Politics

The Electability Spin Machine

Sanders has fought Clinton to a virtual draw in Iowa — it's time to crank up the spin machine

February 2, 2016

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all but tied in the Iowa Caucuses Monday night. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty, Win McNamee/Getty

The Rubio team’s calculus is that, once other “establishment lane” candidates drop out, either humiliated by Iowa or New Hampshire, all the reasonable conservatives who hate black people, Muslims and Latino immigrants but who don’t want to go full neofascist will get on the bandwagon. And that’s a fine argument, but it’s nothing close to inevitable. People enjoy backing winners (there’s a reason why so many people still hold betting stubs for Secretariat at the Belmont), so why trade up for Rubio when you can go higher and pick one of the other two guys?

Chamber of Commerce types have no reason not to like Trump, apart from “electability,” which is just as much a problem with a Rubio campaign that thinks “take a second job with Uber” is a solution to income inequality, is just as hardline anti-immigrant, and sounds increasingly determined to go full neocon by peppering speeches with casual calls to start conflicts with roughly two billion people. As for the culture-war types, why not pick Cruz? He and Rubio keep sounding the same War on Christianity notes, and if anything the ferocious pettiness of their attacks amounts to two guys trying not to sound identical. The only concrete way that Rubio proves an alternative to either of the frontrunners depends not on policy but on whether voters already personally hate those frontrunners.

Meanwhile, if overnight media Twitter is any indicator, the “Donald Trump Is a Loser” narrative is already in full swing. It’s fine; it’s funny, and needling anyone who overreacts to negativity as much as Trump does is a great pastime. There’s just no way to argue that this is any more inevitable than Rubio’s ascendance.

The argument goes something like this: Donald Trump says he will win all the time, so if he loses once, nobody will vote for him now, and they’ll all like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It kind of makes sense, and that would be a great line of reasoning in a party that didn’t make so little sense that it made Donald Trump its frontrunner for five months, despite the horrible things he says and all the ways in which he’s repeatedly displayed a supposedly fatal heterodoxy.

You can find counterarguments without trying too hard. For one thing, Trump has been running a national-media campaign, which is a disadvantage in caucus states like Iowa, where he only dedicated serious attention for the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, Cruz flung everything at Iowa for months on end and still won by only 4.4 points, which might not mean much in light of Trump’s absence of a ground game. Trump currently holds a large lead in New Hampshire, where his style of campaign and the easier voting process can pay off, and then we move to South Carolina, where he has a 16-point lead. And while it’s late to start an operation from scratch, who’s to say he doesn’t throw a bunch of money at the problem and make a more serious get-out-the-vote effort now that he’s been beaten once?