Saturday, August 8, 2015

1st GOP Debate Fall Out

The biggest news from the first debate is that Fox News has turned on Donald Trump.  For all 7 years of the Obama presidency they have happily given him a platform to pronounce how terrible the Obama administration is.  Once or twice a week he would phone into "Fox & Friends" and plug up some air time with his droll commentary about where Obama was born and why China was "beating" the United States at everything. It was a symbiotic relationship.

Once Trump announced he was running for president, they had to scale back his presence on the shows. But the Fox team seemed to enjoy the early moments of Trump mania. But eventually it got out of hand. By the time of the first debate, he was doubling the nearest competitor in all the early state polls. (He actually has a 3 to 1 lead in South Carolina, a state not known for loving Yankees.)

The debate was crafted to make Trump look as bad as possible. They started with a show of hands question designed to make the crowd boo him. Then Megyn Kelly called him on his sexism. The very same shtick that her network has ridden for ratings glory the past 7 years was now being used as a cudgel against his orange-quaffed head.  Things didn't get much better after that. By the end of the night, Mr. Trump was staying up at his beautiful, classy, luxurious, Cleveland hotel room tweeting about how mean Megyn was to him.  Thirty tweets in all, between the hours of 2:30 and 4:30 AM.

The next day he continued the attack against Fox pollster Frank Luntz, calling him a loser who once tried to beg for consulting work with Trump's empire.  Priceless stuff.  The best outcome of this nuthouse in-fighting has been the new conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign is actually an outgrowth of a collusion between Trump and the Clintons to get Hillary elected. This has the very ring of all the right-wing conspiracy theories.  Trump won't be the nominee. But he might run as a third party candidate. Now he might just run to spite Fox News. And next year, if  Hillary wins with say, 50% of the vote, to Rubio or Bush's 46% and Trump's 3 or 4 percent, the teeming masses of low-information votes will know who to blame.  But there will be plenty of blame to go around, for both Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster he waited too long to kill.

On a happier note, two candidates stood out during the debates.  Marco Rubio was the clear winner on substance in the prime-time debate. He still comes across as a little too green for the Oval Office, but he had the best night. And in the earlier debate Carly Fiorina stood out for her ruthless ability to say mean things about Hillary Clinton.  She is having a moment, and I expect this will lead to her making the prime-time debate next time around, probably at the expense of Chris Christie. Christie was 9th in the polls before Cleveland but Kasich also had a solid performance and Christie was obviously underwhelming to the Republican crowd.  I think he will slip to 11th.

Fiorina now has a path to the nomination. It is remote and it will probably go away as people begin to look at her dreadful record as CEO of Hewlet-Packard. But she connected with the base and she has a certain "Little Engine That Could" feel to her now.  If Fox News continues to turn on Trump, she may become their new darling.

Before the prime-time debate I went to Paddy Power, an Irish betting web site and wrote down the betting line for each of the top ten candidates to win the nomination.  I post them below next to the current odds, about 36 hours after the first debate.  There has been very little movement after the debate among the top ten, although Walker and Kasih got modes bounces.  I did not note what Fiorina's odds were before the debates, but I'm sure they were longer than 20 to 1. She has had the most buzz in the past 48 hours, and I'm sure the punters have noticed.

Paddy Power Pre-debate  Post Debate
Trump 8 to 1 8 to 1
Bush  5 to 4 5 to 4
Walker 4 to 1 5 to 2
Rubio 6 to 1 7 to 1
Huckabee 20 to 1 25 to 1
Santorum n/a 40 to 1
Paul 10 to 1 10 to 1
Cruz 25 to 1 25 to 1
Kasich 16 to 1 14 to 1
Carson 16 to 1 20 to 1
Christie n/a 16 to 1
Jindal n/a 33 to 1
Fiorina n/a 20 to 1
Graham n/a 66 to 1
Perry n/a 40 to 1
Pataki n/a 66 to 1
Gilmore n/a 66 to 1

Now back to my subtective forecast.  I have 4 columns this time, fore my pre-debate numbers, Nate Silver's pre-debate numbers, my current numbers and the change in my numbers before and after the debate. I don't think Nate Silver has updated his subjective forecast yet. He's not very big on subjective and I suspect he'll only do it again right before Iowa.


Candidate Pre-debate Nate Silver Post 1st Debate Change
Trump 2 2 1 -1
Bush  34 28 31 -3
Walker 32 28 29 -3
Rubio 23 21 28 5
Huckabee 3 3 3 0
Santorum 1 0 1 0
Paul 2 3 1 -1
Cruz 1 1 1 0
Kasich 1 6 2 1
Carson 0 1 0 0
Christie 0 3 0 0
Jindal 0 1 0 0
Fiorina 0 1 2 2
Graham 0 1 0 0
Perry 0 0 0 0
Pataki 0 0 0 0
Gilmore 0 0 0 0
The Field 1 1 1 0


There are only 4 crooked numbers in that last column. These reflect Rubio gaining a bit at the expense of the other 2 top tier candidates and Carly Fiorina getting her boomlet.



