Tag: 2016 presidential elections
An Independent Candidacy Would Make Trump The Biggest Loser

An Independent Candidacy Would Make Trump The Biggest Loser

By Nathan L. Gonzales, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — An independent presidential run by Donald Trump would sink Republican chances of winning the White House, but Trump would be the biggest loser. And if there is one thing Trump can’t afford or stomach, it’s losing.

During the wealthy businessman’s latest dustup with the GOP establishment over his proposed travel ban on all Muslims, Trump used a new USA Today/Suffolk University survey as a thinly-veiled threat.

“A new poll indicates that 68 percent of my supporters would vote for me if I departed the GOP & ran as an independent,” Trump posted on Facebook, which also went out on Twitter.

Leading the polls in a multi-candidate field, and with this latest poll in hand, Trump seems to believe he is operating from a position of strength. In fact, he isn’t.

First of all, 68 percent of his supporters is not a lot of people in the context of the larger electorate.

In 2012, Republicans made up 32 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls. Trump is supported by about 27 percent of GOP voters right now. And 68 percent of those supporters say they would support him as an independent. That’s about 6 percent of potential general election voters.

Of course, Trump could get some support from independent voters, and maybe even some disaffected Democratic voters (though that doesn’t seem particularly likely). But the bottom line is that Trump the independent would be nowhere near putting together a plurality coalition.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise considering third-party candidacies historically “crash and fail,” as Harry Enten wrote at FiveThirtyEight, ranging from Henry Wallace’s 2 percent in 1948 to Ross Perot’s 19 percent in 1992 and a few candidacies in between.

We know from down-ballot races that independent or third-party candidates win when one party’s nominee collapses and the third-party candidate becomes the de facto nominee for one major party.

Some of the best examples are Bernard Sanders’ victories in Vermont or Joseph Lieberman’s re-election in 2006. In that race, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary but won as a third-party candidate when the GOP nominee received less than 10 percent of the vote.

That’s just not going to happen in this presidential race.

Without Trump in the GOP primary, Republicans are guaranteed to nominate someone who is not Trump, and will presumably have broader appeal within the party. That will force Trump to formulate a coalition largely made up of independents and Democrats.

At a minimum, Trump would virtually destroy the GOP presidential nominee’s chance of getting 270 electoral votes. Republicans don’t have enough margin to give up 6 percent of GOP voters who would normally vote for the Republican nominee, and win any of the swing states including Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Virginia. And 6 percent from the GOP nominee would put North Carolina, Arizona, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia at greater risk as well.

There is a logistical challenge of running as an independent. One expert told CNN it would take about 570,000 signatures to gain ballot access in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But Trump can afford to spend the money necessary to pay people to gather those signatures, if he wanted to go that route, and it’s certainly possible that Trump will run as an independent to spite the Republican Party after feeling mistreated during the primary process.

But Trump could have even more to lose than the Republican Party. Trump would be risking political bankruptcy and damage to the “winning” Trump brand.

A third-party candidacy would lead to a loss, and losing is the antithesis of who Trump says he is and often comes with a dose of humility; a character trait Trump is neither familiar with nor interested in cultivating.

After the election, would Trump call in to the networks and cable shows every day to answer questions about how and why he lost?

As I wrote last month, Trump has to get out of the race before he loses the race in order to preserve his image. And running as an independent would make it even more difficult for him to win the White House than staying in the GOP race.

©2015 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he speaks at the meeting of the New England Police Benevolent Association in Portsmouth, New Hampshire December 10, 2015. REUTERS/Mary Schwalm 

Ex-Texas Governor Perry Can’t Pay Presidential Campaign Staff: Reports

Ex-Texas Governor Perry Can’t Pay Presidential Campaign Staff: Reports

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has stopped paying his campaign staffers, several media outlets reported, saying the former Texas governor’s operations are running out of money.

The Washington Post, citing campaign and Super PAC officials as well as other Republicans familiar with Perry’s operations, said fundraising for two-time presidential candidate had dried up.

Perry has struggled to gain traction in his second bid for the White House and had consistently been at the bottom of the pack of 17 Republicans seeking the party’s nomination for the 2016 presidential election.

Perry’s campaign manager last week told staffers after the Republican Party’s first debate that they would no longer be paid, but most are staying on as volunteers, the newspaper reported, citing one Republican familiar with the situation.

A Super PAC aligned with Perry said it would step in to provide support and do some work normally handled by campaigns, such as building ground organizations, the Washington Post reported.

Super PACs and candidates’ campaigns are not legally allowed to coordinate their activities, the newspaper added, although the fundraising groups can back candidates.

“The Super PAC is not going to let Rick Perry down,” Austin Barbour, a senior adviser to the Opportunity and Freedom Super PAC, told the Post.

Representatives for Perry’s campaign were not immediately available for comment on the reported financial woes, which first emerged from CBS News and the National Journal.

According to Reuters/Ipsos, 2.5 percent of potential Republican voters said they would vote for Perry, compared to nearly 27 percent for the poll’s leader, businessman Donald Trump. The online poll surveyed 388 affiliated Republicans as of Aug. 7.

Perry has tangled with Trump as the two candidates have exchanged verbal barbs on the campaign trail.

