- George Pataki (0%): No chance in hell. Not a bit.
- Carly Fiorina (0.1%): Appears to be running for VP. Might gain traction in that, but winning the nomination outright is probably a bridge too far.
- Lindsay Graham (0.25%): I would say "not impossible because of South Carolina's position in the nominating process." But I think "extremely unlikely" is accurate.
- Ben Carson (0.4%): Very popular on the Right. Might have actually had a shot in 2012, if he ran a good campaign. But there are too many plausible candidates in the Tea Party space.
- Rick Santorum (0.75%): Santorum got so good on the trail by the end of the 2012 cycle that I give him points just because he's become such a solid retail campaigner. But he has so much ideological overlap with Mike Huckabee that I think he will struggle to find space this time around.
- Bobby Jindal (1%): He's a very good VP choice or HHS choice for a Republican nominee, particularly an establishment choice. But his low approval ratings in ever-redder Louisiana make me think he's going to have trouble gaining traction.
- Mike Huckabee (3.5%): I was more bullish on Huckabee a few months ago than I am now. If the 2008 version of Huck ran in 2012, I think he would have been the favorite for the nomination. The updated version of Huckabee, though, appears to have become a bit less of a happy warrior and a bit more venomous. The Huck strategy was always about taking a loyal base of support from Evangelicals and expanding it to potential sympathizers who were at least a little skeptical of GOP economics. He can do the former and may well win Iowa, but I don't think he'll be inclusive enough to gain traction this time around.
- Chris Christie (5%): I think he's been overrated for a while, and Jeb Bush boxing him out with his best potential donors is essentially slamming the final nails in his coffin. But I'll give him a shot on the grounds of his potential debate performances and potential to connect in New Hampshire. Christie's best shot was a full-throated endorsement from Romney as soon as Romney announced he wasn't running. It didn't happen.
- Rand Paul (5%): Paul is interesting, certainly, but I think the emergence of threats like Russia and ISIS will reactivate the Tea Party's Jacksonian soul. (As far as I can tell, the Tea Party lies at the intersection of Jeffersonian small government and Jacksonian populism.) Paul's non-interventionism just won't play this time around, I don't think. He should probably just run for Senate again.
- Ted Cruz (6%): Cruz's best chance to emerge would be in a long-lasting slog for delegates after a lot of the other conservatives simply stopped competing. It's hard to gauge the likelihood of that. The super-divided field actually makes the chances for someone like Cruz to pull off a win in Iowa pretty good; all he needs to do is find 20 percent of the caucus-goers that support him, and he'll have it. But the establishment will absolutely revolt if Cruz starts to gain ground.
- Rick Perry (11%): The most underrated of the candidates in question. Stellar governing record for conservatives. The 11% is misleading, in terms of odds, because it is absolutely a hedge based on the debates. If Perry rocks the debates, he is probably right there in the top tier. If he falters--even a little early on--he's at the back of the pack.
- The Field (11.5%): I'd throw the Midwestern governors who haven't made as much noise as Scott Walker into this area: guys like Rick Snyder (MI), Mike Pence (IN), and John Kasich (OH) all belong here. I could even see a dark horse rising, like a Susana Martinez (NM), Nikki Haley (SC), or the self-funded Rick Scott (FL).
- Scott Walker (17%): Certainly the initial "flavor of the month" of this cycle. His poor handling of the slew of "gotcha" questions and Q&A in general, though, signifies potential trouble down the road, if he doesn't improve as a candidate. (Conservatives defending him so vociferously counts for something, but I see it as a potential leading indicator of problems deflecting tough questions.) I wouldn't put it past Scott Walker to improve, but the early returns on the unscripted portions of campaigning are not positive. Still, on paper, he is the strongest candidate for 2016.
- Jeb Bush (19%): I've moved Jeb up slightly in my mind based on the overwhelming support that the establishment has sent his way, which exceeded my expectations. Some of his rhetorical choices of late have reminded me of Jon Huntsman, but Huntsman never approached the level of establishment support that Bush is seeing. Critically, though, the establishment, on its own, will not be enough. Can he expand? (Addendum here: why on Earth do so many establishment Republicans want to run Bush v. Clinton??? We lost that race in 1992. We'd've lost that race in 2000. And Clinton is a far more popular former president than W. Why do we think that the result will be any different this time?)
