeles Times elaborates that demographics have shifted in the Palmetto State:

Like several people interviewed at Trump’s Monday night rally, Daigle was not originally from South Carolina, having lived in California and several other states before retiring in Spartanburg. Demographic data show an increasing number of residents have moved from out of state, perhaps loosening the traditional boundaries of Southern politeness.

In 2000, 64% of the population was state-born, according to census data, but by 2013, the number of resident born in the Palmetto State had fallen to 58%.

GOP strategist Kevin Madden, a former Mitt Romney spokesman, said he believes Trump may yet suffer in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, noting that attitudes here often shift in the final days of the campaign.

It seems as if the mood in “Bush country” has already shifted — away from the traditional GOP. But people here rebuilt their economy from the ashes of the textile industry, looked around and wondered where all these furriners came from with their strange ways.

Martin Longman at Political Animal explains that it is not limited government these voters want, but something else:

No, the appeal of George W. Bush was more in his swagger than in his ideology. “Compassionate conservatism” caught in the throats of relatively few conservatives so long as it was succeeding in punishing liberals and making them crazy.

So, too, with the appeal of Donald Trump. Evangelicals like him despite his adultery and womanizing and foul language and lack of piety and decorum. They don’t mind his many heresies against limited government and Conservative Movement orthodoxies.

What they want is someone who will fight liberals.

If they piss off the intellectuals and cultural elites, that’s a huge bonus. Being politically incorrect is a big feature in Trump’s popularity with evangelicals, not a bug.

All Trump has to do is to promise to fight for them. It doesn’t matter to them if he actually shares their values. They’ve had their fill of politicians who claim to share their values and, yet, can’t stop the wave of demographic and cultural change that is going on in this country.

Be careful what you wish for. You invite Them in because you want their business and next thing you know they’re in your business.

BTW: The SC primary circus is clearly in town. This hotel caters to construction workers, many of them Latinos. Except, guys with laptops and backpacks suddenly appeared at breakfast this morning. White guys with names like Judson.

QOTD: Sean Hannity

by digby

On Scalia’s seat:

SEAN HANNITY: I’m just going to say it straight up. If the Republican Party breaks here, if they capitulate, if they go wobbly, if their spines crumble like usual, I’m done with you people. Done. I’m finished. I want nothing to do with you, because you are no good to any conservative in this country. You didn’t repeal and replace Obamacare, you won’t stand up to a lawless president on executive amnesty, and now if you’re not going to fight against something that hasn’t been done in 80 years, you are useless and pathetic and you all need to go. Only those that will capitulate. So I want our side to be, you better be ready all you senators in Washington for the onslaught.

McConnell’s instantaneous declaration happened because he knew his base.

So does Sean Hannity.

(So should anyone who harbors some fantasy that “the establishment” is going to save the party by pushing out Trump or Cruz and installing Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney as the nominee. There will be a full blown armed revolution if anyone tries that.)