“So, you know, if all of a sudden, what amounts to a write-in vote basically, if people decide that they actually think I’m the right person to be the president, I’d be grateful for their support and I want your listeners to know that.”

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images

w.soundcloud.com

Jim Gilmore, the former Virginia governor who, unbeknownst to many, is running for president, said on Friday that if he gets a single vote in Monday night's Iowa caucuses, it will be a victory for his campaign.

"If I get one vote, frankly, in Iowa, I'll consider it a victory," the Gilmore said on the Iowa radio show Mickelson in the Morning. "A single vote, I'll consider it a victory. Because I've told the press that I couldn't compete in Iowa because of the high expense of the process. So, you know, if all of a sudden, what amounts to a write-in vote basically, if people decide that they actually think I'm the right person to be the president, I'd be grateful for their support and I want your listeners to know that."

Gilmore, whose run for the Republican nomination has attracted little attention and support, reappeared at the undercard debate on Fox News on Thursday night, after failing to make the cut since the first debate on August 6. On Friday, other candidates, from his undercard rival Mike Huckabee to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, panned Gilmore, saying that they had forgotten he was still in the race.

"I thought that he had dropped out," Huckabee told radio host Simon Conway. "I was not aware that he was still in. I knew that he was early. I'm like you, when I saw his name, I said, 'Wait a minute, I thought that he had dropped out.' And of course he was called out for the fact that he has not spent one single moment in Iowa campaigning."

And on The Howie Carr Show, Trump piled on, saying "Nobody even knows who he is. And frankly, we thought he got out of the race and probably so did you. All of a sudden he showed up again."

INDIAN WELLS, California — Two days before the Iowa caucus, Charles Koch defended the work of the political network affiliated with the billionaire brothers and laid out his vision for the country before 500 attendees at the largest ever gathering hosted by the network.

“I’m kind of incognito,” Koch joked, encouraging the attendees to be open about their political philosophies. “But I’ve been identified lately, and it's not so bad. I’m still here and stronger than ever….This isn’t some secret cabal. We have ideas that will make American better, and we need to share them and we need to stand up and be open that this is what we believe because we’re committed — whatever the cost — to make America better. And believe me, I haven’t suffered any costs. I get a lot of attacks, but I get a lot of great letters on how what we’re doing has changed people’s lives."

Koch's comments at a resort in the California desert were part of his opening remarks for the annual winter meeting of the network, which intends to spend $889 million on conservative causes and candidates in line with the brothers' political philosophy in the two-year 2016 election cycle. Freedom Partners, the umbrella group hosting the event — and other allied organizations — have already spent just under $400 million in 2015, a top official revealed Saturday.

In his remarks, Koch also laid out four priorities for the network that he believes will change the country.

"The first one is to change, reverse the policies that are moving us toward…a society that is destroying opportunities for the disadvantage and creating welfare for the wealthy,” he said.

"The second one is the irresponsible, destructive spending by both political parties that is making people’s lives worse. And the third one is to get government at all levels — that is local, state and federal — to focus on the government’s primary responsibility to keep America safe instead of being distracted with all sorts of other objectives…And last, but not least — protecting free speech, which is the foundation of a free society.”

BuzzFeed News was one of six news organizations to accept an invitation to cover the event after agreeing to a set of ground rules proposed by the Kochs' political network, including not identifying the donors attending unless they agreed to an interview. With Democrats increasingly attacking the brothers for their political giving, the network has made an effort to be more transparent in recent months, opening up parts of their meetings — known as "seminars" — to a few reporters for the first time last year.

On Saturday, Koch stressed the network’s new efforts toward transparency and encouraged donors to talk to media.

The gathering comes as the brothers have faced renewed scrutiny following the release of a new book by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. In her book, Mayer reports that Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch, helped construct an oil refinery in Nazi Germany.

About one-third of the prospective donors at this weekend’s event were first time attendees, and the theme for this weekend's gathering is “A Vision to Unleash America’s Potential” with discussions on “restoring fiscal responsibility,” “corporate welfare” and criminal justice reform. Donors have to put in $100,000 to become part of the network, which includes several, well-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, LIBRE Initiative, and Generation Opportunity.