- Marco Rubio (19.5%): This is a bet on a couple of things: Rubio's sheer political talent, and his potential to emerge as a "compromise" pick late. Put it this way: if Jeb falters, he will almost assuredly throw his support to Rubio. And among conservatives, even with his immigration heresy, Rubio can play the role of "whistleblower" about Obama and Congressional Democrats ("They can't be trusted! I know because they lied to me!"), so I think he can actually neutralize that weakness. He's not higher because I'm not sure there will be enough space for him to fit into the broad field. But if I absolutely had to pick a frontrunner, it would be Rubio.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Quick Assessment of GOP Nomination, February 2015
Here's how I rank them, by plausibility of winning the nomination. I've assigned percentage values to each off the top of my head. This is extremely unscientific, but this is how I'm seeing it currently.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
The Maddening Vaccination/Global Warming Comparison
In the most thoroughly unsurprising news of the week, the New York Times tried to make the facile, misleading comparison between the GOP's stance on global warming and the recent, ill-advised comments about vaccination.
Let's move beyond issues about whether people "believe" in global warming to the more relevant issue: what people actually want to do about global warming. For policy purposes, it is basically equivalent to believe that global warming is a hoax and that global warming is happening, but that doing anything to stop it is not worth it.
Let's also avoid discussing the complex ideological and political mix of the anti-vaccine population. (The Times is insinuating that opponents to vaccination come from a largely conservative population, but polling data is much more ambiguous.)
Conservatives (rightfully) almost universally cite Jim Manzi when talking about climate change. I'm going to quote a piece he wrote a few years ago for The New Republic that I think holds up fairly well:
I find Manzi highly persuasive. You may not, but the bottom line is that this is a principled, reasonable argument against emissions targets that accepts that the climate is changing, and that human activity is part of the cause. The core reason why Manzi's arguments are at least justifiable is because of the uncertainty in modeling. To use another Manzi frame, climate modeling is a domain of extremely high causal density: it is very difficult in areas of high causal density to disaggregate cause and effect. We think that carbon emissions result in incremental increases in global temperature. But we also think that solar activity changes temperature. And we think that volcanic activity changes temperature. And we think that the oceans absorb a lot of carbon. There's a lot of complexity in all of this; it is very hard to get to the bottom of it. Climate modeling is not like math, physics, or chemistry. Or, for that matter, vaccination.
Like the environment and climate, the human body is a complex system that we're still learning a lot about. But we have managed to reduce some of our uncertainty about the body--and learn about medicine and health--because we can at times control confounding variables and do experiments. Vaccination is one of many health benefits that have come out of this experimental process. We have been field testing vaccines for over 200 years, going back to Jenner and cowpox. The idea of variolation--which is basically the same principle--goes back even longer, having been practiced with some regularity in China and Turkey, among other places.
The widespread use of vaccines targeting very specific diseases coincided with dramatic drops in the incidence of those diseases over the 20th century. Pessimistic climate models may be entirely right about the negative effects of carbon emissions, but the bands of uncertainty are much, much greater.
Moreover, the collective action problem is far less significant with vaccines than it is with the environment, because there is an immediate benefit to the individual who gets vaccinated. True, as Megan McArdle points out, there is a collective action problem at high levels of immunization, as people free ride on herd immunity rather than facing whatever health risks come with vaccines. But in a world where herd immunity was not an option--say one where vaccines were scarce and limited by randomized drawings--there would still be strong, selfish incentives to vaccinate. Emissions cuts to fight global warming are precisely the opposite, in that the only benefit kicks in after we reach a critical mass of people or countries cutting emissions.
Lastly, the cost of vaccines are quite minor: low health risks, small financial expenditure (often paid for by the government or a third party, these days), a brief sting of pain in the arm, and perhaps some soreness for a few days. Consequential emissions cuts would require dramatic costs and lifestyle changes for billions of people, with an unknown benefit.
