Tag Archives: romney

It’s the Wall Wot Won It

by MaximoArispe Posted on April 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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Phil Klinkner takes to the pages of the LA Times this morning to tell us that immigration was a big deal in the 2016 election:

Comparing the results of the 2012 and 2016 ANES surveys shows that Trump increased his vote over Mitt Romney’s on a number of immigration-related issues. In 2012 and 2016, the ANES asked respondents their feelings toward immigrants in the country illegally. Respondents could rate them anywhere between 100 (most positive) or 0 (most negative). Among those with positive views (above 50), there was no change between 2012 and 2016, with Romney and Trump each receiving 22% of the vote. Among those who had negative views, however, Trump did better than Romney, capturing 60% of the vote compared with only 55% for Romney.

….Overall, immigration represented one of the biggest divides between Trump and Clinton voters. Among Trump voters, 67% endorsed building a southern border wall and 47% of them favored it a great deal. In contrast, 77% of Clinton voters opposed building a wall and 67 % strongly opposed it.

This gibes with my anecdotal view that a fair number of Trump voters didn’t pay much attention to anything he said except that he was going to build a wall and keep the Mexicans out. All the budget and regulation and Obamacare and climate change stuff was just noise that they didn’t take very seriously. But building a wall was nice and simple, and they thought it would bring back their jobs and keep their towns safe.

Having said that, though, I want to repeat a warning: everyone should stop looking for tectonic changes that account for Trump’s win. Hillary Clinton was running for a third Democratic term during OK-but-not-great economic times, and that’s always difficult. Most of the fundamentals-based models predicted she’d win by a couple of percentage points, and she actually did much better than that—until James Comey decided to destroy her. And even at that, she did win by a couple of percentage points. It was a fluke of the Electoral College that put Trump in the White House, not a historic shift in voting patterns.

The real question is how Trump won the Republican primary. At the presidential level, that’s a far more interesting topic than what happened in a fairly ordinary general election.

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It’s the Wall Wot Won It

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Donald Trump, Champion of the Working Class, Is Filling His Cabinet With Billionaires

by AlvaroAsher Posted on November 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump and his possible choice for secretary of state Mitt Romney were photographed dining at Jean-Georges, a three-star Michelin restaurant located inside the president-elect’s Manhattan hotel property. The two men, accompanied by Reince Priebus, reportedly feasted on frog legs, lamb chops, and chocolate cake:

During the campaign, such images of the two would have seemed inconceivable. In March, Romney dedicated an entire press conference to blasting the real estate magnate as a fraud. Much of Trump’s campaign also decried Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and billionaire donors.

But three weeks after Trump won the general election, both the Jean-Georges dinner and Romney’s potential role in a Trump administration are only in the latest incidents in what is increasingly shaping up to be a presidential cabinet dominated by millionaire—even billionaire—appointees. Just take a look at the reported estimated net worths of Trump’s picks so far:

Betsy DeVos: $5.1 billion, married to Richard DeVos Jr., co-founder of AmWay and member of the DeVos political dynasty
Wilbur Ross: $2.9 billion, “vulture investments”
Elaine Chao: $37 million (together with husband Sen. Mitch McConnell), from family inheritance and sits on several corporate boards
Steve Mnuchin: $40 million, former Goldman Sachs banker with Hollywood ties
Tom Price: $13.6 million, former orthopedic surgeon

And they share more in common than just millions of dollars and a taste for expensive restaurants. They’re all outspoken opponents of LGBTQ rights.

In his cabinet picks, Trump appears to be flagrantly abandoning his campaign promises to “drain the swamp” and eliminate big money interests once he takes office. The question is: When will Trump supporters realize they’ve been conned?

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Donald Trump, Champion of the Working Class, Is Filling His Cabinet With Billionaires

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Trump’s Inner Circle Really, Really Doesn’t Like Mitt Romney

by GinoLizotte171 Posted on November 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is what the chattering classes are chattering about today:

Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump escalated their attacks on Mitt Romney on Sunday, catapulting their long-simmering frustrations onto cable news in an extraordinary public airing of grievances.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, argued firmly against tapping Romney for secretary of state…“I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position,” Conway said in an interview with CNN. “We don’t even know if Mitt Romney voted for Donald Trump.”

….Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich…“I think there’s nothing that Mitt Romney can say that doesn’t sound phony and frankly pathetic…I think we would be enormously disappointed if he brought Mitt Romney into any position of authority.”

This is pretty remarkable. Presidential staffs always have plenty of infighting, and often that infighting becomes public via anonymous leaks. But I can’t recall a transition team that literally went public in its bashing of a potential cabinet pick. So what’s going on?

