No Plans, No Backup, No Exit

As the polling numbers flounder, there are other signs of discord and chaos within the World of Trump (tm):

What is concerning for Trump backers and Republicans (the Venn diagram of overlap between those groups seems to be in perpetual flux) is that it appears to be distracting from the rest of the crucial work of building a presidential campaign. For most intents and purposes, there appears to be no Trump campaign... 

As David A. Graham at the Atlantic notes:

For example, Trump has no state-level campaign director in Ohio or Colorado, two top-shelf swing states. Across the map, Republican officials say they’re just waiting to hear on what to do from either Trump or the Republican National Committee, but so far they’re hearing very little. “I'll say that as far as building the infrastructure of a campaign, the RNC has been doing it for many years,” Trump said at a press conference in May...

It's true that the national committee has always handled the "ground game" aspects of the nuts-and-bolts, usually coordinating with their state branches to get volunteers and call centers organized, but there's always been a joint effort with the campaigner himself to, you know, put something into that effort to get it started. Everyone's waiting for Trump to settle into his own chain of command, press a Start button to get the general election engine going... and he's too busy yammering at rallies and Tweeting online to get his own house in order.

At the beginning of that article, Graham noted how Trump is hiring just a handful of people, and mostly focused on his home state of New York as a place he wants to win. Which flies a bit into the face of common sense because New York is so liberal Blue in national elections - and with Hillary claiming it as a home-state as well - that the Republicans are better off cutting their losses and focusing on Ohio and Florida instead.

Trump's thinking on this mimics his thinking on trying to win California: deluded that a solid Blue state could be treated like a toss-up, because it's Electoral College-heavy (gotta win HUGE) and because Trump seems to know where the state is on the map (Trump's ego is telling him New Yawk is his place and the people there are HIS people).

What's interesting is how Trump is screwing up on the finer details of campaigning: Even an amateur like myself would know to set up and keep running - especially if I'm winning - state-level offices during the primaries to have a ground crew in place for the post-convention push into the General election. It may cost some money - isn't Trump supposed to be rich, and isn't he supposed to be good at hiring people to work for him? - but even a volunteer staff would be something. This is common-sense stuff, stuff I've seen for statewide Governor campaign in-person volunteering for Crist in 2010 and with Obama's ground games in 2008 and 2012.

It's as though Trump is trying to run his whole thing on the cheap: He HAD gotten so much free press coverage up until now that it helped him avoid wasting money during the Primary season on ad time. It's his modus operandi of Other People's Money, instead of money it's with Other People's Press Coverage. And now he seems to think he can just campaign the whole way like this.

Hint: He can't. This is the part of the campaign where the fight goes to Get Out The Vote efforts, bigger ad pushes, fund-raising that requires money be spent first to get the staff to raise those funds and organize more events and drum up constant support. And he's not getting any of that in place right now.

By comparison, Hillary's got a ground game in most battleground toss-up states and is already buying up ad time. She'll be selling a positive spin on herself - and mudslinging a ton of dirt at Trump - that can reach more people and with better effectiveness than any Trump Tweet could. And we're still weeks ahead of the Democratic convention in Philly.

Trump is showing signs that he honestly doesn't know how to campaign for the Presidency in the first place, and that he's not hiring the right people to do it for him. He's also not in the mood - hilariously enough - to do any fund-raising himself (also via Graham):

A related and intertwined problem is Trump’s lack of fundraising. Although he once said he’d raise $1 billion, his new fundraising team—mostly constituted by the RNC, of course—is working to depress expectations, saying there’s little chance he’ll raise that much. In fact, many members told The Wall Street Journal they haven’t even done any work yet. There’s a vicious cycle at work here, which is that as donors see the Trump campaign in chaos, they’re unwilling to fork over their hard-earned cash. Why back a candidate who’s rending the Republican Party apart, doesn’t follow conservative orthodoxy, and seems to have no idea what he’s doing with the money?

From the Politico, this little tidbit:

...While Trump had promised Priebus that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation. It’s unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later.

Meanwhile, there’s deep skepticism on Trump’s campaign about the RNC’s commitment to the presumptive GOP nominee, with some campaign officials questioning how hard the RNC is working to help Trump and to raise money for his campaign’s joint committees with the party.

There's a sense that Trump wants control of the funds, but doesn't want to do any of the heavy lifting to get those funds in the first place. Again, Other's People Money at work here.

It's like having a professional cyclist keep the lead of the Tour de France up until the 15th Stage, and then suddenly stop pedaling (peddling?) unless the other cyclists on the Tour take over the pedaling for him.

There's been this buzz that somewhere within - deep down in a secret part of the empty space that should contain his soul - Trump is that he really doesn't want to be President. I can see where the idea would come from: Being President is too demanding, too time-consuming and too limiting on someone like Trump who has to be 100 other places all at once doing his own thing and not someone else's.

Here's the problem: Trump always wants to paint himself as a winner... even when he's running away from whatever disaster he just created - failing casinos, struggling sports league, doomed airline, questionable online school - with his terrible skills. He can't just quit the campaign for something because the ENTIRE WORLD is witnessing this. That would be a huge admission of failure, and it would wreck his trademarked name.