So, we have three critical differences:
The vaccination controversy is a twist on an old problem for the Republican Party: how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.
It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.That the Times would make this comparison was both inevitable and deeply frustrating.
Let's move beyond issues about whether people "believe" in global warming to the more relevant issue: what people actually want to do about global warming. For policy purposes, it is basically equivalent to believe that global warming is a hoax and that global warming is happening, but that doing anything to stop it is not worth it.
Let's also avoid discussing the complex ideological and political mix of the anti-vaccine population. (The Times is insinuating that opponents to vaccination come from a largely conservative population, but polling data is much more ambiguous.)
Conservatives (rightfully) almost universally cite Jim Manzi when talking about climate change. I'm going to quote a piece he wrote a few years ago for The New Republic that I think holds up fairly well:
The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement, then, boils down to the weaker form of the uncertainty argument: that you can’t prove a negative. The problem with using this rationale to justify large economic costs can be illustrated by trying to find a non-arbitrary stopping condition for emissions limitations. Any level of emissions imposes some risk. Unless you advocate confiscating all cars and shutting down every coal-fired power plant on earth literally tomorrow morning, you are accepting some danger of catastrophic warming. You must make some decision about what level of risk is acceptable versus the costs of avoiding this risk. Once we leave the world of odds and handicapping and enter the world of the Precautionary Principle—the Pascal’s Wager-like argument that the downside risks of climate change are so severe that we should bear almost any cost to avoid this risk, no matter how small—there is really no principled stopping point derivable from our understanding of this threat.
[snip]
So what should we do about the real danger of global warming? In my view, we should be funding investments in technology that would provide us with response options in the event that we are currently radically underestimating the impacts of global warming. In the event that we discover at some point decades in the future that warming is far worse than currently anticipated, which would you rather have at that point: the marginal reduction in emissions that would have resulted up to that point from any realistic global mitigation program, or having available the product of a decades-long technology project to develop tools to ameliorate the problem as we then understand it?
The best course of action with regard to this specific problem is rationally debatable, but at the level of strategy, we can be confident that humanity will face many difficulties in the upcoming century, as it has in every century. We just don’t know which ones they will be. This implies that the correct grand strategy for meeting them is to maximize total technical capabilities in the context of a market-oriented economy that can integrate highly unstructured information, and, most important, to maintain a democratic political culture that can face facts and respond to threats as they develop.Manzi is basically taking a cost/benefit approach to global warming, and finds that the emissions reductions that are needed to prevent it are simply not worth the cost. If the "worst case" scenarios hit, he believes that we will be better off if we had spent resources on developing technologies that could mitigate their effects, rather than by targeting emissions targets that will dramatically reduce people's standards of living.
I find Manzi highly persuasive. You may not, but the bottom line is that this is a principled, reasonable argument against emissions targets that accepts that the climate is changing, and that human activity is part of the cause. The core reason why Manzi's arguments are at least justifiable is because of the uncertainty in modeling. To use another Manzi frame, climate modeling is a domain of extremely high causal density: it is very difficult in areas of high causal density to disaggregate cause and effect. We think that carbon emissions result in incremental increases in global temperature. But we also think that solar activity changes temperature. And we think that volcanic activity changes temperature. And we think that the oceans absorb a lot of carbon. There's a lot of complexity in all of this; it is very hard to get to the bottom of it. Climate modeling is not like math, physics, or chemistry. Or, for that matter, vaccination.
Like the environment and climate, the human body is a complex system that we're still learning a lot about. But we have managed to reduce some of our uncertainty about the body--and learn about medicine and health--because we can at times control confounding variables and do experiments. Vaccination is one of many health benefits that have come out of this experimental process. We have been field testing vaccines for over 200 years, going back to Jenner and cowpox. The idea of variolation--which is basically the same principle--goes back even longer, having been practiced with some regularity in China and Turkey, among other places.
The widespread use of vaccines targeting very specific diseases coincided with dramatic drops in the incidence of those diseases over the 20th century. Pessimistic climate models may be entirely right about the negative effects of carbon emissions, but the bands of uncertainty are much, much greater.