But Trump took center stage at last week’s debate, while Perry failed to make the top 10 in opinion polls needed to make the televised event’s stage. Instead, he and other low-polling candidates unveiled their policy positions at a forum ahead of the prime-time event.

There Perry vowed to boost U.S. economic growth, secure the southern U.S. border with Mexico and tear up a nuclear agreement with Iran.

Perry has also had to grapple with charges against him in an abuse-of-power case stemming from his time as governor.

(Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Photo: Bobby Jindal (L) and Rick Perry speak during a commercial break In Cleveland, Ohio, August 6, 2015. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Inside The Grassroots Group That Wants America To ‘Feel The Bern’

Inside The Grassroots Group That Wants America To ‘Feel The Bern’

By Arit John, Bloomberg News (TNS)

NEW YORK — Joseph Beuerlein, a 33-year-old bartender and actor, was looking through the list of groups registered to march in New York City’s Gay Pride Parade when he noticed that Hillary for America would be there, but no Bernie Sanders surrogates. He registered and reached out to People for Bernie, a grassroots group aimed at helping people organize for the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate, to get some people together.

“They said, ‘How about you organize it?'” Beuerlein said.

About 70 supporters showed up to march in Sunday’s parade, decked out in Bernie shirts, Bernie buttons, and neon-colored workout gear (a play on the “feel the Bern”/”feel the burn” pun the group claims to have popularized), carrying handmade signs with more puns and messages about Sanders’ LGBT support.

The parade was a good example of the role People for Bernie hopes to play in the 2016 election, where Sanders is waging a long-shot bid to wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton. The group’s presence at the parade didn’t raise any money for the candidate, but it raised awareness and gave people a chance to get involved and meet other supporters. Sanders’ name was announced to a small crowd of onlookers still watching the parade at 6 p.m. when the group started marching down Fifth Avenue. Organizers passed out lollipops with a QR code leading to Sanders’ website.

By design, that’s how People for Bernie operates. The group’s goal is to help people who are new to politics, people who support Sanders but don’t know how to help the campaign, and put them in a place where they can lead.

“We call ourselves a permission machine,” said founder Charles Lenchner. “Usually in politics someone says, ‘Oh, we should do this,’ and then they look for someone to say that that’s a good idea…. People come to us with ideas and our approach is almost always, ‘Yes, how can we help?'”

While Lenchner says he is in contact with the Sanders campaign — they provided buttons and posters for the event, and have asked the group to promote events such as the candidate’s Wednesday night rally in Madison, Wisconsin — People for Bernie sees itself as a resource for activists the campaign might not have the bandwidth to work with.

“They don’t have staff; they’re not going to set up operations in all 50 states; they’re going to run a smaller, less well-funded campaign than say Hillary Clinton,” he said. “So what are we going to do to make it easier for people to jump in?”

The Sanders campaign didn’t have an immediate comment on the group’s efforts, but referred to a June 22 statement in which Sanders “welcomed growing support for his candidacy from” former supporters of a presidential run by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, which finally fizzled last month when it became clear Warren was not going to jump in.

The Origins of #FeeltheBern

Before there was People for Bernie, there was Ready for Warren, and before Ready for Warren, there was Occupy Wall Street. Lenchner was heavily involved in the protest effort to challenge income inequality. In 2013, joined by several other Occupy veterans, he co-founded Ready for Warren with Erica Sagrans, who worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. Ready for Warren was, in his words, an “intervention,” an effort to force a debate on progressives’ issues in the 2016 debate.

“In 2013, some of us figured out that it looked like Hillary Clinton was cruising toward a Democratic Party nomination without there being any sort of significant fight for the progressive wing of the party,” Lenchner said.

People for Bernie started taking shape a few months before Sanders announced he was running on April 30, as activists started realizing that Warren was out and Sanders was in. The group formally launched on the day of Sanders’ announcement outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. They launched dozens of niche “for Bernie” Twitter accounts (examples: @Women4Bernie, @LGBT4Bernie and @Blacks4Bernie), which have since multiplied, and the hashtag #FeeltheBern. Lenchner joked that he couldn’t say who came up with it.

“I can’t answer that without causing intense rivalries inside the team,” he said. “I’ll just say that it was definitely us, and we chose that hashtag, we tested it, we saw that it was doing well, so we used networking and social media strategies in order to popularize it.”

It’s hard to say how much of a dent the group is making. Katherine Brezler, a 33-year-old teacher and the administrator of the group’s social media accounts, said the #FeeltheBern hashtag had earned 2.5 million impressions on Twitter in June, but added that they measure success in more anecdotal ways.

“My mom has eight Twitter followers, and she tweets about Feel the Bern. You have older, retired people taking to Twitter and Facebook. That is a huge metric for us also,” she said.

Deray McKesson, an activist and Twitter user well known for his involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement, has mentioned Sanders, and rapper Killer Mike endorsed Sanders this week, Brezler said, though it’s not clear how much People for Bernie had to do with those gestures.

“We feel the skepticism too, but you know, everywhere he goes he’s packing rooms,” she said.

Photo: Jen Wegmann-Gabb via Flicker