Although the network has invited several presidential contenders to speak at forums before donors at past seminars, Freedom Partners has not endorsed anyone, with different donors within the network backing different candidates. No presidential candidate is expected to attend the gathering this weekend, given it’s just before the Iowa caucus.

In the end, the campaign spent $40 million, a record for a losing Senate bid at the time.

If Donald Trump ends up on stage this July formally accepting the GOP presidential nomination, don't be surprised if everyone from Washington Republicans to Twitter conservatives gathers outside the convention arena in Cleveland to burn Mike Murphy in effigy.

The famed 53-year-old political consultant runs the Right to Rise super PAC, where he has spent the past year on a mission to mow down every viable Republican candidate standing between Jeb Bush and the White House. The campaign waged by Murphy has been, by turns, vicious, strange, and comically ineffectual — but always expensive. With Jeb flatlining in national polls, the group has blown through roughly 70% of its $100 million war chest — and developed, along the way, a blooper reel of widely mocked stunts. In New Hampshire, they mailed small video players to voters with a 15-minute Jeb! documentary pre-downloaded. In Iowa, they splashed messages across digital billboards so head-scratching that even Bush himself reportedly asked, "What the hell is that?" when he drove by one.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some disgruntled donors have struggled to keep their displeasure with Murphy to themselves. As one nameless Bush backer grumbled to Politico during the latest round of venting in the media, "You might as well light all this money on fire."

But it isn't just wealthy Bush loyalists whining about squandered contributions. In recent weeks, a widening cast of critics across the GOP has accused Murphy of cynically pursuing a scorched-earth 2016 strategy that will leave Jeb's legacy in tatters, wreak havoc on the national party — and make him millions of dollars.

The critics argue that Murphy recklessly enabled Trump’s rise last year by cavalierly dismissing him as a "zombie frontrunner" and stubbornly refusing to use the vast war chest at his disposal to take the billionaire down. ("Trump is, frankly, other people's problem," he said when asked about it in August.) Meanwhile, the super PAC went on to spend approximately $30 million on attack ads targeting Marco Rubio — a candidate many (including Bush donors) believe to be the party’s last best hope to stop The Donald. In spite of it all, Murphy shows no signs of letting up: in the final sprint to Iowa, Right to Rise has reportedly spent nearly $1 million per day hammering Rubio on everything from his immigration record to his insufficiently masculine boots.

Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

Now, with the spectre of the Trumpocalypse looming over the GOP on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, rivals, critics, and even some admirers are questioning Murphy’s motives.

"The real question of this campaign is whether Mike Murphy wants to spend down to the last dollar just to destroy Marco Rubio," said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist based in Florida. Suggesting that Murphy's unwavering commitment to the failed ad blitz might be infusing Bush with false hope, Wilson added, "Maybe I'd be a lot richer if I just always told my clients the ads were working when they weren't."

“I have a lot of respect for Mike Murphy, but I have no idea what the hell he is doing right now,” said another strategist.

A third GOP operative who is neutral in the 2016 race even floated a far-fetched theory that Murphy is holding his fire on Trump because he wants the billionaire’s future business. (In fact, Right to Rise did eventually end up running some anti-Trump ads, though the $5.5 million behind the effort is a pittance compared to the group’s seemingly bottomless kill-Marco fund.)

Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for Right to Rise, dismissed the criticism of Murphy as jealous carping by competitors.

"Under Mike's leadership, everyone at Right to Rise is focused on promoting one person: Jeb Bush. We have neither the time nor the inclination to pay attention to anonymous sources in the Republican political consultant class who are largely driven by green-eyed personal animus," Lindsay said.

But Charlie Spies, who serves as treasurer and chief counsel to the super PAC, acknowledged the perception in certain Washington circles that Murphy is making a killing at Right to Rise.

"Since we first started the super PAC, I've heard people cracking that, 'Oh, Murphy's going to retire off this,'" Spies said in an interview. But in fact, he said, the organization has taken extraordinary measures to ensure that "no one's burning down the store for personal profit."

Among the safeguards he cited: an unpaid, independent governance committee that oversees the budget, and a "global" compensation cap that limits how much money each employee can make.

Spies, a veteran election lawyer, declined to provide specifics on Murphy's compensation at Right to Rise, but said, "I think I know the market better than anybody and ... Mike is getting paid the lowest rate I have seen anyone in a similar situation for a similar organization get paid." (Lindsay also declined to specify how many digits are contained in the number of dollars Murphy stands to make.)

