Posted on 02/25/2016 3:42:16 PM PST by Kaslin
If you want to disbelieve this because it’s coming from HuffPo, feel free. I’m inclined to disbelieve it — not because of the source but because it cannot possibly be true that the competition failed to take Trump seriously even after his poll lead persisted throughout the fall and winter. Yet the evidence is compelling. As Sam Stein notes, you’re more likely to find basic oppo stuff on Trump, like his dubious “opposition” to the Iraq war and his sex chats with Howard Stern, on BuzzFeed than you are in a Cruz or Rubio campaign ad. If Republicans had that material, they would have used it. They must not have had it. Why not?
Trump went into the campaign lacking a sophisticated ground game. Everyone else went into it lacking a sophisticated oppo effort towards Trump. Whose oversight turned out to be worse?
Multiple Republican campaign sources and operatives have confided that none of the remaining candidates for president have completed a major anti-Trump opposition research effort. There are several such efforts being run by outside conservative organizations. But those efforts are still gathering intel on the businessman after having started late in the primary season, these sources told The Huffington Post. And they worry that it may come too late…
“Not taking Trump seriously as a candidate a year ago was a mistake we all made, so I don’t blame his Republican opponents for that. But the lack of evidence that they have been doing thorough research on Trump more recently is malpractice,” said [former DNC research director Shauna] Daly. “[I]f a Republican had committed six recent college grads to power through a Nexis dump in November and December, by January they’d have been able to compile a powerful narrative amplified by names and quotes that they could have put in ads by now.”…
Indeed, one Democratic opposition research said that they've spent the past eight months compiling material on Trump as he's risen up the ranks. That’s actually not a lot of time. Democrats had started focusing on Mitt Romney in 2009 — a full two years before he ran again for the presidency. But those eight months have produced some good.
That researcher estimated that of all the material they’ve compiled — court and property records, newspaper clips and videos — approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.
Maybe that’s Democratic hype aimed at spooking the competition but it doesn’t seem implausible. Few people in America have been as famous for as long as Trump; the public record of things he’s said is almost endless, but an endless record is bound to have plenty of goodies scattered throughout. It stands to reason that there’s plenty Republicans haven’t found. The basic problem, per HuffPo, is that oppo takes time and money and none of them took Trump’s polling seriously until just a few months ago. It was reasonable as of last September to believe that Trump might still turn into Herman Cain and that Jeb Bush would reassert himself through the sheer force of his ad spending and therefore resources were better spent towards compiling attack lines against Jeb than against Trump. That was a gamble with very high stakes. That gamble has now been lost. And the donor class turned out to be too craven to bankroll a bootstrap oppo and attack ad effort against Trump in time for the first few primaries:
Republican operatives have told major donors it would require an eight-figure advertising campaign or campaigns to make any kind of dent in Trump's surprisingly durable popularity. While many of the donors have privately voiced support for the cause, most have begged off writing big checks…
[T]hey worry that, if they fund higher-profile attacks, they could come under attack from Trump, who this week fired a warning shot at one of the few major donors to the anti-Trump efforts, Marlene Ricketts, tweeting that her family "better be careful, they have a lot to hide!"…
"We would totally donate to you if we could do it anonymously; we're worried about Trump taking reprisals against us for donating to this," [Liz] Mair said, parroting reactions she's heard from donors. "Suffice to say, there are a lot of people out there who want to stop Trump and are willing to donate to do it," she said. "They're just the rank and file of the base, not the establishment donors."
That’s gutless, but it tells you how confident wealthy Republicans are that Trump won’t upset their income streams as president that they’re willing to put their checkbooks away when asked to help stop him. Threaten them with an angry tweet that’s apt to be rebroadcast on CNN and they may decide that donating to stop him isn’t worth the trouble. Threaten to neuter their lobbyist connections and they’d pony up for sure. They can work with Trump, certainly more than they could with someone like Cruz.
