2016

Heading into 2016, Democrats should feel very confident about retaining the White House. Such a statement may seem unreasonably self-assured, seeing as the country appears to be more divided and partisan as ever. But consider the following opinions of Americans today:

• 90 percent support background checks on all gun sales
• 63 percent believe money and wealth distribution in our country is unfair
• 63 percent support a $15 minimum wage by 2020
• 58 percent support legalizing marijuana
• 65 percent support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants
• 60 percent support gay marriage

These numbers demonstrate that there is a clear hunger in America for bold, progressive policies. This certainly helps explain the appeal of Donald Trump to the modern Republican voter – the man is a strong advocate for a “big” and active government. He’s hardly your Koch-tested “small government conservative.” Because America yearns for collective action, Democrats have so far been able to define the issues of the campaign cycle with relative ease. Comforted by polls like the ones above, the Democratic candidates are bringing issues like gun responsibility, gay marriage, and the minimum wage to the forefront of the presidential race.

Understandably, that has made Republican strategists quite anxious. Their candidates are being labelled as mere oppositionists, who have no fresh ideas and opposed measures which the majority of Americans agree with.

Then, the attacks on Paris and San Bernardino happened.

Out of these terrible events Republicans found their opportunity to start redefining the 2016 campaign. In unison, all the candidates started pumping out fear. Instead of having to focus on Trump or issues which Democrats largely defined, here they could all prey on American anxiety together. They found a cause which could unite them all and help them reclaim the trajectory of the national conversation.

The press was all too willing to help their cause. Blinded by our sensationalist media, we couldn’t stop talking about fear and terrorism. Forget about the economy or Kim Davis! Death! Islam! Mosques! In a matter of weeks, the Republicans had successfully regained control of the political conversation. Since those attacks, terrorism has leap-frogged the economy and became the number one concern of American voters.

Manufactured fear, however, can only take this Republican field so far. Eventually, they will have to sell the American people on their social and economic visions. And from what we’ve seen so far, no GOP candidate looks like they could beat either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders on these issues.

The GOP knows this, even though they may not admit it. Their goal over the next 10 months, therefore, is to continue playing towards nativist impulses of white America, while also scaring the living shit out of everyone (just check out Marco Rubio’s latest ad). In the end, it’s a shallow and desperate strategy which will only slightly deflect attention from issues which actually affect people’s day-to-day lives (health care, gun violence, wages etc…).

And consider this: research suggests that “because there are roughly 5% more Democrats than Republicans, the GOP needs a solid majority of independents to win a national election.” Republicans, more so than Democrats, have to worry themselves with solidifying independent support after primary season. In essence, they can’t just talk to their base and hope to win. They’re going to have to actively pursue the agnostic American voter.

Can their fear-pushing alone galvanize the undecided? It’s a highly dubious prospect. Eventually they will have to rationalize their opposition to a bevy of issues which a large majority of American voters support. That’s a tall task for Republican strategists and one I do not envy. For now, Democrats should take solace in the fact that they are defending and, campaigning on, the well-founded opinions of so many Americans.

Before you watch Marco Rubio’s latest TV ad, please take a deep breath and try to remain calm.

It didn’t work, huh? You’re probably buying guns right now in order to stop ISIS from putting you in a cage and burning you alive. I don’t blame you. That Call of Duty soundtrack in the background got my blood pumping, too.

Thankfully, Marco is there for you. He’s wearing a flag pin on his suit, so you know he’s patriotic and has your best interests at heart. And he just promised that he’s going to keep you safe. So that’s good.

Economy – who cares about the economy? Evil exists in the world. Why worry about jobs and wages when our world is about to end? As Marco said earlier this year, “We can’t even have an economy if we’re not safe.”

Good point, Senator. But this blatant fear-mongering can only take you so far. At some point, you’ll have to sell people on your ridiculous trickle-down tax plan and your utter disregard for people earning the minimum wage. Until then, good luck preying on people’s fears. You’ll need it.

Trump the Game: It’s all fun until you’ve excluded all your potential voters.

