2019: There are millions in conservative money in NJ

When it comes to picking through the detritus and finding the gems nobody does it better than David Wildstein.  Yep, before he was Wally Edge he was a political consultant, campaign manager, opposition researcher, and successful candidate for public office.  You can’t take that away from him.  He’s been in battles up close and personal.  He’s had to punch and claw.  And that’s what makes him different from a guy like Max Pizarro.  David Wildstein remembers what it was like to be in the muck of the trenches.  Max Pizarro has only known clean sheets and maid service.

Given the excruciatingly poor results Republicans have had raising the necessary levels of funding for legislative races in New Jersey, a recent post by Wildstein on his latest venture – NewJerseyGlobe.com – noted that the very conservative United States Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has raised more money in New Jersey than his very woke, very hip, wildly popular with the Left opponent – Congressman Beto O’Rourke.  Cruz has raised $139,783 in New Jersey to fund his re-election effort in Texas.  Media darling Beto managed just $52,349.  

But here’s the clincher.  Wildstein notes that in his failed 2016 run for President, the plain-as-day, no-doubt-about-it, right-winger raised $903,417 in New Jersey. 

How is that possible?  We are endlessly told that there aren’t any conservatives in New Jersey – let alone nearly a million bucks worth (and that’s not counting what the other wingers raised in New Jersey, like Rand Paul, and Donald Trump himself!).  A million bucks would be a BIG part of the budget of a committee like ARV, wouldn’t it be?

Reminder to those concerned:  In preparation for next year, get a message that doesn’t ignore the acres of diamonds out there.

McCann skips GOP primaries but works for Democrats

Every Republican with a pulse knows what happens in a primary.  Two or more candidates duke it out -- sometimes it gets downright nasty -- but after the votes are counted and the dust clears, all sides get together behind the winner of the Republican primary and go and beat up the Democrat and win the election in November. 

That's how it was in 2016, when a lot of good conservatives worked for presidential candidates like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie, among others.  They fought for their candidates and against Donald Trump, but then got behind Donald Trump once he became the Republican nominee at the convention. 

Some Republicans, like Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno, said that they couldn't support Donald Trump for President.  But at least they didn't support the Democrat ticket led by Hillary Clinton.   Later, Guadagno would be forgiven by many Republicans, including Mayor Carlos Rendo, who agreed to serve on her ticket in last year's gubernatorial race.

A very few Republicans, like candidate John McCann, continued to serve their Democrat paymasters (in McCann's case, Bergen Sheriff Michael Saudino) while Saudino was running for re-election as a Democrat on Hillary Clinton's ticket.  In our view, this is unconscionable.  Any Republican with a spine and worthy of the name should have campaigned against Michael Saudino in 2016.  He shouldn't have been taking a check from him.

But maybe John McCann doesn't understand the primary process too well because he doesn't vote in Republican primaries too often.  If his voting record is correct, McCann has showed up for one Republican primary in the last decade.  That's pretty darn lame.

Many see McCann as a Democrat straw man.  The Bergen Record has identified McCann as the "right hand man" to Democrat Sheriff Michael Saudino.  It was Saudino's feud with the Republican County Executive that undermined and ultimately lost Republicans control of Bergen County.  The coup de grace came when Saudino, a one-time Republican, joined Hillary Clinton and Josh Gottheimer on a ticket that crushed Republicans in Bergen County.  McCann remained Saudino's consigliore through all of this and ran for Congress (as a Republican) with Saudino's blessing and while still on the Democrat's payroll.

Sheriff Saudino has formally endorsed fellow Democrat Josh Gottheimer for re-election this year.  All this meddling in the Republican primary has the Democrats resembling the Russians.

Have a good weekend.

Erickson: The Tea Party is Dead.

Erick Erickson is an author, former editor of Red State, a radio talk show host, and the editor of The Resurgent.

On February 19, 2009, CNBC editor Rick Santelli, stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and went on a tirade against the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, which bailed out individuals who had (mostly) knowingly entered terrible mortgages and could not pay them off. Santelli was so outraged he predicted a “Chicago Tea Party” would rise up.