Moreover, the collective action problem is far less significant with vaccines than it is with the environment, because there is an immediate benefit to the individual who gets vaccinated. True, as Megan McArdle points out, there is a collective action problem at high levels of immunization, as people free ride on herd immunity rather than facing whatever health risks come with vaccines. But in a world where herd immunity was not an option--say one where vaccines were scarce and limited by randomized drawings--there would still be strong, selfish incentives to vaccinate. Emissions cuts to fight global warming are precisely the opposite, in that the only benefit kicks in after we reach a critical mass of people or countries cutting emissions.
Lastly, the cost of vaccines are quite minor: low health risks, small financial expenditure (often paid for by the government or a third party, these days), a brief sting of pain in the arm, and perhaps some soreness for a few days. Consequential emissions cuts would require dramatic costs and lifestyle changes for billions of people, with an unknown benefit.
So, we have three critical differences:
- Vaccines have a proven level of effectiveness, while the effectiveness of various emissions targets remain in question.
- Vaccines produce significant individual benefits, in addition to the social herd immunity benefit. Emissions targets largely require individual sacrifice before reaching a potential collective benefit.
- Vaccines are low cost; emissions targets would be more costly and disruptive.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Anti-Vaccinators and Issue Salience
Basic American Government 101 test question:
Why might politicians find it useful to express sympathy for people who oppose vaccination?
Although most anti-vaccination campaigning is on the far left, it is really something of a bipartisan phenomenon.
Here's Chris Christie:
The key factor that has gotten left out of most discussions is issue salience. For the vast majority of the population, vaccination is just something you do. It's not controversial; it's just part of having children and getting them ready for school. So they don't think much about it. For most of recent history, they probably didn't know very many people who admitted to not vaccinating their kids.
But for the subculture of the country that is opposed to vaccination, it's a much different story. This medical choice becomes a major part of their life; it has to. It comes up in medical visits, presumably all the time. They probably face a fair bit of social shame from experts who are involved in medical treatment. Moreover, they're the ones whose status quo is at risk from government coercion: in theory, the government could compel vaccination. (Legally, you'd be looking at a framework something like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, where the government needs a compelling interest to force action. Public health qualifies, certainly, and vaccination is a far easier sale for the government than, say, birth control.)
So the politician that offers the full-throated endorsement for vaccination risks alienating this subculture that takes the issue seriously, for only limited political gain.
This is the standard political calculation, I'd hazard, for most politicians who wade into this thicket. But the calculation changes in a country with an active measles outbreak, particularly if we see vaccinated kids start to come down with the disease. All of a sudden, the complacency of the broad majority--those who support vaccines--is challenged, because the activities of the subculture officially begin to disrupt the mainstream's plans and health. Right now, what we're seeing is the transformation of a low salience issue into a higher salience issue. The hostility from the pro-vaccine crowd towards the anti-vaccine now is much more visceral, now that we see the consequences for ourselves. (We may have thought about these risks in theory, but it's a lot different when childhood diseases that we thought we'd largely eradicated come roaring back.)
So it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see more public pushback from politicians who sense the ability to jump on this wave of public anger. Indeed, it is sort of Chris Christie's stock-in-trade, so I was surprised by his equivocating comments. And, in fact, if Republicans don't jump on board and reject this forcefully, they're going to pay a political price.
Why might politicians find it useful to express sympathy for people who oppose vaccination?
Although most anti-vaccination campaigning is on the far left, it is really something of a bipartisan phenomenon.
Here's Chris Christie:
Speaking in Cambridge, England, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he vaccinated his four children — “the best expression I can give you of my opinion.”
But unlike other officials, Christie also said parents should have a choice in whether to vaccinate.
“It’s more important what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well. So that’s the balance that the government has to decide,” Christie said, according to multiple press reports.Here's Rand Paul:
Republican Sen. Rand Paul is standing by his statement that most vaccinations should be "voluntary," telling CNBC that a parent's choice not to vaccinate a child is "an issue of freedom."