Political consulting is, in the end, a business for mercenaries, and Murphy — an acid-tongued ad man who once famously sported a “GO NEG” vanity plate on his car — is one of the best in the GOP. Murphy's defenders say his only obligation in 2016 should be to help his client win, not to police the party for existential threats. And of course it remains possible that Bush, who’s shown recent glimmers of momentum in New Hampshire polls, will ultimately vindicate Murphy’s slashing strategy at Right to Rise with a last-minute surge in the Granite State.

But Murphy has demonstrated over the course of a long and lucrative career that he sees himself as more than just a hired gun. Over the past 35 years, he has been a cutthroat operative in campaign war rooms, a prophet of big-tent conservatism in cable news green rooms, and an aspiring filmmaker in TV writers’ rooms. Along the way, he has elected a slew of high-profile Republican governors like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and made enough money to buy himself a house in the Hollywood Hills, apartments in Manhattan and Miami, 38 square miles of land in Nova Scotia, and an array of pricey toys, from a Mercedes-Benz to a private Piper Meridian plane that used to shepherd him back and forth from Sacramento. Today, a bearded and stylishly bespectacled Murphy lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two-year-old, where he continues to dabble in Hollywood. (Sniggered one rival strategist, “He’s a screenwriter like all the Uber drivers in Santa Monica are screenwriters.”)

But according to a review of his Murphy's and interviews with more than a dozen people who have worked for, with, and against him over the years, at least one thing has followed him throughout his various reinventions: a reputation for aggressively hoovering every last nickel from his clients’ campaigns — regardless of whether he delivers a win.

“I don’t know any consultant that isn’t in business to make money,” said Rob Stutzman, who worked with Murphy on the 2003 Schwarzenegger campaign, and rejected the thesis that his old colleague was only looking out for a payday at Right to Rise. “People can be and maybe should be very cynical about our profession of political consulting,” Stutzman continued. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t patriots to what we think is important to the country often.”

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

"It's not about money," Mike Murphy assured Jeb Bush. "I've got money."

It was late in the summer of 1999, and the 37-year-old strategist was explaining to his friend and trophy client why he had decided to sign on full-time with John McCain's fledgling presidential campaign. Just a year earlier, Murphy had played a key role in getting Jeb elected as governor of Florida — a marquee win for the hotshot consultant that had helped to solidify the Bush family's status as an American political dynasty. Now, however, he was preparing to spend the primaries locked in hand-to-hand combat with Dubya and his aides.

"I have a lot of respect for Mike Murphy, but I have no idea what the hell he is doing right now."

Jeb was more than a little miffed by his consultant’s fickle sense of loyalty and the tight spot it was putting him in. ("Look, I'm going to have to fire you," Bush reportedly told him. "It's my brother, Mike. What the hell can I do?") Still, Murphy insisted his decision wasn’t rooted in anything so crass as money or careerism.

"I've got one more of these left in me before I get old and bald and married," he reasoned. He simply wanted to enjoy it.

But for Murphy, the failed McCain bid was hardly a last hurrah: it was a launching pad. Aboard the campaign bus — famously nicknamed the "Straight Talk Express" — the gregarious consultant put his quick wit and subversive sense of humor to work, cementing his reputation among reporters as a reliable dispenser of colorful quotes.

Dan Schnur, McCain’s communications director, described Murphy’s indefatigable motor-mouth as an asset on the Straight Talk Express, allowing him to tag out McCain and keep reporters entertained while the candidate rested. “Normally when the candidate disappears behind the closed doors, the reporters wander off to find other things to think about,” Schnur said. “Mike was able to maintain their attention. Playing the second-half of a tag team in the back of a bus allowed McCain to maintain that straight talk persona for much longer periods of time.”

“To the Irish, talk is a dance, and that’s Mike Murphy,” said Alex Castellanos, a former partner and longtime friend of Murphy’s.

The Straight Talk Express may have failed to carry McCain to the White House in 2000, but Murphy rode it all the way to the bank. By the time his candidate dropped out, he had inked a multi-million-dollar deal to sell his consulting business (concluded in February, smack in the middle of the primary season); planted his name in every TV booker's rolodex as the GOP talking head with the barbed one-liners; and greased the Washington Post with enough unauthorized leaks and exclusives to fill a 6,000-word campaign postmortem.