  1. Conway and Gingrich want to influence Trump, and they know the only real way to get his attention is via TV.
  2. This whole thing has been orchestrated by Trump as a way of publicly humiliating Romney.
  3. The Trump inner circle is truly an out-of-control freak show.

I dunno. In the meantime, Trump’s cabinet-level appointees so far include a guy who created a platform for the alt-right; an ex-general with delusions of persecution; a deputy who thinks Hillary Clinton sent black helicopters after her; an attorney general who’s basically opposed to all laws protecting minorities; a governor with no background for her job; a CIA director who supports more torture and more black sites; a billionaire who wants to destroy public education; and Reince Priebus.

Priebus is probably unqualified to be White House chief of staff, but that’s about it. In Trump’s world, that makes him a superstar.

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Trump’s Inner Circle Really, Really Doesn’t Like Mitt Romney

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There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

by RustyEbersbache Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Among liberals, one of the most popular explanations for Donald Trump’s victory is that it was a “whitelash,” a primal scream of lost influence and latent racism among white voters. I myself certainly talked about racial animus quite a bit during the runup to the election. However, in the spirit of figuring out where we were wrong, the actual voting patterns suggest this is flat wrong. Using exit poll data from 2012 and 2016, here is Trump’s share of the vote compared to Romney in 2012:

Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump.1 There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite. But now let’s add a column to the table:

Among whites, Trump lost 1 percent of white votes, but third-party candidates gained 3 percent. Among Latinos, third-parties gained 4 percent, and among blacks they gained 3 percent.

This is the big difference. Who did third-party candidates hurt the most, Trump or Clinton? And why? Or was the damage equal? You need to answer this question before you can say anything sensible about race.

It’s worth nothing that this doesn’t mean that race played no role in this election. But it does mean two things. First, white racial animus seem to have played no more of a role than it did four years ago. Second, although Trump’s blatant appeal to white ethnocentrism did him little good, it also did him no harm—and that was true among all racial groups. That’s disheartening all on its own.2

When more detailed data is available, it might turn out there are specific subsets of the white vote that moved very strongly toward Trump. But what we have so far doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. If you still want to claim that whitelash played a big role in this election, you need to contend with this.

1You can break this down by age or gender, but it doesn’t really change anything. For example, white men moved slightly toward Trump while white women moved slightly away from him. Likewise, middle-aged whites moved slightly toward Trump while young and old whites moved slightly away. But the differences are small enough that they don’t change the picture much.

2Since I first put up this post, several people have suggested that national data isn’t the right way to look at voter demographics. Instead, we should look at the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But that doesn’t change things. If you look at the exit poll data, Trump did slightly worse than Romney in Pennsylvania and slightly better in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the operative word is “slightly.”

Still, maybe turnout was up among white voters? That’s possible. But we don’t have that information yet, and I’m not sure when we’ll get it.

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There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

by StaciWFOgmzdrj Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The polls are tightening and the freak-out is beginning. With hours to go before the first presidential debate, FiveThirtyEight‘s polls-plus forecast gives former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just a 53.4 percent chance of winning the election. It’s the closest the race has been since the elections site unveiled its model in June. The “bedwetting cometh,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin.

But Democrats have been here before. In 2012, President Barack Obama held a modest but consistent lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney heading into the first debate, only to uncharacteristically collapse. Within a few days, the lead had evaporated—according to FiveThirtyEight, Obama’s chances went from 86.1 percent to 61.1 percent, the steepest drop of the campaign—and his supporters started to lose it. No one captured this liberal angst better then Andrew Sullivan, then of the Daily Beast, who had championed Obama in 2008 and joyfully called him “the first gay president” in a Newsweek cover story.

Following Obama’s first debate with Romney, Sullivan was inconsolable:

Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate—and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better—and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

A week later, after the vice presidential debate had passed, Sullivan was even further gone. “Obama threw it all back in his supporters’ faces, reacting to their enthusiasm and record donations with a performance so execrable, so lazy, so feckless, and so vain it was almost a dare not to vote for him,” he wrote. And then Obama rebounded at the next two debates and won 332 electoral votes.

The race heading into the first debate tonight is closer than it was heading into the first presidential debate in 2012. If the election were held today, there’s a virtually even chance that Donald Trump would win. But Clinton backers anxiously hitting refresh on FiveThirtyEight and consulting their astrologers would do well to reread Sullivan’s lament. It’s fine to panic, but a 7-point polling swing is nothing a few good debates can’t reverse.

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

by HenrietTKQ Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, known for his staid manner and his short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combinations, might have been chosen as a steady counterweight to Trump’s flamboyant provocative style. But when it comes to adding weight to the Trump campaign’s wobbling fundraising operation, he might have been the worst pick Trump could have made. Newt Gingrich, for instance, has a devoted backer in Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest source of cash for Mitt Romney’s efforts in 2012 who has yet to commit significantly to Trump’s operation. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is known to have been a darling of some of Wall Street’s biggest names.