Adam Serwer’s excellent assessment of the Trump campaign—it’s titled “The Antidote to Trump“—is absolutely worth your time. Here’s the thesis statement:

The force that can scour Trumpism from the Republican Party for good is the same one that gave Truman the ability to defy the Dixiecrats: a diverse base. Not the feel-good diversity of tokenism or having “black friends,” but the division of power.

This is absolutely true. Trump’s rise to popularity in the Republican Party could only have happened with the help of a homogenous base. And the only way to stop this kind of exclusionary talk is by diversifying that base. On the face of it, this seems to be a catch-22, but Serwer correctly points out that both Democrats and Republicans have successfully incorporated more diverse viewpoints at multiple times in their histories. More to the point, the diversification often came after demagogues single-handedly drove the parties to their worst moments.

Nobody can seriously deny that the party of Trump is at a low point. Unless you’re a straight white male, the Republican Party has likely overtly offended you in the last few years. In this primary alone, politicians have worked to exclude, vilify, or outright deny the rights of every minority imaginable. This is not sustainable.

Diversity, as Civic Skunk Works co-founder Nick Hanauer has said, is the key to innovation of all kinds: “The more cognitive diversity we have — the more people simultaneously approaching the same problem from as many different backgrounds and perspectives as possible — the greater the rate of innovation.” And yes, that includes political innovation. Without diversity, your answers become more and more myopic, until finally the solutions to all your problems start to look remarkably like Donald Trump: hateful, exclusionary, and cruel.

Donald Trump is the end result of the negative feedback loop that Hanauer has warned us about: Trump happens when you run out of innovative solutions to complex problems. By continually scaring away diverse populations, the Republican Party has bombed itself back to the stone age, rhetorically speaking; all their problem-solving capabilities have been reduced to clubs and sharp rocks. Exclude these people, give tax cuts to the rich, and invade any country that disagrees with us is not a platform. It’s a prescription for destruction.

All right, fine. This guy won. Are you happy?

I stand by my prediction from this morning: tonight’s Republican debate was all about fear. Candidates proposed war with just about every country we’re currently not friendly with, including Russia. They implied that terrorists and criminals were behind every rock and around every corner, ready to leap out and take everything we hold dear. They accused all refugees and Muslims and immigrants of being criminals or murderers or worse. It was a horrifying display.

Even stranger, tonight’s debate was a bizarre blend of deadly dull and horrifying—there was a point when the candidates were jostling over who would be most eager to kill innocent children that I felt an alarming blend of boredom and shock that I’ve never quite felt before. I guess you can get used to anything.

So if you’re still keeping track: Trump and Cruz probably “won” the debate, insofar as they projected their message of fear and hatred as clearly and as relentlessly as possible. Marco Rubio sweat it a little bit; he’s not going to lose his favored son status with the establishment, but a few Rubio fans might have walked away from the debate on shaky feet. Jeb Bush had the best debate of his campaign, but it won’t matter. His stammering closing statement was still ugly, and he didn’t make a case for why anyone should pass Rubio over for him. Christie was strong enough to pick up a point or two in New Hampshire. Rand Paul was about as good as he’s ever been, but it won’t help him at all, either. Kasich, Carson, and Fiorina all failed to justify their continued existence on the debate stage.

But really none of that matters. What matters is that the candidates didn’t discuss the economy at all. They barely mentioned climate change, or guns. They talked about Americans feeling unsafe, but they didn’t talk about any shooting besides San Bernardino. After a while, it turned into one long beige blur, intermittently anchored by a horrifying statement or two.

There’s only one more of these debates before the Iowa caucuses. This is a relief. I don’t know how much more of this acrid bile I can swallow before my insides get hollowed out.

You’ll probably scroll past a lot of previews for tonight’s Republican presidential debate on Facebook and Twitter today. They’ll theorize about how many candidates will try to attack Ted Cruz (many of them) and who will “win” (probably Rubio) and who will “lose” (probably Paul and Bush) the debate. This is fine. I like to speculate about presidential debates as much as the next person—probably more.