His statement went viral within conservative media. Played over and over on talk radio and reposted on conservative websites, activists who already felt alienated by a Republican Party that had drifted toward corporatism and away from conservatism decided to mobilize. Local talk radio hosts around the country organized tea party protests on tax day. “Taxed Enough Already” signs sprouted up across conservative areas.

Those tea party groups organized and the Washington conservative apparatus stepped in to try to bring some focus, order, and assistance. Donors stepped up and helped fund other groups. Because of Citizens United, small dollar donors suddenly found themselves able to combine resources without a bunch of lawyers and compete against the big guys. Organized tea party groups sprang up, national tea party coalitions sprang up, other groups rose, and the C-Team and D-List celebrity consultants of the right decided to cash in.

Tea party activists were mad at both Republicans and Democrats. They were mad at Democrats for Obamacare and big government and keeping all their promises. They were mad at Republicans for TARP, the General Motors bail out, and breaking all their promises. Over the course of 2009, tea party activists became more and more organized and by 2010 decided to challenge long time Republicans they felt had broken promises while challenging Democrats as well in open seats.

The media portrayed them as racists. They were derisively called “tea baggers” by reporters and left-wing pundits. Republicans really did not know what to make of them. Democrats considered them a hate group. During the 2009 August recess, as Democrats sought to hide from voters, tea party activists showed up at townhall meetings and began embarrassing congressmen by proving these citizens actually knew what they were talking about. Union activists showed up to disrupt the recesses. While the media blamed tea partiers for violence, all but a handful of arrests made at the time were of union activists. Being beset by all sides fostered a lot of unity and solidarity. But then, after the 2010 election, the activists expected the GOP to actually use the power of the purse to hold the President accountable. It did not happen. In the minds of the activists, goal posts were moved by Republican leaders who’d promised action. Excuses were made. The activists got even angrier.

Tea Party activists learned, in the process, what pro-life activists had long known. Many Republicans would tell them they supported their cause, but behind the scenes would mock the tea party activists as hicks and rubes. Their checks were appreciated, but their opinions were not. Pro-life activists had long gotten used to this, but still pushed and cajoled and tried to work from within and without to incrementally advance their agenda. The anger built. Activists began to suspect Republican leaders had no willingness to act and Republican leaders concluded the activists did not understand how the system worked.

As the anger grew within the tea party activists, something vital to their cause never did — discernment. Some activists decided they could make a quick buck. Some consultants learned quickly they could profit off scamPACs and take advantage of tea party activists. The activists could never discern the good from the bad. Sometimes it was because of friendships, but not all the time. It started to become a real problem though and when some began calling out the con-artists and charlatans, they were branded as too Washington friendly. The grassroots tea party activists grew more cynical and distrustful.

The national tea party groups started fighting internally and with each other. The local groups felt like the national groups were of no help. That distrust, over the next few years, would poison the well. With a lack of trust in any group from Washington, no matter the bona fides of the organization, and with a serious lack of discernment, tea party activists finally took a go-it-alone approach in recruitment. They began finding the most socially maladjusted candidates to run for office — people who showed up at all the rallies and who, frankly, had been the volunteers most candidates left in the back of the office putting stamps on envelopes. Now, suddenly, they were the candidates because they had put in the sweat equity and were true believers. In still other cases, candidates sprang up, bought tables at tea party events, threw red meat to the crowd, and got endorsements without ever really believing what they were saying.

Considerations of electability were set aside because these were the people the local activists could trust. When national groups stepped forward, whose core competencies were fielding grassroots conservatives candidates, the tea party activists chose to ignore their advice. Consequently, multiple true-believer conservatives started entering primaries against a conservative who could win and an establishment candidate. The true-believers attacked the conservative who could win as a poseur standing between the tea party and the establishment.

The damage became immense as the Republican establishment struck back. Groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club For Growth were getting blamed for awful candidates running for office who they not only did not fund, but never actually supported and actively tried to dissuade from running.