But Pence? He isn’t exactly a star with the party’s regular fundraisers and donors—the people who have always been the backbone of GOP financial support. It’s true that Pence has ties to both the political empire of the conservative billionaire Koch brothers and some tea party grassroots organizations. But if Trump thought he could tap into those connections to fuel his presidential campaign, he might have been mistaken.

Over the course of his career, Pence’s biggest source of campaign cash has been the Republican Governors Association, which has put more than $2.6 million into supporting his gubernatorial aspirations. The RGA’s main job is to funnel money from wealthy Republicans nationwide into potentially pivotal governor’s races, and much of the organization’s success in doing that hinges on the connections and interests of the RGA’s executive director. In 2012, the director was a party operative named Phil Cox, who went on to become a close Christie ally, running the presidential super-PAC that raised more than $20 million this year. If Cox stays with Trump, it won’t be because of Pence. (Christie’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, may be going through a rocky stretch.)

Pence did spend 12 years in Congress, but he never really made his mark as a fundraiser there. His largest source of support, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.org, were donations fundraised on his behalf by the Club for Growth, the tea-party-aligned group that relies heavily on its expansive grassroots fundraising operation. It’s an organization that has devoted a great deal of time and energy this election to trying to destroy Donald Trump. Almost immediately after kicking off his presidential campaign, Trump picked a fight with the group, accusing it of trying to extort him for $1 million. That’s a rift that all of Pence’s past goodwill with the group probably won’t be able to overcome.

If Trump can’t rely on Pence to hook him up with any fundraising networks, perhaps he can call on some of Pence’s sugar-daddy donors? Notably, Pence has had two billionaires backing his political aspirations, Indiana businessman Dean White and industrialist David Koch, but neither looks promising for Trump.

Koch personally contributed $300,000 to Pence’s war chest, a much more direct investment in a candidate than he usually makes. (David and his brother Charles are known to be major backers of dark-money groups that operate independent of any candidate, and their direct contributions to candidates are generally not so large.) But if part of the Trump campaign’s calculation in picking Pence is that he could rope in the Kochs, it’s probably not going to happen. Both brothers have expressed serious doubts about Trump, and almost immediately after word leaked that Pence was the choice, the Koch organization threw cold water on the idea that the move would endear them to Trump.

White, who is not a household name like Koch, is actually the individual who has done more for Pence’s political career than anyone else, according to campaign finance filings. White has shoveled at least $775,000 into Pence’s two bids for governor of Indiana, including $350,000 already this year. Those numbers, while eye-popping for the average American, are actually not that extraordinary for White, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to various Republican candidates in Indiana.

But despite being worth more than $2.3 billion, White is not a major player on the presidential level. The one noteworthy donation he’s made when it comes to presidential politics is a $1 million contribution in 2012 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, which backed Romney. Rove’s animosity toward Trump and the fact that White also gave directly to Romney (who has spoken out against Trump) suggest that White will not automatically transfer his allegiances, or his deep pockets, to Trump.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

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Romney on Trump’s Taxes: He’s Hiding Something

by GretaBalfe5743 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mitt Romney ripped into Donald Trump on Wednesday afternoon, claiming that Trump is unfit for the presidency if he doesn’t release his tax returns. Romney took to Facebook to share his message, saying that “it is disqualifying for a modern-day presidential nominee to refuse to release tax returns to the voters, especially one who has not been subject to public scrutiny in either military or public service.”

Romney’s attack comes a day after Trump swatted aside suggestions that he should release his tax returns before the election. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” Trump told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

Romney disagreed and played the role of armchair psychologist, speculating about Trump’s true motivations for refusing to make his records public. “There is only one logical explanation for Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his returns: there is a bombshell in them,” Romney wrote. “Given Mr. Trump’s equanimity with other flaws in his history, we can only assume it’s a bombshell of unusual size.”

Romney’s own 2012 presidential campaign was plagued by demands from Democrats that he release his tax returns. He finally caved and put out his 2010 and 2011 records, but not until late in the campaign.

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Romney on Trump’s Taxes: He’s Hiding Something

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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After condemning Donald Trump in a speech earlier this month, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took an all-of-the-above approach to stopping the Republican front-runner from picking up the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He campaigned for John Kasich in Ohio last week and offered to do the same for Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida.