But the thing is, we’ve long since passed the point where this kind of speculation was useful. There have been four Republican debates so far, and they’ve all roughly followed the same pattern: Trump starts with a bang and disappears for the middle part of the debate after humiliating one or two of his opponents. Rubio follows his script and is praised for it. A few of the fringe candidates get to say a thing or two. Jeb Bush flails around and is visibly uncomfortable. Maybe Cruz does a little better or a little worse, depending on the day. This pattern is probably not going to change on any significant level between the last four debates and now.

But here’s what has changed. In the month since the last debate, we have seen the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks. We’ve seen that Republicans are interested in changing the conversation from economics to terror, because they believe they have a better shot at winning that way. Donald Trump has led the field on a ridiculous escalation of anti-Muslim statements that eventually led to a proposed unconstitutional (and unenforceable) ban on all Muslim travel into the US. In the time since the last debate, Trump has also proposed an automatic death penalty for all convicted killers of police officers.

Since we’ve already established that the Republican presidential field is taking its orders from Trump, and since this debate is hosted by Wolf Blitzer, who is one of the least capable TV news hosts in the business, this means only one thing: the big winner at tonight’s Republican debate will be fear. Out-and-out fear mongering will rule the day. I expect to hear ludicrous statements about terrorism, about crime, and about the left taking guns away from normal hard-working Americans. Tonight’s debate should be a free-for-all when it comes to amping up the panic. Trump will take the lead, probably when he’s asked about his proposal to ban Muslim travel to the US, but everyone will follow suit. They’ll depict the Middle East as the staging ground for our impending armageddon. They’ll claim that the world is two seconds away from ending and that only they can save us.

This is the oldest trick in the Republican playbook. Barry Glassner’s excellent book The Culture of Fear uncovered all the ways politicians and the media conspire to terrify the populace, because frightened Americans are easily controlled Americans. In economic matters, that kind of fear-mongering is most commonly phrased as “if you raise taxes on the rich, you’ll lose your job.” But when it comes to international relations, the formula is even simpler: “if you elect a Democrat, we’re all going to die.” Expect to hear a lot of that talk tonight.

We’ll be live-tweeting the Republican debates tonight on our Twitter feed. Hopefully, we’ll be able to identify the fear-mongering for what it is. The best antidote for this kind of scary talk is a one-two punch of identifying it for what it is and passing along information that proves it wrong.

I’ll admit that “5% unemployment and $38 oil will bring about our nastiest politics” wasn’t my expectation in 2011-12.

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) December 7, 2015

The American economy, while certainly not perfect, is at least performing better than most expected. (Remember when Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent by 2016?)

In fact, the very existence of our economy also flies in the face of Republican forecasts about Obama’s tyrannical rule of America. Here’s a brief refresher of what the GOP predicted a couple of years ago:

• Obamacare will “destroy our economy…It’s going to push us into a total economic collapse.”
• The 2009 stimulus bill is “affirmatively job killing” and “about to get worse.”
• The US is about to go through “the Great Depression times 100.”

Clearly, none of those statements were 1) true and 2) ever came to transpire. So, it should come as a surprise to no one that the GOP has pivoted from the economy as the “central issue” of the 2016 election and now gone full terrorism-mode. Donald Trump and his dire rhetoric has dragged his competition down to his level (or the base’s level). Therefore, Republican candidates have been forced to talk non-stop about the threat of terrorism, in order to appear “presidential.” As a result, economic discussions have largely been thrown to the wayside.

Unfortunately, the GOP’s incessant chatter on the subject of terrorism has greatly impacted the American psyche. According to a recent Gallup survey, Americans now see terrorism as the number one problem facing the country. As Politico notes:

The share of Americans worried about terrorism has not been this high since the mid-2000s, when 19 percent said it was the most important issue after the 2004 Madrid train bombings and 17 percent in the wake of the 2005 London bus and subway bombings.

Notably, the survey showed that the economy’s importance in the minds of Americans has fallen to an eight year low.

9 percent of Americans named the economy in general as the most pressing issue facing the country, while 21 percent mentioned some aspect related to the economy, the lowest share for those issues since 2007.

This survey goes to show that Republicans have so far been successful in diverting our attention away from the economy. Will this last? I doubt it. Don’t be surprised when Hillary Clinton, like her husband, reminds the American people that 2016 is all about the economy, stupid.