I don’t think that completely explains the lack of oppo and outside spending either, though. Such is the devotion among Trump’s core supporters that rival campaigns seem to have convinced themselves that attacking him is pointless. That’s why Rubio is going to steer clear of Trump at the debate tonight, allegedly. Trumpism is a cult (just ask the man himself), and you’re not going to reason anyone out of their membership in a cult. You’re certainly not going to reason them out of supporting Trump by reminding them that Trump’s not a conservative, which everyone understands by now. The problem is, by treating all of his support as if it’s part of that unreachable core, you’re writing off people who may be gettable. Trump may have a floor of 33 percent but those people have been with him for months and he can’t win with them alone. To win you need to prevent him from adding new votes from people who’ve held out until now. They’re not core Trumpers; they could, in theory, be moved by the right attacks. But not if those attacks never come. And at this point, they probably never will.
The other reason you’re not seeing oppo aimed at Trump like the BuzzFeed story about him chatting about women with Stern is that I think Rubio and Cruz are deathly afraid to attack him on any grounds that might be seen as “politically correct.” That’s also why they haven’t made an issue of Trump’s alt-right fan base or the fact that David Duke is telling his fans that voting against Trump "is really treason to your heritage.” (Team Rubio did call on Trump to repudiate a robo-call effort on his behalf by white nationalists last night but I haven’t seen them flogging that issue anywhere in the media today.) Only leftists scream about racism and sexism; in a Republican primary, Rubio would lose more votes for tut-tutting Trump than Trump would lose for what he or any of his fans said. Needless to say, Hillary will not be bound by those rules and will merrily carpet-bomb Trump with stuff like that in the general election, if only as a distraction from her own multifarious character issues. It’ll be the nastiest election ever. Wear a helmet.
It doesn’t matter. The media has plenty of dirt on Trump they refuse to air. If it becomes convenient, they will let fly with it.
It’s amazing to me that Freepers don’t remember the Clintons. They beat the crap out of us in the 90s and survived everything we had. Now Freepers act like it’s going to be a walk in the park against them. I remember the past.
So all the hit pieces we are subjected to just are not enough. We really need a whole lot more.
Why spend the money? If there is something out there the GOPe will find it.
I heard someone on TV a few days ago, talking about how the field has to be narrowed, an opposition research team established, and a multi-million dollar anti-Trump ad campaign launched. He was talking like they had all the time in the world to do this. Super Tuesday is now just 5 days away, and by about 10pm on March 1st, the campaigns of Rubio and Cruz may very well be on life-support, unless they can each win 2 or 3 states, which is unlikely.
Why should they? The media and supporters have dug for months going back decades.
The thing is, Trump has been in the spotlight for about 30 years and has been open about his life. There probably isn’t too much that opposition research will find over and above the already known.
And if they do manage to scrape up something that hasn’t been scraped-up already, so what? Or are you going to tell us this will FINALLY be “it”...the kryptonite that finally after everything else has failed, will bring Trump down?
The Democrats already know all there is to know as well as the news media. We just won’t hear about the good stuff until after the convention. The fact that his supporters won’t care is a given, but he has to have a little more than that to win in the general.
But Trump is a media product. The media has never given the truth about Trump. Most of his P.R. is totally inaccurate.
Cruz and Rubio need to remind voters that the primary enemy of conservatism in the Senate has been Harry Reid, and that Trump is a Harry Reid suck-up. And if Cruz and Rubio do not bring this up (and the mountain of Trump's liberal baggage) tonight, they may as well just quit.
Yup, …..just waiting for the fall, then it will be "scandal of the night" for 60 straight days. And it's a really massive ammo dump.
Most of what they've thrown at him hasn't stuck -- eminent domain, support for Democrats, liberal positions, bankruptcies. Has any of that had an effect?
If you're looking for some juicy sex scandal, those are much harder to uncover (if they exist) and exposing them could backfire.
Moreover, in a multi-person race you can't tell who'll benefit from a scandal. Publicizing a scandal (if you've found one) could be the thing that puts a third candidate over the top and knocks you out of the race.
More likely, none has bothered because as Rush pointed out NONE of the traditional political attacks work on Trump-—possibly because the American public is so fed up that now they view any criticism of Trump as more establishment tricks.
And bury it! Only expect token resistance from them. They figure they can cut a deal with Trump. Cruz makes them piddle a little because they already know he won't. (That's why they don't like him!) They are pushing Rubio to stop Cruz, not Trump.
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