GOP’s trifecta of doom: How candidates, issues and culture are building a 2016 calamity

[DonViejo]

To fully sense its crumbling apparatus, look not just at folks like Rubio and Cruz -- but also Rush and Sterling

PAUL ROSENBERG

On Tuesday, I looked at Chris Christie’s crumbling hopes for 2016, as reflected in recent scandal developments on three fronts. I followed up with a look at how Marco Rubio and Rand Paul both showed signs of stumbling in different ways. These stories could easily be expanded to include the entire GOP field. None of the GOP prospects has caught fire, and just as success breeds success, the opposite holds true as well. But it’s not just a matter of individual candidates.

There are at least two other facets to the woes facing the GOP today—above and beyond the fact that Democrats have more electoral votes in their state-level base than Republicans do. The first is the issue landscape—gay marriage & marijuana legalization are spreading at state levels, economic inequality is growing as an issue, even as many GOP candidates are now rejected even the concept of a minimum wage, Obamacare has now largely shifted to a bundle of rights and benefits that people stand to lose, global warming is regaining the salience it had before the Tea Party showed up and the GOP turned deeply denialist, and the public is now firmly anti-war, much as it was, pretty much from the aftermath of the Tet Offensive through the first Gulf War. This is not to say that all the issues favor the Democrats. To the contrary, Gallup just issued its most recent top issue findings which seem to show the opposite, based primarily on questionable trust placed in Republicans’ supposed economic competence (more on that below), though others disagree.

A second facet is the social/cultural context. What do I mean by that? Think Trayvon Martin, Sandy Hook, Sandra Fluke, Fast Food strikes and Donald Sterling—all examples of social media empowering a framework of norms & voices of people who the political establishment usually ignores. Way back in 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, about the long term demographic trends favoring the Democratic Party. With Obama’s election in 2008, and his reelection in 2012, we seemed to be seeing their prediction come to pass. But the dramatic mid-term losses of 2010 put a definite crimp in the story. What I mean by the social/cultural context is the combination of that demographic potential with the bottom up social self-organizing that social media helps make possible. This context was fully exploited by Obama in his 2008 campaign, before most others fully realized its potential, and it bodes well to play a significant role in 2016 as well.

When thinking about 2016, the current issue landscape favors the Democrats, but with one notable exception: the economy. While the current media/polling focus is on the 2014 midterms, the state of issues today, along with where they have been, gives the Democrats a broad advantage in 2016. In the most recent Washington Post/ABC poll, for example, the overall news for Democrats isn’t good, but voters still favor Democrats on virtually every issue, starting with a whopping 15-point gap on the minimum wage, 49-35%, an even bigger 20-point gap (52-32%) on who will do a better job helping the middle class, and a Godzilla-sized 30-point gap (55-25%) on who will do a better job helping women. Yet, compared to these rather astonishing gaps, Democrats only had a very modest 3-point lead (41-38%) on “who the public trusts on the economy”. Thus, even the Post is telling us that “the economy” as a whole generates less trust in Democrats compared to other issues.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/23/gops_trifecta_of_doom_how_candidates_issues_and_culture_are_building_a_2016_calamity/