Thursday, August 6, 2015

First GOP Debate Reactions

First impressions of the performance of the candidates.  I list them by how much pre-debate buzz they had generated.



1. Trump.  He was exactly what we expected because that is the only thing he is capable of being.  He may recede in the polls, but that was going to happen anyway. I don't think anyone landed a good punch on him, which may be a sign of maturity. I think the serious candidates know that he's not a real threat.  (Kudos to Fox News for getting the crowd to boo him by asking the candidates if they would pledge to endorse the eventual Republican nominee.)

2. Bush: didn't do great. They may call him Vito Corleone in Florida, but I'm beginning to think he's still called Fredo at family reunions.

3. Walker: Boring, as advertised. But he didn't really need to do much tonight and he didn't have any Perry like "Ooops" moments, and that's probably all he needed to accomplish.

4. Rubio.  The clear winner, in my view. He looked mature and articulate and I think he may get a modest bounce out of this event.

5. Carson: He's a really bright guy who got all of his non-medical information by listening to Rush Limbaugh to and from Johns Hopkins. And any candidate who doesn't know shit about the Baltic Republics is dead to me.

6. Paul.  He obviously was told by his staffers that he needed to make an impression and he came out swinging but I don't think he made much of an impression either way.

7. Kasich. He had obvious home-court advantage but he didn't do much with it.

8.  Cruz:  Wow, did he come out flat. I think he is used to formal, competitive debates and that does not translate well into these televised joint television appearances.  He might be the biggest disappointment of the night. But I also think he will prep like hell for the next one and come out swinging.

9. Huckabee.  Solid but bland. He's destined for the back of the pack so who cares?

10 Christie.  Pretty much an after-thought His whole shtick of being the straight talker has been stolen away by the man at the middle podium.


Upshot:  I think Rubio will close the gap on Walker and Bush in the next few weeks. No one else made much of an impression. Trump will begin to fade over time, but that was going to happen anyway.

What did we learn?  Trump will probably run as a 3rd party candidate and if he does next year's debates will be awesome!


Wednesday, August 5, 2015

The Good News Is There Are a Lot of Options. (The Race for the right to lose to Hillary next November.)




Tomorrow night in Cleveland the glorious spectacle that is the 2016 GOP presidential primary begins in earnest. There are currently 17 announced candidates who are fighting for the right to be a 2 to 1 under dog in the general election. But only 10 of them have earned a spot in that prime time debate. The other 7 will have to fight for scraps at the 5PM kiddy table.

Of course, most of these folks, including a majority of the 10 with seats at the big boy table, have no chance of being the nominee. But ever since Mike Huckabee parlayed a 2nd (or 3rd, depending how you count) finish in the 2008 GOP primary into a multi-million dollar TV deal, there is clear value in just running for president.

I wrote my first assessment of the field almost a year ago, before any candidate formally announced. Now the field is set and there has been a lot of movement in my rankings. In that first ranking I broke the filed into three tiers: Contenders (6), Pretenders (4) and Niche Candidates (6). Eleven of those sixteen prospects are now in the field, including all ten from the top two tiers.  But there's been a lot of movement between and among the tiers.  Here are the updated rankings:


I. Three Contenders.:  Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker.

There are only three candidates that I can realistically see winning this nomination.  Among the three, I give Bush a slight advantage over Walker. Rubio has yet to get his feet but he is a plausbile nominee for reasons that I will discuss below.

1.  Jeb Bush.  This country has felt destined to wake up to the reality of another Clinton versus Bush election.  The first one was in 1992.  Since then we have had 8 very prosperous years under Clinton, eight terrible years under Bush and a prolonged if uneven recover from that Bush disaster. But all of these ups and downs have only solidified the natural rift in our politics. The Red States still like the Bush philosophy-plain spoken slightly less rabid than other options in that party, and bereft of any hope for a better tomorrow.  Hillary Clinton has been scarred by the various proxy wars and nontroveries of the past quarter-century, but she's still standing, and she's virtually certain to be her party's nominee. Sadly, the most likely outcome of this nominating process is the son of Bush 41/Brother of Bush 43 fighting the wife of Clinton 42 for the right to be #45.
Rank Last Time:  1st (No change)
Odds of being the nominee: 34%.  (Up from 23%)

2. Scott Walker. As this field takes shape, it has become clear that Scott Walker has the widest appeal. He is acceptable to every substantial demographic in the party.  Billionaires Snake Handlers and War Mongers all seem to find him palatable. He's also done very well with fund raising and I think that has more than a little to do with his electoral track record. He can say, with a straight face, that he has won 3 statewide elections in a Blue State. No one else on this list can claim that.