If there's an exit strategy - get kicked off the ballot by the GOP, or have the convention stolen from him - it still compels him at this point to play the game to the bitter end by angrily (justifiably) running as an Independent/Write-In if only to wreck the Republicans for "betraying" him. I doubt scandal - any emerging facts of his dubious business practices for example - will drive him out. Only Trump can destroy Trump, and he doesn't want to.

So for now I'm thinking he's in this to win this. He just doesn't realize what that means.

What I'm figuring is that Trump has a Plan A: Run for President using the same marketing skills to promote his brand (his NAME) to draw in enough suckers voters to win and draw in enough billionaire fools fellow rich people to give him enough money to pay off growing debts he'd rather not people know to enjoy the good life. It works (worked) for the Primary, but the General election is filled with voters who aren't suckers for a wingnut egomaniacal platform.

Trump does not have a Plan B. From what I've seen of his career, Plan B is usually bankruptcy court. That doesn't help here.

This is where the Republicans have to panic. They are facing the WORST of both worlds here. Either Trump stays on as their standard-bearer, running a disorganized mess that scares away the deep-pocket funders (more and more companies are refusing to support their convention, for example) and wrecks the whole party's ability to campaign for down-ballot offices. Or Trump leaves, but in a way that either burns the whole house down as he runs for it or else prevents the party from fixing the damage left in his wake.

Kicking Trump out is no longer an option: They do that, and the voting base riots. Worse for the RNC, they'll stop voting Republican at every level. Their dying party - still shambling about zombie-like - dies for real, and stays dead for more than one generation.

In the RNC's best-case scenario, Trump nominates a "respectable" long-time politician as his Veep, then quits for some vague excuse allowing the RNC or the convention delegates to rally to the Veep to step up as the Presidential candidate for the General election. But even then, the party will be weeks behind in organization compared to Hillary and the Dems. The Republicans would have to start from scratch in July something that should have been up and running by May. And knowing Trump, his Veep selection is going to be someone so similar in tone against immigrants and women that the replacement candidate will be just as toxic and hated as Trump, meaning they'll still poll poorly and lose in November.

The only good news in THAT scenario for the GOP is that they could get their fund-raising efforts back into play to where they could salvage their Congressional and state-level campaigns. Maybe.

The only real way Trump leaves is if he's utterly convinced he's not going to make any money out of his scam campaign. Which might be why the RNC isn't so rushed to do anything to help: the Republicans have always been about "starving the beast," after all. But the Republicans have to starve themselves in the process if they do this, with no guarantee they can recover as a Party.

I'm adding this to the Schadenfreude tag, just because it is maliciously joyous to watch the Republicans panic as this oncoming storm of disorganized hell approaches them.

I just hope innocent people don't get hurt in this.

The Aftermath of Citizens United: No Longer About the Presidency It's All About the Benjamins

If you notice the title of this article, there's an irony in that Benjamin Franklin who graces our hundred-dollar bill is one of the primary Founders who never served as U.S. President.

I'm writing this because a few things happened this weekend: first, the GOP decided to kill off the much-worshiped but horribly-skewed Iowa Straw Poll after 40 years of making the Beltway media foam at the mouth over the horse race that is our Presidential campaign system.

Via the FiveThirtyEight site:

It consists of a tiny and unrepresentative sample of voters in a small, overwhelmingly white state. Its importance depends almost entirely on the perceptions of the political elites and the news media. The spin after the vote often matters as much as the vote itself. Its rules can be surprisingly informal, to the point that baked goods are sometimes exchanged for the promise of a vote. And it has a terrible track record at predicting the GOP’s presidential nominee...

...From the standpoint of the parties, the purpose of the Iowa Straw Poll is not necessarily to pick winners but to narrow (or “winnow”) the field. (In some years, this applies to the Iowa caucus too...) In that sense, the biggest danger from the straw poll is not a “false positive” — an insurgent candidate like Michele Bachmann winning when she has little shot at the nomination — but rather a “false negative,” meaning an establishment candidate like Tim Pawlenty making a big bet on the straw poll and coming up with a disappointing performance, as happened four years ago...

What was happening was that the big-name guys - not just the Establishment candidate like Jeb but also headliners like Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee (who oddly enough did well in the Iowa straw poll and caucus back in 2008 to mark his near-successful foray back then) - were opting out to focus on a more broad national campaign and better positioning for the more-important televised debates.  The other big name in the race - Scott Walker - was hesitating, because he stood to benefit the most from the poll and from winning Iowa early but was worried if the results weren't positive enough.

There was something else at play as well: The Sugar Daddy.

The results of the Citizens United ruling - that fund-raising for political campaigns can pretty much be unregulated as "free speech" - outside fund-raisers can plug in as much money to their hearts' content into a campaign and nobody can stop it.  As long as those outside groups (once called Political Action Committees but once billions are poured in they're now SuperPACs) didn't directly co-ordinate with the specific campaign(s) - say with me now, HA HA - they are untouchable.