When the Post story came out three days after McCain exited the race, some of Murphy's colleagues felt betrayed, viewing it as an egregious act of self-promotion. Based on two dozen interviews he did over six months with reporter Howard Kurtz, the feature cast Murphy, not McCain, as the chief protagonist of the race, and did much to mythologize the consultant, describing him as the “long-haired,” “subversive,” “shrewd,” “flamboyant” “emotional heart” of the upstart campaign.

“He was everywhere,” Kurtz wrote breathlessly, “mapping strategy, developing ads, polishing speeches, coaching the candidate and always, endlessly, spinning the press.”

“Nobody knew that he had been leaking to Kurtz for six months,” campaign manager Rick Davis told the New York Observer months later. “I think people were disappointed that they weren’t told about that.” (Davis declined to comment for this story, saying in an email, “You'll find plenty of people who will want to take shots at Mike and he probably deserves it. I’m not one to pile on.”)

Murphy’s tumultuous year continued on Rick Lazio’s New York Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. Facing a sitting first lady was a challenge in itself, one made more formidable by Lazio’s late entry into the race, but, according to a source familiar with the campaign, Lazio believed these problems were further exacerbated by Murphy.

In the final months of the campaign, Lazio had an invitation to appear on Jay Leno’s show, brokered by Murphy, who was Leno’s friend. But Lazio didn’t want to pause his campaign in New York to go to the West coast and preferred to go on The Late Show with David Letterman. The source says that, while Murphy told Lazio that he couldn’t get a commitment from Letterman, Lazio discovered after the election that there was “a long-standing request” for him to go on the show. The source concluded that Murphy had placed his relationship with Leno above the candidate. (Lazio’s campaign manager, Bill dal Col, disputes this account, arguing that, though there was a disagreement about Leno, he believes somebody else on the campaign would have found out about any offer from Letterman.) Lazio ultimately did not appear on either show.

The campaign also stands as an example of the argument that Murphy-run campaigns waste money. The source, who called Murphy a “swashbuckler,” recalls Lazio erupting over fruit baskets being sent to his hotel rooms at night. Despite the campaign’s prolific fundraising, the source says, the candidate worried about the impact of such luxuries on the culture of his campaign. Dal Col, for his part, vehemently denies the fruit basket allegation, saying that gratuitous treats were provided by hotels and contending that “Mike wouldn’t even know how to order a fruit basket, to tell you the truth.”

In the end, the campaign spent $40 million, a record for a losing Senate bid at the time.

Murphy returned to success on Mitt Romney’s 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts and then, in 2003, on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign in California, further establishing his status as a Republican with a talent for winning in blue states. With Schwarzenegger, a political novice, Murphy was able to display his talent as a “candidate-whisperer,” as another Schwarzenegger operative, Rob Stutzman told BuzzFeed News. (This is a skill rendered irrelevant during this cycle by his placement at the super PAC.)

Stutzman and pollster John McLaughlin recalled how Murphy fed lines to Schwarzenegger to be used in a debate against Arianna Huffington. At Murphy’s suggestion, Schwarzenegger put down Huffington with zingers like, “Arianna, a little more decaf” and ''I have a perfect part for you in Terminator 4.” Stutzman added that Murphy helped Schwarzenegger through a series of allegations that he had groped women, with the consultant advising the Hollywood star to express some remorse “without validating the specifics of some of the allegations.”

"Yes, I have behaved badly sometimes,” was Schwarzenegger’s line. “Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things I thought were playful that now I recognize that I have offended people.”

Murphy soon faced allegations of a minor scandal of his own, when a Boston Globe investigation found that his consulting company, DC Navigators, was holding funds from the sponsors of a fundraiser the firm threw for Romney during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It was never explained why the money, which was supposed to cover excess catering costs, was not sent to the event’s caterer.

With his attention turning to Hollywood and his blossoming career as a media commentator, Murphy remained neutral in the 2008 primaries, which featured his former clients Romney and McCain. He didn’t work for McCain during the general election either, choosing to retain his pundit’s perch and deliver a regular stream of call-em-like-I-see-em commentary on the candidacy of his one-time boss. His unfiltered horserace analysis struck many in the candidate’s orbit as unnecessarily harsh, and his excoriation of the campaign, including for its decision to tap Sarah Palin as the venerable senator’s running mate, was enough to make McCain stop talking to him, according to the The New York Times.