As this confluence of malevolence, incompetence, and distrust built energy, the tea party began to fracture. Many of its members decided the only way to win was to adopt the tactics of the left.

Unfortunately, they defined those tactics as behaving like thugs and jackasses. The left won, they thought, by being nasty. So they would be nasty too. The face of grassroots conservatism became a face of anger.

When conservatives stepped forward to promote the idea of the happy warrior, the angry activists accused them of surrender and compromise. Eventually, conservatives began stepping back and the angry grew more suspicious of anyone and everyone within a few degrees of Washington, D.C. All the while, the ever more corporatist Republican establishment played on and off these divisions, smearing legitimate conservative organizations as profiteers while continually breaking promises. 

When Jeb Bush entered the Presidential race, the angry and suspicious became the angry and paranoid. They rallied to Donald Trump, not so much because they agreed with him, but because they were desperate. They had become convinced there was no hope, 2016 could mean the end of America, and they must take drastic measures to turn the tide. Drastic measures meant Trump. The conservatives, like Paul, Rubio and Cruz, could not be trusted because they were of Washington. That they had opposed Washington to varying degrees made no difference. The angry and paranoid concluded they were infected by establishmentarianism.

This all finally came to a head on Tuesday night. The angry and paranoid put forward Kelli Ward in Arizona, who believed in chem trails, and Carlos Beruff in Florida. Both reflected the bleak black hearts of the remains of a movement no longer driven by shared believe in limited government and instead driven by crazy town. Both were defeated and deservedly so. A tea party movement that stopped listening to sound advice and turned inward and tribal needed to lose.

After Trump’s loss in November, the angry-paranoid remnant of the tea party movement will not go away. It will still fester and troll. But those who developed the discernment to realize our ways are not the left’s ways and we do not have to proceed as they proceed will be the ones to help pick up the pieces. The others will, for the most part, be ignored.

The tea party began through common cause and it died because too many of its members failed at discernment and, as a result, were betrayed from within and from without only then to grow too angry for anyone to ever want to join their cause except the fringe. One silver lining of the movement was that it found a Republican Party of old white men and left it with younger, more diverse officials. The old white men did not back Allen West, Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tim Scott, and others. But the tea party movement did in its early days. Because of the tea party, for the first time since the Civil War, the congressional district wherein Fort Sumter resides had a black congressman and an Indian-American Governor. That congressman is now South Carolina’s Senator and that Governor may be a future Presidential contender. The group portrayed as racist by the media in 2009 and 2010 broadened the color spectrum of the GOP. That is worth remembering.

Stuart Stevens is what's wrong with politics

Stuart Stevens has grown very fat off the system.  Year after year, campaign upon campaign, he's gotten rich off the Republican Party as one of the most inside of insider political consultants to the Washington, DC party bosses.  Stuart always gets his cut of whatever is going down.

Usually everything goes his way.  Some tame, docile, member of the GOP political establishment get's nominated and Stuart makes a bundle.  The candidate loses of course -- but the grease machine of corporate cronyism, lobbyists, wads of money, and consultants like Stuart, it keeps going on and on.  Winning and losing matters less than it did because not only does Stuart have corporate clients who are fully participating members of the grease machine, but he has foreign clients too.

Stuart Stevens ran Republican Mitt Romney's lackluster campaign for President four years ago.  Romney spent a lot of money but lost to a bigger insider, President Barack Obama.  This year finds Stuart upset because he doesn't have a seat at the table and isn't getting his cut.  The candidacies of anti-establishment outsiders like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have completely undone Stuart, who is now threatening to help the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton by getting Republicans to vote for a throw-away third-party candidate.

Stuart Stevens is having a hissy fit because the citizens are refusing to do as they are told.  Democracy doesn't matter to Stuart, getting paid matters, and Stuart is willing to take a dump in the picnic basket if he doesn't get his own way.  More than a few establishment Republicans are applauding Stuart, not thinking about what would happen if we all adopted this attitude. Think of all the unmitigated bear shat you serve up as candidates and think of all the times we have dutifully supported them "for the good of the party"  -- and you don't even pay us like you do Stuart.