But there are problems ahead.  Put simply, the candidate is not very bright. This would be a complete deal breaker in a rational party, but fortunately for Scott, he's running for the Republican nomination. One of the most interesting things to look for tomorrow night is which candidates go after Walker. The media attention will swirl around Trump, but Walker is the real threat to win this nomination. Trump is Tattaglia. Walker is Barzinni.
Rank Last Time:  9th (+7)
Odds of being the nominee: 32%. (Up from 1%)
Note: the last time I forecast the field Walker was still facing a reelection campaign in Wisconsin. If he had lost that, he would  have been done, which is why I ranked him so low then.

3.  Marco Rubio.  I think Marco Rubio would have been better off sitting this one out. He could be the nominee in 4, 8 or even 12 years time.  Running against Hillary after 12 years of Democratic rule or for an open seat after 16 would be ideal. By then the Republican fever will have broken and they will be so desperate to regain power that they will be ready to nominate a candidate that championed immigration reform. Indeed, they will no option but to do so.

But Marco correctly figured that he has a path to the nomination this time, and he went for it. He looked bad changing tracks on immigration but that won't kill him in the primary and come next year the party might let him walk that back a little in the general election. The Republican party also have a long track record of being a royalist party.  If Rubio finishes second this time, he instantly becomes the favorite for 2020.

He just does not look mature or confident yet.  He's not quite ready for the nomination but maybe the next few months will light a fire under him. Stranger things have happened.
Rank Last Time:  6th (+3)
Odds of being the nominee: 25%. (Up from 1%)

II.  Two Pretenders: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

4.  Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee has strong support among the Christianist wing of the party but Wall Street and the Club for Growth Crowd have their doubts.  So far he has run a very ineffectual campaign and I'm not sure he wouldn't prefer to be back doing his weekly Fox News show.

But the Republicans have a long history of nominating a previous runner up.  (Reagan was runner up in 76, nominee in 90. Bush 41 did the same in 88/80, Dole in 96/88 McCain in 2004/2000 and (arguably) Romney in 2008/2004.  I say arguably because although Mitt Romney got more votes than Huckabee did in 2008, Huck won more delegates. He sat out the last election to make easy money on FNC, but he's back in the ring now and theoretically has a path to the nomination. He has to finish strong in Iowa and wipe up in the South. His biggest advantage is that he's the only true Southern boy in the field.  (Texans and Floridians are only quasi-southern.)
Rank Last Time:  4th (Unchanged)
Odds of being the nominee: 3%. (Down from 12%)

5.  Rick Santorum. Last time around he snuck up on everyone and wound up being the runner-up. This campaign has started much more roughly for Senator Santorum and not making the first debate is a big setback. But voting for a candidate is a habit, and there are 4 million Republicans who vote for him in the last primary. They can't all go elsewhere.  He needs another miracle in Iowa, and he needs Huckabee to drop out fast. There is a route there, but it's a long shot.
Rank Last Time:  3rd (-2)
Odds of being the nominee: 1%. (Down from 13%)

III. Twelve Niche Candidates (And the Niches they Represent).

6.  Donald Trump (Assholes)

You can see why he's leading the polls; his niche is the biggest in the party. Trump has made the race fun and he has energized the low-information voters by giving them exactly what they want: the same stupid rhetoric they've been hearing on Fox News and talk radio for seven years.  But let's keep things in perspective: he can not win. Four years ago the runaway leader was Rick Perry. Four years before that it was Rudy Giulliani.  This man will come back to the back and then fall down to earth  The only open question is how the eventual nominee handles him in the early going.  He could be somebody's Sister Souljah or he could be their Willier Horton.
Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 2%.

7.  Rand Paul (Libertarian-lites)

Rand Paul has always struck me a lazy dofus. He inherited the family business, running for president on a vaguely Objectivist platform of calling the Federal Reserve the boogeyman. Thanfully he's less charming than his father.

I will give him credit for one thing. He seems to understand that the Republican party needs to attract minority voters. He also knows that the present system does not serve the needs of inner-city black folk well at all. I admire him for reaching out to those people and asking for their vote. Eventually, some Republican will convince them to vote for him That person's name is not Rand Paul.
Rank Last Time:  5th (-2)
Odds of being the nominee: 2%. (Down from 10%)

8.  Ted Cruz (Tea Party Purists)
Let me begin by saying that he makes my skin crawl. Every time he tells the crowd that he is "the son of an immigrant" I have to yell "You ARE an immigrant."  But he'll keep doing it.

I could vent about this guy's naked hucsterism for hours but he's not worth the time.  So I'll just leave one anecdote here.  When Ted Cruz was a first year student at Harvard Law School, he refused to study with anyone who was not a graduate of Harvard, Yale or (like himself), Princeton. Standford, MIT and Columbia were not good enough for young Ted.  But when he wanted to announce his campaign for presidency he did so at Liberty College, a diploma mill for home-schooled teenagers who think human being used to put saddles on dinosaurs.

