Michael Reagan to Donald Trump: You’re No Ronald Reagan

RS: Michael Reagan to Donald Trump: You’re No Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan Answering Questions from the Press

One of the hazards of trying to claim the mantle of a great man who is only fairly recently departed from the scene is that he still has family and friends around to set you straight. Donald Trump should remember that the next time he tries to insinuate that he’s anything like Ronald Reagan or has anything like Reagan’s approach to politics, leadership or conservatism. Don’t take my word for it; listen to Reagan’s son Michael.

The younger Reagan, himself a popular conservative author and talk radio personality, took to the pages of that venerable New Hampshire institution, the Manchester Union-Leader, on Tuesday to remind New Hampshire voters that The Donald is nothing like the man they set on the path to the Presidency with his primary victory in 1980:

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Are “Electable” Candidates Actually Electable? Part I: Presidential Primaries 1948-2012

RS: Are “Electable” Candidates Actually Electable? Part I: Presidential Primaries 1948-2012

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One of the siren songs raised in favor of moderate and establishment-backed candidates every primary election season is that they are “electable” and their opponents are not. Sometimes, this is frankly code for “not like those conservatives.” But if the idea that conservatives are unelectable is a fallacy, so too is the reflexive assumption that any candidate described as “electable” is actually the opposite, or is not any sort of conservative. History reminds us that good candidates win and bad ones lose, and while ideology can matter more or less depending where and when the election is held, neither conservatives nor moderates have any monopoly on winning elections. And if you look at the history of failed GOP “electability” candidates, you will find that they were usually moderates who faced significantly weaker and/or non-conservative opponents.

Let’s take a two-part walk through the history of electability arguments, starting with a review of the GOP primaries from 1948 to 2012. In the second part, I’ll look at statewide swing-state races over the past decade to consider what kinds of Republican candidates actually do win contested elections.

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The Case For Marco Rubio Part II: The Salesman

RS: The Case For Marco Rubio Part II: The Salesman
Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., visits the Republican Party of Iowa booth during a visit to the Iowa State Fair, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Why vote to nominate Marco Rubio? My guiding star in choosing candidates is winning: winning elections, winning domestic policy and foreign policy battles, winning victory, peace and prosperity for America, winning advancement for the cause of conservative ideas – not in that order of priority, but in that order of how each kind of winning contributes to the next. In the first installment of this series, I argued that Rubio has important and useful political leadership experience, more than the other remaining major Republican alternatives. But that’s just a foot in the door. Why Rubio specifically? Some would say he’s the “most electable” Republican running – I agree, and I’ll talk more about electability and its discontents in a later installment, but that’s not the only reason why I’m supporting him. Rather, I think Rubio brings to the table a crucial gift that has been in painfully short supply since Ronald Reagan departed the scene: the willingness and ability to sell conservative ideas to the unconverted. And like it or not, 27 years after Reagan left office, Republicans in general and conservatives in particular are in need of a good salesman.

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ARG Polls Love John Kasich When Nobody Else Does

RS: ARG Polls Love John Kasich When Nobody Else Does
There are many rules of thumb in evaluating polls, especially in the volatile context of a primary. We usually caution people to look at polling averages rather than individual polls for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that some pollsters may have biases (even if unintentional) or may consistently produce outliers. Sometimes, of course, one pollster that sees the world differently from everyone else is right, so being way off the averages probably means the pollster is wrong, but it doesn’t always.
So it is right now with American Research Group (ARG) in the New Hampshire Republican race. The RCP poll average right now has Ohio Governor John Kasich second in New Hampshire, far behind Donald Trump at 31 but with 13.3% to 11.5 for Marco Rubio, 11.3 for Ted Cruz, and 8.3 each for Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.
But the polling averages are heavily influenced by the lastest poll from ARG, which has Trump 27, Kasich 20, and Rubio 10 with everyone else in single digits. If we look at the Huffpost Pollster average, we can see what the averages look like with different pollsters in and out of the average:
nh non arg

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Marco Rubio Is Now Getting Attacked Unfairly For Killing Charlie Crist’s Climate Scheme

Marco Rubio, Charlie Crist

In 2007, Florida’s newly-elected “Republican” Governor Charlie Crist announced, with much fanfare, a costly “cap and trade” plan to regulate carbon emissions by Florida electric power plants. In the Spring 2008 legislative session, Crist pushed the Florida legislature to adopt his mandates into law. During the months-long public debate on the plan, Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio called for free-market approaches to “clean energy” and decried European-style mandates. Instead of Crist’s plan, the legislature at Rubio’s insistence passed a bill (which Crist reluctantly signed) that instructed the state Department of Environmental Protection to develop a potential plan, which would then go back to the Legislature no sooner than 2010 to put it up for a vote before Crist (who was then projected to be up for re-election in 2010) could actually do anything. The delaying tactic worked: the mandates were never passed into law, Crist ultimately ran away from them while running for Senate in 2009, in large part due to Rubio’s (successful) primary campaign, and by 2013 the whole scheme had been repealed. None of these facts are reasonably in dispute – yet Crist in 2009 ran with a wholly disingenuous attack claiming that Rubio had supported cap-and-trade, and some of Rubio’s critics in this race are recycling that attack. Charlie Crist’s sloppy seconds should be no less nasty this time.

Let’s go blow-by-blow here to get the context.

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The Case For Marco Rubio, Part I: Experience

RS: The Case For Marco Rubio, Part I: Experience
House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-Coral Gables, points to his official portrait that will hang in the House chamber, Friday, May 2, 2008, in Tallahassee, Fla.  Rubio is in his final session as House Speaker.(AP Photo/Phil Coale)
The two main goals of the primary process – whether in a presidential or other race – are to choose the best candidate to do the job, and the candidate with the best chance of winning the job. Less than three weeks from the Iowa Caucus and less than a month from the New Hampshire Primary, we have reached a time for choosing. That choice involves a careful and serious weighing of those two objectives. Unlike in past years, the GOP’s conservative and moderate wings are both still divided, although the options are narrowing. With my first choice (Bobby Jindal) out of the race, I believe the choice for conservatives comes down to Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz – and the best candidate remaining, on balance, is Rubio. Today, I will begin a series of posts explaining why, beginning with the question of Rubio’s experience. Subsequent chapters will focus on Rubio’s salesmanship, his conservatism, and his “electability.”

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How A Donald Trump Nomination Would Make The GOP Consultant Class Very Rich

RS: How A Donald Trump Nomination Would Make The GOP Consultant Class Very Rich
FILE - In this Dec. 7, 2015 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, businessman Donald Trump speaks  aboard the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. (AP Photo/Mic Smith, File)
While Donald Trump won’t be the GOP nominee, reclaiming the party from Trump still requires that we contemplate what a Trump nomination and even possibly a Trump presidency would look like. The picture isn’t a pretty one. One of the underappreciated aspects is how any electoral success by Trump in the primaries and potentially the general election could spawn a bonanza for the GOP’s much-despised consultant class, at the expense of the party’s ability to field principled and/or successful statewide and national candidates.
The reason for this is fairly straightforward: Trump is the avatar of the clueless-rich-guy style of candidate that is the absolute favorite target of consultants. Oh, the consultants working for other candidates right now would be, momentarily, upset if Trump won the nomination; they’re hired guns, but they do like to win. And consultants for Senate and House Republicans would be dismayed for a while by how a Trump nomination would cost the GOP Senate and House seats and make Chuck Schumer the Senate Majority Leader. But there’s always another campaign season.
Back when Mitt Romney was running a similar effort to win the nomination, I warned that a Romney victory would spawn imitators:

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