Maybe this is obvious: When voters are continually betrayed by those they put in office, they often resort to unapproved methods. I remember when David Duke was almost elected to the Senate from Louisiana in 1990. He got 43% of the vote! Were that many voters racists? I doubt it. Why would they vote for him, then? Well, take one of Duke’s issues, welfare.  For decades, conservative voters had supported politicians who promised to cut welfare, end welfare, support workfare instead of welfare–only to see welfare spread to cover more of the population. Voters didn’t understand there were children on welfare! Recipients had “barriers to employment”! You couldn’t expect them to work! Etc.

Louisiana voters may have figured, “Everyone we elect sells out on this issue. But this guy Duke’s a f**king racist maniac! At least he won’t sell out.”  Wackiness and bigotry became markers for “he means business.”

A similar, though less extreme, dynamic is clearly working in favor of Donald Trump.** Republican voters have sent lots of politicians to Washington who promise to get tough on border control and wind up supporting amnesty within about 35 minutes of their arrival. Marco Rubio, come on down! (Also Renee Ellmers and, um, Eric Cantor.) It’s all too realistic to expect that Scott Walker and even Ted Cruz will join these Election Day converts to comprehensivism, should either win national office. But this Trump guy — he’s out of control! He means business. He might actually build the danged fence.

This is also why Trump will likely be punished if he backpedals and apologizes for his wild overstatements disparaging Mexican illegals. It would have been easy for Trump to say he spoke imprecisely — ‘the vast majority of Mexican illegal immigrants are good people, but we’re getting a lot of bad people too, etc.’ [which I believe to be the truth***]. Talk more about the effect even law-abiding undocumented workers have on wages. He hasn’t done that. He knows voters regard his behavior as a sort of trial run for how fast he’d cave in office.

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** — Chris Matthews made this point today, before (absurdly) endorsing the Senate Gang of 8 amnesty bill as a way to placate “those angry about illegal immigration.”

*** — I’ve just finished Ann Coulter’s anti-immigration polemic, Adios America!, which may have influenced Trump. Coulter talks a lot about immigrant rapists, but she doesn’t say Mexico is sending us the dregs of its society, nor does she suggest that most Mexican illegal immigrants are criminal types. She says they come from a peasant culture, and peasant cultures are not known for, say, their progressive treatment of women.

The pensants are restive: Ron Brownstein says [on KCRW’s To the Point, at 20:40] that Scott Walker’s pursuing a “losing strategy” by a) talking about reducing legal immigration and b) supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Obergefell. According to Brownstein, Walker was the man who could have bridged the GOP’s blue collar populist and social conservative half and its moderate, upper income wing. But now he’s alienated the latter. …

Seems like a highly suspect bit of punditry to me! Has Walker really burned his bridges with white collar, upscale GOPs with these two moves? Those Republicans probably don’t want to reduce legal immigration and aren’t bothered by same-sex marriage. But, unless they’re DC strategists or corporate CEOs, is it really important to them that immigration levels not ever be reduced? If the quota goes from 1 million a year to, say, 800,000 — that’s a killer for white collar GOPs? Might they likewise be willing to tolerate a candidate who formally supports a transparently doomed effort to amend the Constitution — the way GOP moderates in the 1980s tolerated Ronald Reagan’s various amendments about abortion and school prayer (and his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment). …

This seems like a big flaw in the accepted “don’t-please-the-Tea-Party” analytic framework: Intensity matters, and it may be entirely possible to mobilize one wing of the party on issues they care a lot about (e.g. immigration) without sacrificing broader appeal — as long as those aren’t issues the other wings of the party care that much about. …

Thesis: Brownstein instinctively resists the idea that an immigration control position could ever be smart politically. His Next America empire is at stake! …

Further study: Does the same “intensity counts” logic apply, in mirror-image fashion, to Democrats? Maybe not.  To pick one issue, “higher taxes” may please the party’s left wing, but it’s hard to argue this isn’t something the party’s moderates care about. …