NRO: The Blue Wall Crumbles

My latest at National Review on demographics as destiny, Obama’s hidden WWC strength, and the Clinton campaign’s folly:

The failure of Hillary Clinton to excite, turn out, and sustain Obama margins with the so-called Rising American Electorate hurt her badly. But even more fatefully, the Clinton campaign — and Democrats generally — appear to have misread the very make-up of their coalition, and in doing so ignored the apparent glue that was holding together the deceptively fragile Blue Wall. In the end, a little more than 100,000 votes separate genius and glory from folly and failure.

Full piece here.

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How to Triage Trump

Over at National Review I break it to my fellow #NeverTrumpers that the RNC is not going to “pull the plug” on the Trump campaign. But what’s far more important than the public posture is what happens behind the scenes:

So no, the RNC isn’t going to “cut Trump off.” But it’s instructive to consider where the committee is putting its cash to begin with. The national party isn’t stockpiling cash for a big media blitz down the stretch like its congressional-campaign counterparts. The money is paying for field staff and setting up victory offices. It’s going toward mailers, campaign literature, and chasing down absentee ballots. These are shared, mutually beneficial investments for the good of the entire ticket. The question isn’t whether to do these things, it’s where to deploy the effort. And that’s the key: Triage isn’t punitive, it’s a function of scarcity, efficacy, and allocation.

Click here for the full column.

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On Trump’s “Missing” Millions

My rebuttal to the “Missing Money” Huffpo story that has been making the rounds:

Consider author Bob Burnett’s premise, that there is $63 million in “missing” money somehow unaccounted for. More precisely he asserts that Trump must have spent that massive sum. Well, not so fast. Indeed, the campaign seems to have netted $17 million in July, but the $80 million denominator is way off base…

In other words, the $80 million figure is padded by tens of millions of dollars bound for the RNC, 11 state party signatories, and special, segregated funds held by the national party for specific purposes.

Click here for the full story.

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