Stuart Stevens claims that he's betraying his party because he doesn't agree with what someone like Donald Trump "stands for," that he doesn't like Trump's "tone."  It's rather amusing, coming from someone who has worked for the political operations of foreign thugs.  One such thug, the former President of Albania, actually had his "special forces" shoot protesters at a rally.

That's right, some political consulting businesses are no longer American enterprises but instead work for the interests of foreign potentates wherever there is lots of money to be made. Take Stuart Stevens' client Sali Berisha, the former President of Albania.  This guy is a real piece of work, as Wikipedia reports:

Sali Berisha was elected President on 9 April 1992... Berisha introduced Islam to the Albanian political scene, pursued re-Islamisation of the country to reverse decades of anti-religious policy under Communism. Non-Governmental Organisations from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Muslim world were invited in to build mosques and schools and provide other aid, and introduce Wahhabi or Salafi Islam to Albania.

...The collapse of the Ponzi schemes towards the end of 1996, into which it is alleged that Albanians invested $1 billion worth of life savings from 1994, recapped the crisis. The schemes failed, one by one, from December 1996, and demonstrators took to the streets accusing the government of having stolen the money. Those demonstrations were then taken over by the opposition.

During the first ten days of March, the situation deteriorated, culminating in the desertion of large numbers of police and military, leaving their arsenals unlocked. These were promptly looted, mostly by militias and some criminal gangs, and for a time it looked like civil war would erupt between the government and rebels. Although the Prime Minister resigned immediately, Berisha refused opposition demands to step down, claiming he had to ensure continuity, and UN and European Multinational Forces were required to step in and take the situation under control. After their intervention in Albania, early elections were held in June 1997, leading to the victory of a socialist-led coalition of parties. On 24 July 1997, a month after the DP lost the 1997 elections to the left coalition, Berisha stepped down as President...

On 3 July 2005, Sali Berisha was able to lead a coalition of five right center parties into the 2005 parliamentary elections, which eventually won a majority of 74 MPs from a total of 140. He was appointed Prime Minister of Albania on 8 September 2005...

The 2009 elections were flawed and have been called as such by the socialist opposition, who have asked for a recount of the ballots. Berisha refused any recount of the votes... The political crisis between government and opposition worsened over time, with the Socialists abandoning parliamentary debates for months and staging hunger strikes to ask for internal and international support. The EU attempted a conciliation, which failed. The ongoing political crisis was one of the reasons for the EU's refusal to grant Albania official candidate status in late 2010.

On 21 January 2011, clashes broke out between police and protesters in an anti-government rally in front of the Government building in Tirana. Four people were shot dead from government special forces. The EU issued a statement to Albanian politicians, warning both sides to refrain from violence, while Berisha defined the protests and the subsequent charges by judges upon policemen as stages of an attempted coup against him - consequently using this to his advantage to further attempt to consolidate his grip on the state institutions. He accused the then President of having been part of the coup after the relations had soured between the two and he embraced his perceived victim status to install his own 'yes man' in the office.

...After his party's defeat in the 2013 parliamentary election, Berisha resigned as party leader, but he remained in parliament.

Another foreign politician who Stuart Stevens worked for is Joseph Kabila, the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since January 2001.  He became President after his father, the dictator Laurent Kabila, was assassinated by his bodyguards.  The Kabila family has a long association with such memorable figures as Che Guevara, who worked with the elder Kabila in a 1965 coup attempt.  As a youth leader for Patrice Lumumba, the elder Kabila was present for the orgy of rape and murder that followed.

The younger Kabila (Stuart's client) received his military training in China at the Peoples Liberation Army National Defense University, in Beijing.  He became the commander of the "infamous" army of children -- taken from their families and conscripted -- known as the kadogos.  Up to 10,000 children, some as young as seven years old, were abused in this way.     The International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague has condemned the use of children in combat, calling it a violation of human rights as well as a war crime.