When Murphy returned to politics for the 2010 California governor’s race, his Hollywood aspirations and political work became inauspiciously intertwined. The consultant had been courted heavily by prospective candidate Steve Poizner, and Murphy appeared ready to sign on — but at the last minute he bailed, explaining that he was “tired of politics.” Two days after breaking the news to the Poizner campaign over email, Murphy’s production company received a $1 million investment from former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who was preparing to self-finance her own gubernatorial bid. Murphy rediscovered his passion for politics and signed on with her campaign, which would go on to spend an astronomical $178 million — the most costly non-presidential race in United States history. Whitman ended up losing by 13 points in the general, and her campaign is often cited as a textbook case of consultant class grifters.

After Obama’s election in 2008, Murphy began aggressively preaching a gospel of big-tent Republicanism — escalating his war on Palin in the 2010 midterms, slamming Romney’s stance on immigration in the 2012 primaries, grimly warning that a political "ice age" was about to hit the party, and voicing an anxiety that in 2016 Republicans would nominate a conservative version of George McGovern, the ultra-liberal Democrat who suffered a landslide defeat against Richard Nixon in 1972. In these forecasts, Murphy cast his present client and chief target, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, on the same side, as Clintonian figures with the potential to modernize the GOP. The person he chose for the role of McGovern was the newly elected senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.

“We would re-set the clock to zero,” Murphy said in 2013 of the disaster scenario of a Cruz nomination, before adding, thoughtfully, “which might be what we need.”

You'll find plenty of people who will want to take shots at Mike and he probably deserves it. I’m not one to pile on.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse took his anti-Trump campaign from Iowa and his recent Twitter war with the real estate mogul to a gathering of some of the biggest donors in the Republican Party Saturday evening — and they loved it.

Speaking on a panel about the need to protect free speech, Sasse — who until recently was little known outside of his home state and Washington, D.C. — impressed donors attending the semi-annual meeting of the Koch brothers' political network with his constitutional knowledge and critique of big government. But the first-term senator, who also attended a Koch network seminar last year, drew the loudest cheers and applause when he took on Trump.

At first, Sasse joked, "We had a bet — I think I'm losing right now — how far could we go before the name of the Republican frontrunner was mentioned, so I won't exactly mention him yet."

But within seconds, he went on to try explain Trump's popularity with the GOP base to donors — many of whom have been dumbfounded by the billionaire's rise and how to take him down.

Sasse campaigned with Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in Iowa last week in an effort to get a GOP presidential nominee other than Trump, and in recent days has targeted the Republican front-runner's past policy positions — along with the length of his fingers.

"First of all, I was worried when we were told that this event was business casual and we couldn't wear ties, and we didn't even need to wear coats," Sasse said. "I felt the need to dress up since last night Mr. Trump decided to attack me on Twitter as someone who looks more like a gym rat."

"I viewed it as high praise," he said, drawing laughs and applause from the crowd.

On a more serious note, Sasse continued: "I want to distinguish between two aspects of this moment. I believe that Mr. Trump is actually a very, smart articulate man. And I think he's incredibly strategic about what he's doing. And there's a lot that's terribly broken in Washington, and he's good at diagnosis."

"So many times his blunt speech is actually accurate about certain kinds of problems he's identifying, so there are many people — again I'm totally new to politics... I know that there are lots of people in my family who are supporting Mr. Trump — not in my nuclear family, but in my extended family," he said.

When he was interrupted by another panelist constitutional lawyer David French, who said his parents were supporting Trump, Sasse joked, "I feel like it's just becoming an AA group. I'm David French and I know someone who is voting for Trump," before going back to his tough talk on Trump.

"I know across my state there are lots and lots of people who voted for me who are now in the Trump camp," he said. "Trump leads by 5 in Iowa and that appears to be his smallest lead in the nation, so I want to be clear that I think there are lots of people who are supporting Trump for reasons that are understandable on the diagnosis side of the ledger -- that's a completely different thing from what a solution is."