This man only buys from the best. But he'll sell to anyone  That's a hustler.
Rank Last Time:  4th (-4)
Odds of being the nominee: 1%. (down from 10%)

9.  John Kasich (Sane People)

You can see why he's struggling.  This guy is by far the most competent and sensible candidate in the field.  He also is the governor of a state that the Republicans must win next year.  I suspect that he's running to be Joe Biden, the centrist candidate who gets wiped out in the primary but winds up on the ticket.  Depending on the nominee, he might have ended up their without this run, but he's probably holding out some hope that he can distinguish himself in the early debates and let his resume carry him to the nomination.  If Trump, Walker, Bush and Rubio all win large numbers of delegates, he could be the best compromise candidate.  But the days of brokered conventions have gone the way of three man pitching rotations.  That won't happen in 2016.
Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 1%. (Up from 1%)

10.  Ben Carson (People Who are Not Racist and Aim to Prove it to their Snippy Grandchildren)

Ben Carson is a great surgeon who became famous by being very rude to the President of the United States at a Prayer Breakfast.  This gave him a certain amount of cache to the Fox News crowd and he has parlayed it into decent poll numbers.  He will probably get more votes than some of the people ranked above him in this list, but he simply will not be the nominee.
Rank Last Time:  12th (+2)
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Unchanged)

11.  Chris Christie (Dallas Cowboys Fans From New Jersey)

A year ago he seemed like a plausible nominee but the base simply has not and will not forgive him for appearing in public with President Obama during the response to Hurricane Sandy. This deflated his shtick of being the no-nonsense guy who will tell anyone and everyone what he thinks. That problem was compounded when the genuine article wafted into the race on monogrammed solid gold comb over.  He's toast.
Rank Last Time:  2nd (-8)
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Down from 20%)

12. Rick Perry (People Who Think Glasses Make You Smart.)

Perry's resume is reasonable but everyone remembers the train wreck of his 2012 campaign. I think he wants to erase the memory of that, but early signs are not encouraging. Not making the early debates was probably the last nail in his coffin.
Rank Last Time:  5th (-7)
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Down from 10%)

13 Bobby Jindal (People Sick of Being Called Racist but Who Think Ben Carson is a Little Too Militant.)

Running for president can be a joke, but it can also hurt real people. (Ask Ricky Ray Rector about that.) What's really said is when a joke candidacy hurts real people.  Two days ago Bobby Jindal announced that the state of Louisiana would cancel it's medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood over their practice of donating fetal tissue for reimbursement.  (I mean, selling baby parts to get filthy, filthy rich.)  Never mind that the Planned Parenthood clinics in question do not perform abortions, a stand had to be made, and he was going to make it!  Everybody wins, other than the poor women of Lousiiana who rely on Planned Parenthood for contraception, cancer screening and HIV testing.
Rank Last Time:  7th (-6)
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Down from <1 p="">
14. Carly Fiorina (Women and the Fiscally Incompetent)

I know of no earthy rational for this woman running for President. She was a tech CEO oversaw the loss of more than 50% of her companies valuation. And she got clobbered in her only previous run for office. But onward and downward, I guess.
Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Unchanged)

15. Lindsay Graham (War Hawks and Closet Cases.)
I at least understand why he is running. He really likes scaring the shit out of people about Iran and John Bolton decided not to.  Best of luck, Lindsay.
 Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Unchanged)

16. George Pataki (Rockefeller Republicans)
Remember Rockefeller Republicans? Like January Jones' 2nd husband on Mad Men? Yeah, they were fun.
 Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Unchanged)

17.  Jim Gilmore (The Entire Gilmore Family)
I lived in Virginia during half of this man's tenure as Governor of the Old Dominion. I can't tell you the first blessed thing about him. Best of luck, Jim.
 Rank Last Time:  Unranked
Odds of being the nominee: 0%. (Unchanged)


JUST FOR FUN: My Odds against Nate Silver's:
About an hour after I posted this blog I came across Nate Silver's "completely subjective" odds for the GOP Nomination, as expressed in the 538 Podcast.  So here's where my numbers stand against Nate Silver.


Candidate Spider Stumbled Nate Silver Difference
Trump 2 2 0
Bush  34 28 6
Walker 32 28 4
Rubio 23 21 2
Huckabee 3 3 0
Santorum 1 0 1
Paul 2 3 -1
Cruz 1 1 0
Kasich 1 6 -5
Carson 0 1 -1
Christie 0 3 -3
Jindal 0 1 -1
Fiorina 0 1 -1
Graham 0 1 -1
Perry 0 0 0
Pataki 0 0 0
Gilmore 0 0 0
The Field 1 1 0