One of Kabila's first acts as president was to round up 135 people -- including 4 children -- and try them for the assassination of his father.  Dozens were executed and others faced torture and abuse.  President Kabila stood for election in December 2011.  We'll let Wikipedia take it from here: 

After the results were announced on 9 December, there was violent unrest in Kinshasa and Mbuji-Mayi, where official tallies showed that a strong majority had voted for the opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi.  Official observers from the Carter Center reported that returns from almost 2,000 polling stations in areas where support for Tshisekedi was strong had been lost and not included in the official results. They described the election as lacking credibility.  On 20 December, Kabila was sworn in for a second term, promising to invest in infrastructure and public services. However, Tshisekedi maintained that the result of the election was illegitimate and said that he intended also to "swear himself in" as president.

In January 2012, Catholic Bishops in DR Congo also condemned the elections, complaining of "treachery, lies and terror", and calling on the election commission to correct "serious errors".

On 19 January 2015 protests led by students at the University of Kinshasa broke out. The protests began following the announcement of a proposed law that would allow Kabila to remain in power until a national census can be conducted (elections had been planned for 2016).  By Wednesday 21 January clashes between police and protesters had claimed at least 42 lives (although the government claimed only 15 people had been killed). 

How after working for these monsters, after pocketing their bloody money, how does Stuart Stevens call a Republican like Donald Trump a "thug"?  It's a little ridiculous, isn't it?

Trump is taking Sanders' voters

Today is the Ides of March, memorable for its connection to Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman politician with parallels to Mr. Donald Trump.  Like Trump, Caesar entered politics during a period when the working class (the Roman Plebeians) were being squeezed out of the labor force by imported foreign labor.  In Caesar's day, the imports were slaves from newly conquered territory (Gauls, Germans, Greeks, and Spaniards).  Today the imports come from human trafficking (a modern euphemism for a form of illegal slavery) and porous borders.  Both undercut the price of labor by glutting the market.  Caesar's murder at the hands of a group of rich Patrician Senators was due, in part, to his efforts to limit the importation of slaves and secure work for the citizens of Rome.

Like Caesar, Trump is a rich oligarch who has betrayed his class to gain the affection of the common people.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported that 46,000 Democrats had switched to Republican.  That's half of all the new voters the Democrats have gained since the 2014 congressional elections.  This mirrors huge party-switches in other states, with exit-polling indicating that the candidacy of Donald Trump is the reason for much of the switching. 

Many of these voters would otherwise have been voting for Bernie Sanders, but when the Vermont Senator screwed up and told them that they don't exist, apparently they started jumping to Trump. 

"When you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in a ghetto".

Hey, doesn't Sanders know that twice as many white people are living on food stamps as are black people?  That there are more white people on welfare than black people.  Doesn't he know this?  Why would Senator Sanders diss the very working class voters he needs, in an attempt to pander to black voters?  Doesn't he know that racial and ethnic divides have historically been used to split the working class?  To pit group against group within the working class, to undermine it.  Is remedial Marxism in order?

Consider this:  Black Lives Matter's advocate Al Sharpton is managed by the same public relations firm that manages Governor Chris Christie.  Sharpton is a rich man, not a man of the Left.

Of course, Bernie Sanders' ideology was always closer to the 1960's New Left than to the class-based Old Left.  The New Left was dominated by academics and the children of the well to do.  Frustrated with the cultural traditionalism of the working class, it focused on the grievances of racial and ethnic groups, gender, and sexual identity.  Dominated by younger voices, the New Left was in a hurry to tear down the existing order in any way possible and deemed group-identity the quickest means to that end.  But of course, these younger voices grew up and, being who they were, inherited the establishment -- proving to be more greedy and rapacious than anything practiced by their parents.