But although Kasich did win his home state, Romney is now jumping ship. On Friday, ahead of the potentially winner-take-all Utah caucuses, the favorite son is going all-in for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, announced he would be supporting Cruz not just in Utah, but in all future contests as well. Lest there be any confusion, Romney offered praise for Kasich but indicated the time had come to pick just one candidate to stop Trump. Here’s the statement:

This week, in the Utah nominating caucus, I will vote for Senator Ted Cruz.

Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.

The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.

I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.

I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

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The Nation’s Election Watchdog Just Hit a New Level of Dysfunction

by BarbraRodriquez Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2011, former Bain Capital executive Edward Conrad decided to give $1 million to the super-PAC supporting the presidential bid of his pal Mitt Romney. But he didn’t contribute the cash directly. Instead, he put the money in a generically named shell company he had recently created, which then cut a check to the super-PAC, Restore Our Future. Election law prohibits donors from taking steps to hide their identities, and campaign finance activists pressed the Federal Election Commission to investigate. Five years later, the FEC—which since at least 2010 has been existing in a fugue state of partisan paralysis—has finally rendered a decision on whether it will probe the matter, which is something of a post-Citizens United test case. Nah, we’ll pass on this one, the FEC decided on Monday.

In a letter sent to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog that complained about the donation in 2011, the FEC reported that its six commissioners deadlocked 3-to-3 on whether to open an investigation into the donation. Keep in mind that they didn’t split on whether there had been a violation of law, or if Conrad should be punished—just whether they should open an inquiry. The FEC also informed the Campaign Legal Center that the commission had deadlocked on a similar case from 2011, involving donations made via two other shell corporations to Romney’s super-PAC.

The FEC has been mired in a messy standoff for years now. With three Republican commissioners and three Democratic commissioners, it deadlocks on nearly every question put to it, even the minor ones. But this case was essentially a big softball. Conrad eventually publicly acknowledged he was behind the shell corporation. Donations from anonymous corporations to super-PACs are becoming increasingly common, but it is rare that the original source of the money reveals himself.

The FEC’s inability to open an investigation ends this case, but it doesn’t create a legal precedent. The commission could theoretically pursue future cases over the use of limited liability companies to fund campaigns. But don’t hold your breath, says Paul S. Ryan, the deputy executive director for the Campaign Legal Center.

“We have seen a pretty dramatic increase in the use of the LLCs to contribute to super-PACs, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” he says, noting that the Campaign Legal Center has filed three similar complaints in the last two weeks alone. “But I think the dismissal of these complaints from 2011 will be viewed as a greenlight to continue laundering money into super-PACs.”

For the gridlocked commission, Ryan fears that this is far from rock bottom. “I’ve thought on several occasions that we’ve reached bottom, and they continue to surprise me with greater and greater dysfunction every year. This is a new low, that’s for sure. This does seem to be a million-dollar violation with an admission, and the FEC won’t even do anything about that. If they won’t do this, what hope is there for them to do any investigations in the context of less clear-cut violations?”

Ryan says the Campaign Legal Center will decide in the coming weeks whether to sue the FEC over its failure to act in this case.

Charlie Spies, an attorney for Restore Our Future, the Romney super-PAC that took the donation, told Mother Jones that the organization had followed the law.

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The Nation’s Election Watchdog Just Hit a New Level of Dysfunction

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The Real Republican Problem Is an Appallingly Shallow Bench

by ErwinHanson Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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For what it’s worth, I want to toss out a theory of what’s happening in this year’s GOP primary. Basically, there’s no Mitt Romney or John McCain.

Here’s what I mean. In the past two cycles, Republicans have offered us Snow White and the Seven Loons. In 2008 the loons were Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Fred Thomson, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Keyes, and some other also-rans. In 2012 it was Michele Bachman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and a few others. Both of these primaries were clown shows, but in both cases there was one savior: John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

This year the saviors were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, but both have turned out to be horrible candidates. Rubio is a little better on the campaign trail, but he doesn’t have the gravitas to unite the middle of the party behind him. So that leaves us with the loons. Donald Trump is currently leading the loon pack, but honestly, it could have been anyone. Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, Chris Christie. They all have loon appeal, but not quite as much as Trump (so far, anyway).

It just goes to show that Mitt Romney was a better candidate than we gave him credit for. He was too stiff and too rich, but he had presidential credibility; he was able to subdue the loon pack; he chose a non-loon as running mate; and he ran a fairly decent non-loon campaign against Obama. He didn’t win, but just imagine how much worse any of the others would have done.

So the big story isn’t so much Trump as it is the failure of the Republican Party to field even a single decent mainstream candidate. The Democrats aren’t much better, but at least they have one. The truth is that both parties seem to have an appallingly shallow bench. I don’t quite know why, but to me that’s a bigger story than Trump. He’s just the latest clown in a party full of them.

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The Real Republican Problem Is an Appallingly Shallow Bench

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