"Because I want to make America great again, and the way to make America great again is not by abandoning the constitutional limits and saying to some guy, 'Would you be our king?' And I think that's a lot of what's happening in our electorate right now," Sasse said. "We can't give Trump a pass when we don't know what he stands for."

Sasse was speaking to about 500 donors attending an event hosted by Freedom Partners, which is the political umbrella group of the Koch brothers. BuzzFeed News was one of six news organizations to accept an invitation to cover the event after agreeing to a set of ground rules proposed by the network, including not identifying the donors attending unless they agreed to an interview.

Billionaire David Koch, chairman of the board of the conservative Americans for Prosperity (AFP) advocacy group, in 2011.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Freedom Partners Action Fund, Inc. — the super PAC affiliated with the Koch network — brought in $11.1 million in the second half of 2015, with top GOP donors writing six- and seven-figure checks ahead of the 2016 election.

The group spent only about $200,000 during the same time period and ended the year with $14.8 million in the bank, according to reports the group will file with the Federal Election Commission on Sunday.

The filing was first shared with reporters at the network's annual winter meeting, where BuzzFeed News is one of six news organizations that agreed to cover the event under certain ground rules set by the Freedom Partners, the organization hosting the semi-annual event.

Top donors, including billionaire Charles Koch, Dallas-based businessman Darwin Deason, Amway co-founder Richard and Helen Devos, oil tycoon Paul Foster, coal-mining executive Richard Gilliam, billionaire hedgefund manager Ken Griffin, Wisconsin-based businesswoman Diane Hendricks, and media mogul Stan Hubbard, were among the top donors to the group.

The political network affiliated with Charles and David Koch was until recently only made up of nonprofits that don't have to disclose their donors, but officials created a super PAC last year as part of their broader effort to be more transparent. Unlike politically active nonprofits, super PACs have to file regular reports including names of their donors and their spending with the FEC.

MSNBC

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews apologized during his show Thursday night ahead of the Republican debate, after wondering who would want to watch a Donald Trump-less debate with "two Cubans" — Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

"It had nothing to do with the point I was making and came off as condescending, even derogatory," Matthews said. "It sounded like I was putting them down because of their background. It was raw and insensitive and not just to the good Cuban-American people who have found freedom and pride in this country. Important groups which I respect have called me on it and have been right to do so. I'm sorry I said it."

The apology came after internal complaints were raised at the network by Hispanic and non-Hispanic employees, according to conversations with eight NBCUniversal employees in the company's various news divisions. (NBCUniversal is an investor in BuzzFeed; this reporter once worked for the now defunct NBC Latino, and criticized its closure.)

The remarks are the second time Matthews has been criticized for comments he made about Rubio and Cruz. In November, he questioned whether they are truly Hispanic, calling them "Cuban nationals."

"People have been going to management, not just Latino employees, but people have been going to management and complaining sort of like 'What the fuck? Did that really happen on our air?'" an NBC employee said.

Many of the people at NBC that spoke with BuzzFeed News posed the hypothetical of what would have happened had Matthews been talking about someone else. "Can you imagine if someone said what's up with two old white people debating among the Democrats? Or two Jewish people or two black people?" a second staffer said.

The remarks come amid MSNBC's long-running attempts to keep its talent and voice in line with its diverse, progressive brand. The channel has occasionally had to apologize, as for a 2014 segment meant to educate viewers about Cinco de Mayo which went off the rails when it featured a producer donning a sombrero, shaking a maraca, and stumbling around acting like he was drinking from a tequila bottle, and more recently over NBC News executive Deborah Turness using the term "illegals" during a meeting with Hispanic lawmarkers angry over Donald Trump hosting Saturday Night Live.

Critics have also pressed for more diversity at the channel and across broadcast and cable news. A spokesman for MSNBC declined a BuzzFeed News request for comment, but the cable network has long been heavily watched by black viewers. Last summer, Lester Holt became the first African-American solo anchor on a network news program in history. Just three people of color, Jose Diaz-Balart, Tamron Hall, and Al Sharpton, anchor MSNBC shows.

Matthews's remarks reopened a sensitive subject, and drew criticism across the board — from Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as Spanish-language giants Univision and Telemundo in news reports, the latter of which is part of NBCUniversal.

