The GOP Establishment Is So Screwed: Watch Matt Welch on All in with Chris Hayes Tonight
Tune in after 8:10 p.m. ET to hear discussion about the GOP race and the eternal War on Christmas
So one of the fun things to do if you're of a certain mindset is to open up the RealClearPolitics history of GOP 2016 presidential polling and just start geeking out on the numbers. With the one mild complaint that the nice folks over there end up dropping the once-noteworthy poll results of guys like Scott Walker, there are oodles of insights to be had by grouping various pols together and watching trends.
For instance: After Donald Trump escalatored down into the Republican race this June his numbers shot up in the very next national poll from 1 percent to 11. So who lost that support? The establishment-friendly troika of Jeb Bush (22% to 15%), Marco Rubio (14% to 8%) and Chris Christie (4% to 2%). (Mike Huckabee lost some too, but that complicates my narrative, so I'm ignoring it.) Overnight, the establishment went from 40%, where it had been surfing for months, to 25%, from which it never came back.
Really. Jeb! never again reached 22%, and would be in single digits within six weeks. Rubio didn't see 14% again until November, by which time Bush's support was in free-fall. When you add up the total-outsider threesome of Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, and compare them to our Establishment Three (plus Lindsey Graham, because why not), here are the numbers from July on:
Os Es
27 22 July
39 18 August
51 18 September
53 20 October
51 21 November
47 20 December
The establishment needle just isn't moving, no matter how hard the anti-Trump GOP freaks out over the latest schlonging. Meanwhile, the slight recent dipping of Team Outsider is only a swapping out of enthusiasm from Carson/Fiorina to Ted Cruz:
C/F TC
27 8 September
23 12 October
13 18 December
Anyway, I'm talking about stuff like this tonight on MSNBC's All in with Chris Hayes at 8:10ish p.m., with guest host Steve Kornacki and co-panelist Robert Costa. Later in the show, we'll be talking about the War on Christmas, because YOLO.
Speaking of All In, I was on Monday night talking about Lindsey Graham and such; you can read a transcript here (scroll to the end).