Split along racial and ethnic lines, by gender and all the rest, working class jobs have disappeared overseas, the labor market at home has been glutted, and working class incomes have declined while the inequity between rich and poor is an ever-widening gulf.  Perversely, the rich have never been more "progressive."  Johnson & Johnson puts out a "progressive" LGBT video to take your mind off them selling products to children and women that cause cancer -- and covering it up for 30 years.  HSBC bank signs on to a pro-same-sex marriage brief to keep "progressive" support when it comes out that they laundered a billion dollars in drug cartel money.  "Vulture capitalist" billionaire Paul Singer pushes "gay rights" but off-shores his operations in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes and oversight.

Today's Democratic Party is controlled by these "progressive" rapists of the working class -- making the Democrats anything but an old-order party of the Left.  As for the Republican Party, it too has long embraced the same neo-liberal economic policies practiced by the corporate "progressives" who dominate the Democrats, while the unleashing of campaign and lobbying money has given rise to an all-encompassing regime of crony capitalism that makes corruption in both parties ordinary, usual, and customary.

The parties "clash" in a series of what Daniel Boorstin called "pseudo-events," everyone bemoans "gridlock," but behind the scenes everything functions quite well if you have the money to buy it.  A crisis is manufactured, the working class get taxed, the government spends money, rich lobbyists/ vendors/ consultants/ investors get richer, the solution fails miserably, the crisis is forgotten, the national debt has grown.  A recent Princeton University study reported that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

While equal to the Democratic Party in corruption, the Republican Party actually is more democratic than the Democrats, in that its leadership does not exercise the full control over the institution the way the leadership of the Democratic Party does.  Being "Republicans" and therefore "bad" in the minds of those who set such fashions, they can't get away with the same level of wrongdoing that the Democratic Party's leadership can.  Remember, the Democrats are fashionable and therefore "good."  You will never skunk a cocktail party by announcing that you're a Democrat.

So the Democrats get to crush their Bernie, even though the polls show he is the far stronger candidate in any match-up with Republicans. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html

But the Republicans can't crush their Trump... or even their Cruz.  The Republican electorate has slipped their leash and gone off the plantation.  Can you blame rank and file Democrats for enviously eyeing this outbreak of freedom and wanting to join in?  After being lied to for so long, being told what to think, what to do, and what to feel, it is exhilarating for some to just raise their fist and let fly that middle finger. 

The real worry to the establishment class does not come from those who are temporarily free, who will soon tire and then be rounded up by their assigned keepers.  What keeps the establishment up nights is what Ralph Nader wrote about two summers ago in his book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.  It's what groups like Represent.Us are putting into practice:

Represent.Us: End corruption. Defend the Republic.

Unlike the pseudo-left movements funded by corporate "progressives," these groups do not divide Americans by race, ethnicity, or gender.  They don't pit this lifestyle against that religion.  This is about taking on corporate cronyism and the political class and cleaning up the Republic.  This is about the one BIG thing we need to do if any of the little things have a chance of becoming something good.  This is about the PROCESS and it's not unlike the coming together of Left and Right in the United Kingdom in that country's battle over who controls their PROCESS -- Parliament or the European Union.  This IS THE FIGHT and it has and will produce some interesting alliances, as you can see below.

London Mayoral Candidate George Galloway gets a standing ovation for his speech on leaving the EU, at a Grassroots Out event. @alondonforall @georgegalloway

Gun-shy NJGOP candidates: Pay Attention!

Are the gun-shy candidates of the NJGOP paying attention to any of this?  As they continue to present themselves as versions of Democrat-lite, are they seeing what's happening in their own party?  Is it sinking in or are they going to wake up one day and it will be too late?