In an interview with the network Monday, Paul said that vaccines are "a good thing" but that parents "should have some input" into whether or not their children must get them. And he gave credence to the idea - disputed by the majority of the scientific community - that vaccination can lead to mental disabilities.
"I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines," he said.On the Democratic side, here's Barack Obama from 2008:
"We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person [not Obama] included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it."Here's Hillary Clinton:
Senator Hillary Clinton, in response to a questionnaire from the autism activist group A-CHAMP, wrote that she was "Committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines." And when asked if she would support a study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children, she said: "Yes. We don't know what, if any, kind of link there is between vaccines and autism - but we should find out."You can parse the exact meaning of the quotes, but the tone of each says everything you need to know: these politicians--at the very least--do not want to alienate this constituency. (Rand Paul is probably more enthusiastically on their side, but Christie, Clinton, and Obama all tread very carefully on this issue.)
The key factor that has gotten left out of most discussions is issue salience. For the vast majority of the population, vaccination is just something you do. It's not controversial; it's just part of having children and getting them ready for school. So they don't think much about it. For most of recent history, they probably didn't know very many people who admitted to not vaccinating their kids.
But for the subculture of the country that is opposed to vaccination, it's a much different story. This medical choice becomes a major part of their life; it has to. It comes up in medical visits, presumably all the time. They probably face a fair bit of social shame from experts who are involved in medical treatment. Moreover, they're the ones whose status quo is at risk from government coercion: in theory, the government could compel vaccination. (Legally, you'd be looking at a framework something like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, where the government needs a compelling interest to force action. Public health qualifies, certainly, and vaccination is a far easier sale for the government than, say, birth control.)
So the politician that offers the full-throated endorsement for vaccination risks alienating this subculture that takes the issue seriously, for only limited political gain.
This is the standard political calculation, I'd hazard, for most politicians who wade into this thicket. But the calculation changes in a country with an active measles outbreak, particularly if we see vaccinated kids start to come down with the disease. All of a sudden, the complacency of the broad majority--those who support vaccines--is challenged, because the activities of the subculture officially begin to disrupt the mainstream's plans and health. Right now, what we're seeing is the transformation of a low salience issue into a higher salience issue. The hostility from the pro-vaccine crowd towards the anti-vaccine now is much more visceral, now that we see the consequences for ourselves. (We may have thought about these risks in theory, but it's a lot different when childhood diseases that we thought we'd largely eradicated come roaring back.)
So it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see more public pushback from politicians who sense the ability to jump on this wave of public anger. Indeed, it is sort of Chris Christie's stock-in-trade, so I was surprised by his equivocating comments. And, in fact, if Republicans don't jump on board and reject this forcefully, they're going to pay a political price.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
On Scott Walker's Message
A Midwestern governor with conservative credentials and an ability to relate to working-class people: formidable in a primary campaign, right?
Tell that to Tim Pawlenty.
Pawlenty got squeezed out a bit in the 2012 campaign on three sides: Michelle Bachmann got him from the Right, Mitt Romney got him from the Left, and Rick Perry slammed him with the frontal assault; it was Perry's entrance into the race that forced Pawlenty out. But he made some bad choices, and he did suffer, basically, from his struggle to find a really compelling message. Pawlenty's rhetorical style and lack of a compelling message made him "boring."
One of the reasons Scott Walker has faced skepticism from the pundit class is because people are making a Pawlenty analogy. Pawlenty was bland; Walker is bland. Minnesota and Wisconsin governor, same thing. But if his initial campaign speech is any indication, Walker will not have Pawlenty's messaging problem. I noticed that his rhetorical choices in the speech were perfectly calibrated for his conservative audience. So I wanted to do a bit of analysis on his basic argument here. It will form, I suspect, the basis for a very compelling primary campaign.