What this means is that a campaigner for the White House can run all year long with a SuperPAC footing most of the bill and make him/herself a national figure able to get easy speaking gigs at $100,000 guest lectures and a permanent invite to the Sunday Talk Show green rooms.  And that's the legal stuff, God knows how much of this money is flowing into people's pockets (hi, Rubio!) and not, you know, actual GOTV efforts.

As the National Journal put it last year:

Forget Des Moines. The epicenter of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign last week was in Dallas.

Harlan Crow, the real estate magnate and conservative financier who calls the city home, arrived there fresh from watching the Super Bowl in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's private box. On Tuesday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker flew into town for a reelection fundraiser at Crow's $24 million mansion. Later in the week, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky shared a flight from D.C. to Dallas—and then bumped into each other outside the office of one of the city's GOP donors whom they were both wooing...

...Two years before any primary votes will be cast and long before any official campaign launches, Cruz, Paul, and others are already crisscrossing the country to win the hearts and wallets of the wealthiest Americans.

The race for a 2016 super-PAC sugar daddy is on...

...The rise of SuperPACs has amplified and accelerated the quadrennial donor chase. Candidates now know a single billionaire can make or break their fortunes—as they saw in 2012, when mega-donors Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess propped up the candidacies of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum...

Playing to the base voters for primaries has gotten to be the easy part of a campaign: just stick to the basic messaging of "Blame Obama, Blame Librul Fascists, Blame Feminists, Blame Satan, Blame Minorities, Blame Obama Some More" and let the hate flow through the crowds.  All that matters now is getting money.  Always the dollars.  Always the dollars.

(I'm not even able to fit in a scathing put-down of Ted Cruz's whining for more money here, well maybe I can as an aside...)

And the deep-pocket fund-raisers know it.  And the party leadership itself is starting to catch on because the Republicans themselves are suddenly realizing they're getting their jobs outsourced.  Via Salon.com (with a hat-tip to Yahoo! News): 

The party started to lose its bearings as long ago, as in the ’90s when it took on the self-righteousness of a religious crusade with its unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president. The undisciplined behavior that characterized that time was sanctioned by Party officials and led by long standing movement figures and conservative media stars. They apparently didn’t realize that they were creating a monster of a grassroots base that would someday call itself the Tea Party. In fact, it seemed to come as complete surprise when the monster turned on them in recent years and took the Party into its own hands. Republicans who had spent half a century deriding their opposition for being “appeasers” suddenly found themselves walking on eggshells, scared to death to cross their own voters who took all their messaging seriously and expected results. Even with a congressional majority, Republican elected leaders found they no longer had the power to negotiate or make a deal on the party’s behalf.

They also did not seem to realize that this monster is extremely wealthy and very, very powerful. And it is taking control...

The RNC is now openly arguing … that the Kochs’ political operation is trying to control the Republican Party’s master voter file, and to gain influence over — some even say control of — the GOP.

“I think it’s very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how,” said Katie Walsh, the RNC’s chief of staff.

The Republican base has exerted its strength at the ballot box the last few cycles by challenging and beating incumbents, even some in the leadership like former House majority leader Eric Cantor. Now the Koch Brothers, the wealthy patrons of the Tea Party cause, are taking over the voter data files. You can certainly see why the party establishment might be alarmed...

Like it or hate it, the United States political system thrives on a two-party system: One party stood for something on the issues, One party stood for conflicting position on those issues, the American people tried to decide between them which would solve those issues best.  For the most part it's worked since the days of Adams and Jefferson's transition of power, with the glaring exception of the fall into Civil War because one party - the Democrats of the 1800s - fell under the control of extremist oligarchs (rich Southern slaveowners) who denied the sins of slavery and drove to either rule or ruin the nation.

We're facing the same situation today.  Rich and powerful elites - in the form of corporate overlords who can and do profit from unregulated industries - are pretty much buying ownership control of one party: the Republicans (and they're putting enough money into the other party - the Democrats - to cover their bets).

...Let’s just say that in the Kochs’ minds, taking over the Republican Party and benefiting their massive multinational corporation are the same thing. (If you would like to see what it might mean in practical terms if the Koch party were to politically dominate the nation this Rolling Stone article about their business practices will give you nightmares.) And considering that the Kochs have openly worked at taking over the party since the 1980s, this is not exactly a secret.

This is the end result of Citizens United: not a lot of Free Speech, but basically the rich people Buying political control and Selling to the nation a false bill of goods.

The only good thing we Americans can hope for is Caveat Emptor: that a majority of us voters are savvy enough customers to recognize the lemon that the Kochs' SuperPAC Republican candidate is going to be, and avoid voting for that train-wreck of a candidate.  What happened last election kind of gives me some hope: for all the money the GOP threw at the election, it didn't translate into GOTV ground efforts (100 million yard signs do not equal eager voters) nor make Mitt likable enough to win.

Still, voters need to remember this one rule: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.