Your excuses for why you do what you do don't work anymore.  Fewer and fewer buy it.  Here is a great article from mainstream conservative Byron York, who looks ready to face the new reality:

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — For months, Donald Trump's antagonists in rival campaigns, in the GOP establishment and in the punditocracy have believed the time would come, someday, when Trump would say something so outrageous, so over-the-top, so out there that the scales would finally fall from his supporters' eyes and the Trump candidacy would collapse. The South Carolina campaign, some believed, would be that time. After all, in the course of a week, Trump had dumped all over popular former President George W. Bush, had said good things about Planned Parenthood, and had gotten into a weird tiff with the pope. Surely now…

But no. Despite it all, Trump surged to a ten-point victory here in South Carolina Saturday. And talks with Trump voters who came to the Spartanburg Marriott to celebrate suggest that the very statements that drive Trump's critics to distraction actually serve to strengthen his position with his supporters.

At the Marriott, I asked Trump voters the most basic question: Why did you pick Trump over the other guys?

"The big reason is honesty," said Lori Jagla, of Woodward, S.C. "The more I hear everyone else going, 'Isn't he going too far?' the more [I think], 'No, you just wait, you get into America, and it's not too far. It's what we're thinking.'"

"Because he's honest," said Nicki Cox, of Greer.

"Doesn't mince words," said Angela Griffin, of Spartanburg.

"I don't even care what his views are, I just care that there's a better chance that he's going to do what he says than the other guys," said Robert Daughenbaugh, of Mauldin. "I mean, you know they're all liars. End of story. They're all liars."

It's not that Trump's supporters agree with everything he has to say. They don't. It's that they see strong statements from Trump as proof of strong conviction on his part, and when he says something that causes his critics to go nuts, they see that as proof that Trump is saying not just something that needs to be said but something that he himself believes. So they view him more strongly than ever as an honest man who tells it like it is.

Trump didn't win across the board, but it was close. According to exit polls, he won men and women. He won voters who are evangelical Christians and those who are not. He won veterans and non-veterans. He cleaned up among the 46 percent of voters who do not have a college degree and nearly tied Marco Rubio, 25 percent to Rubio's 27 percent, among those who do. He won among voters who think terrorism is the top issue, and among voters who think the economy is the top issue, and among voters who think immigration is the top issue, and tied Rubio and Ted Cruz among voters who say government spending is the top issue.

In at least one area, Trump invented an issue and then dominated it. The exit polls show that 74 percent of South Carolina Republican voters support a policy of temporarily banning Muslims from entering the U.S. Trump won big among that group.

Trump also won against the opposition of pretty much the entire South Carolina political establishment. In the last couple of days of the campaign, popular Gov. Nikki Haley and popular Sen. Tim Scott and popular Rep. Trey Gowdy traveled the state together with Rubio, presenting themselves as a "new conservative movement" (Haley's words) that would sweep Rubio to victory. Gowdy and Scott developed a buddy comedy routine, and Scott at times seemed almost giddy introducing "Marco Rooooooooooooooobio!"

It didn't work. Just 25 percent of voters said they thought Haley's endorsement was important. And of the 75 percent who didn't, Trump won by a dozen points. Finally, another pillar of the state political establishment, Sen. Lindsey Graham, endorsed Jeb Bush. When the televisions at the Trump victory party mentioned Graham's name, there was loud and lusty booing. It was much louder than any catcalls directed at Bush's withdrawal speech.

The crowd at the Marriott Saturday night was deeply anti-establishment, but their hostility to entrenched power was of recent vintage. Many had supported mainstream Republican candidates for years and felt they had nothing to show for it. Trump is their opportunity to change course.

"I went into a couple of weeks' depression when Mitt Romney lost," said Doug Moore, of Greenville. "I'm just tired of the politicians. I'm tired of the establishment. I voted establishment for most of my life. I voted for both Bushes, I voted for Bob Dole, John McCain, Romney. I'm just ready for something different, somebody who'll actually get in there and make a change."

(Read More) http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2583794

Note:  Trump creates issues and then dominates them.  He doesn't allow the mainstream media or the Democrats or the Legions of Ass or any other lobby group, to set the agenda.  He inverts the process by listening close, figuring out why people are pissed, where the emotion is, and then turning what is on their minds into a policy statement.  He doesn't get his policies from insider lobbyists at cocktail parties hosted by the coffee-enema crowd.  Learn from this.