After offering some local color to the audience (touting his Midwestern bona fides and his appreciation for new hero of the right, Joni Ernst), Walker immediately pivots to his recall election and he thanks everyone for their support, with their time, money, and prayers. But Walker's real focus in the first part of this speech is on the conduct of the opposition. In particular, he highlights some of the more indefensible actions of the protesters:
I love Arnold Kling's "three axis" construct, and I think this speech directly activates that "civilization/barbarism" axis that conservatives often have as a prism for seeing the world. To a conservative audience, there is only one way to react to this: "Those barbarians." So Walker's audience is now primed to see the opposition as fighting dirty and standing in the way of what needs to be done.
Then Walker moves to the rest of his speech, which basically is a rhetorical victory lap about how his programs have been successful in Wisconsin: he won his fight with the unions, the state is economically strong, districts can pay teachers for performance, etc. Whether we accept these things as true or not, they are compelling for conservative voters.
So the audience leaves the speech with two ideas: the opposition fights dirty and is absolutely intransigent, and Walker defeated them.
This is a potent case for a right-wing audience, and it is one that no other conservative can make. (Ted Cruz fights, but he loses. Rick Perry fights, but he's from right-wing Texas. Rick Santorum fights, but he lost in Pennsylvania by 20 points.) A few other things stand out:
1. Walker links the Occupy movement to the Wisconsin protesters, which standard right-wingers denigrate on principle. "Those hippies." It's a useful way to gain sympathy.
2. Walker did this speech without a teleprompter, which will attract some favor from parts of the Right that mock Obama for his reliance on them.
3. Walker has an extended riff on bargain hunting at Kohl's. He's not a candidate who is going to ever risk getting caught in a "bitter clingers" moment, where he seems detached from the voters he's trying to persuade. Moreover, this is a useful "homespun" anecdote that working-class and middle-class people can relate to.
But perhaps most importantly, Walker absolutely does not have a "conservatism as a second language" problem. He understands conservatives and can talk to conservatives in terms they understand. His use of the Wisconsin protests--turning a potential weakness into a major strength--confirms that better than anything else.
A few challenges remain: I think it is pretty evident that Walker will be able to win a substantial share of the more conservative voters in the Republican primaries, but blue state Republicans remain important in the process. The "establishment" types and more moderate conservatives might shy away from his combative record. It also remains to be seen whether Walker can transition from the primary campaign to a general election, when the protest movement is such a key part of his stump speech. He should probably have someone thinking about that message; it would make sense for him to reach out to some reform conservatives to help him prepare a policy message that will address the interests and needs of working-class Midwestern voters. This should be a bigger part of his message, even in the primary campaign, so he can pivot more easily. (He should be walking around with a copy of Room to Grow and should call Yuval Levin and Mike Lee like, yesterday.)
Put it this way, though: say Walker manages to win Iowa, and Jeb Bush wins New Hampshire. Is anyone really prepared to give Jeb Bush a win over Scott Walker in South Carolina?
Walker will be formidable. Underestimate him at your peril.
Tell that to Tim Pawlenty.
Pawlenty got squeezed out a bit in the 2012 campaign on three sides: Michelle Bachmann got him from the Right, Mitt Romney got him from the Left, and Rick Perry slammed him with the frontal assault; it was Perry's entrance into the race that forced Pawlenty out. But he made some bad choices, and he did suffer, basically, from his struggle to find a really compelling message. Pawlenty's rhetorical style and lack of a compelling message made him "boring."
One of the reasons Scott Walker has faced skepticism from the pundit class is because people are making a Pawlenty analogy. Pawlenty was bland; Walker is bland. Minnesota and Wisconsin governor, same thing. But if his initial campaign speech is any indication, Walker will not have Pawlenty's messaging problem. I noticed that his rhetorical choices in the speech were perfectly calibrated for his conservative audience. So I wanted to do a bit of analysis on his basic argument here. It will form, I suspect, the basis for a very compelling primary campaign.
After offering some local color to the audience (touting his Midwestern bona fides and his appreciation for new hero of the right, Joni Ernst), Walker immediately pivots to his recall election and he thanks everyone for their support, with their time, money, and prayers. But Walker's real focus in the first part of this speech is on the conduct of the opposition. In particular, he highlights some of the more indefensible actions of the protesters:
The bigger challenge for us--at least for me personally--were all the death threats and visits to our home. You see, you've heard about those protests, but you may not know at one point in all this, there were literally thousands of protesters out in front of our family home in Wauwatosa, where my two sons were still going to high school, and where my parents were living at the time. In fact, my kids were targeted on Facebook. At one point I remember my mother in her 70s and my youngest son Alex were literally at the grocery store where protesters followed them down the aisle just to yell at them even though it was me that was doing the policies out there.
Even moreso than just the visits in front of our home was the fact that at one point the threats were just overwhelming. Most of those death threats were appointed at or directed at me. But some of the worst were directed at my family. I remember that one of the ones that bothered me the most was someone literally sent me a threat that said they were gonna gut my wife like a deer. Another time, a protester sent a threat directly to my wife that said if she didn't do something to stop me, I would be the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated. The writer went on in greater detail to point out where exactly my children were going to school, where my wife worked, and where my father-in-law was still living at that time. You can see what they were doing, and so I tell you today, that, thanks to all of you for not just the grassroots support and donations, but most importantly, thank you for those prayers, 'cause you can see how important they were in dark days like that.
Time and time again, time and time again, the protesters were trying to intimidate us. But you know what? All they did was remind me how important, how important it was to stand up for the people of my state. They reminded me to focus on why I ran for governor in the first place.This is not a normal political speech! Most politicians don't talk about the death threats their family received, let alone have it be a central theme and part of their argument.
I love Arnold Kling's "three axis" construct, and I think this speech directly activates that "civilization/barbarism" axis that conservatives often have as a prism for seeing the world. To a conservative audience, there is only one way to react to this: "Those barbarians." So Walker's audience is now primed to see the opposition as fighting dirty and standing in the way of what needs to be done.
Then Walker moves to the rest of his speech, which basically is a rhetorical victory lap about how his programs have been successful in Wisconsin: he won his fight with the unions, the state is economically strong, districts can pay teachers for performance, etc. Whether we accept these things as true or not, they are compelling for conservative voters.
So the audience leaves the speech with two ideas: the opposition fights dirty and is absolutely intransigent, and Walker defeated them.
This is a potent case for a right-wing audience, and it is one that no other conservative can make. (Ted Cruz fights, but he loses. Rick Perry fights, but he's from right-wing Texas. Rick Santorum fights, but he lost in Pennsylvania by 20 points.) A few other things stand out:
1. Walker links the Occupy movement to the Wisconsin protesters, which standard right-wingers denigrate on principle. "Those hippies." It's a useful way to gain sympathy.
2. Walker did this speech without a teleprompter, which will attract some favor from parts of the Right that mock Obama for his reliance on them.
3. Walker has an extended riff on bargain hunting at Kohl's. He's not a candidate who is going to ever risk getting caught in a "bitter clingers" moment, where he seems detached from the voters he's trying to persuade. Moreover, this is a useful "homespun" anecdote that working-class and middle-class people can relate to.
But perhaps most importantly, Walker absolutely does not have a "conservatism as a second language" problem. He understands conservatives and can talk to conservatives in terms they understand. His use of the Wisconsin protests--turning a potential weakness into a major strength--confirms that better than anything else.
A few challenges remain: I think it is pretty evident that Walker will be able to win a substantial share of the more conservative voters in the Republican primaries, but blue state Republicans remain important in the process. The "establishment" types and more moderate conservatives might shy away from his combative record. It also remains to be seen whether Walker can transition from the primary campaign to a general election, when the protest movement is such a key part of his stump speech. He should probably have someone thinking about that message; it would make sense for him to reach out to some reform conservatives to help him prepare a policy message that will address the interests and needs of working-class Midwestern voters. This should be a bigger part of his message, even in the primary campaign, so he can pivot more easily. (He should be walking around with a copy of Room to Grow and should call Yuval Levin and Mike Lee like, yesterday.)
Put it this way, though: say Walker manages to win Iowa, and Jeb Bush wins New Hampshire. Is anyone really prepared to give Jeb Bush a win over Scott Walker in South Carolina?
Walker will be formidable. Underestimate him at your peril.
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