Democratic donor Freddy Balsera, who called the comments "bigoted" in a tweet, told BuzzFeed News, "If we as progressives project ourselves as people who fight for equality and civil rights, then it can’t just be talk. We have to conduct ourselves in that fashion. It’s not a funny comment," he said.

"By the way, these are two people I thoroughly disagree with, it's not like I want to hear them," Balsera said, referring to Cruz and Rubio. "But these are two Americans, not two Cubans."

Republican Carlos Gimenez, the Cuban-American mayor of Miami-Dade County called the remarks "antiquated" and said they showed "bigotry and ignorance." Alfonso Aguilar, who led a Hispanic Republican effort to bash Trump and Cruz because of their immigration rhetoric before previous GOP debates, said Matthews comments were "offensive to all Hispanics and especially those of Cuban origin."

Posting an unflattering photo of Matthews before his apology, Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas wrote, "Why am I not surprised? He should apologize but probably won't," adding in Spanish, "As if it wasn't enough to hear racist comments from candidates now we also have to hear them from journalists." Univision aired a follow-up segment Friday, after covering the initial remark. Meanwhile on Telemundo, anchor Maria Celeste said there was criticism from the Hispanic community of Matthews's remarks in a broadcast.

Internally, meanwhile, there was a new wave of recriminations.

"There's embarrassment and shame at the things that we’ve done," an NBC source said. "No one here has malice towards Latinos but we keep shooting ourselves in the foot."

Employees suggested the uproar would be bigger internally if more people felt it would make a difference, with some noting with frustration that the sombrero-clad producer from the Cinco de Mayo segment, Louis Bergdorf, now plays a prominent role on the show Way Too Early.

"Why this is all offensive is because of the tense environment Latinos are living in right now," a third NBC employee said. "The bigger issue is no one bothers to say anything because they feel no one will be held accountable."

The latest incident comes months after Latino groups mobilized after a fall report that Diaz-Balart would be the odd man out of lineup changes at the network, by having his show cut from two hours to one or being canceled. At the time Alex Nogales of the National Hispanic Media Coalition spoke with MSNBC president Phil Griffin who reassured him that the report was inaccurate.

“Jose is a highly valued part of the network and we expect him to continue to be for a long time," an MSNBC source said at the time.

In fact, Diaz-Balart is a permanent member of the rotation of anchors for the Saturday edition of the Nightly News on NBC News and is a regular Meet the Press contributor.

Felix Sanchez, chairman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda’s (NHLA) media committee, which sent a letter to the network after the erroneous report, said the network has repeatedly said it wants to be better at diversity and Latino representation.

"There's a history of an apologia mentality," he said of the network. "'Let’s sin and then let’s ask for forgiveness.'"

Nogales, who has had some of those conversations with Griffin and NBC executives, said he has been upset with all things NBC after SNL had Trump on as a host, but said he believes Griffin cares about the network doing better when it comes to Latino representation.

"I have great confidence in Phil Griffin, he has proven himself to be a good leader," Nogales said. "He really gets it, he tries to have his people be equitable."

"He could say to his people 'Goddamn it, don’t say these things or you’re going to get us into trouble,'" he said. "But how do you control someone like Chris Matthews?"

Let freedom fries ring!

With the Iowa Caucuses on Monday night, Ted Cruz may have just discovered a crucial voting bloc: children who cannot vote.

Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

At rallies on Saturday and Sunday, Cruz thanked his wife, Heidi, for introducing him and then delivered this message to "all the school aged kids" in the crowd:

vine.co

"When Heidi's first lady, french fries are coming back to the cafeteria!" he said to cheers.

"The last I checked the cardboard was supposed to be on the tray and not in the food!"

Mary Altaffer / AP

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Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Donald Trump bet big on his presidential campaign in the final months of 2015, loaning the presidential effort $10.8 million according to federal filings disclosed on Sunday night.

The billionaire came under fire last year for repeatedly claiming he’d been self-funding his campaign when his campaign was mostly relying on donations — and continuing to claim that after it had pointed out that he wasn't.

In the fourth quarter, he was still fundraising: He raised an additional $2.6 million — the majority of which came from small-dollar donors.

Regardless of where the money's coming from, Trump's spending a lot on hats. The campaign has spent $405,038.84 on hats — more than the combined expenditures of Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore. (Those hats are produced in a California factory where many of the employees are Hispanic or even immigrants.)

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

DES MOINES, Iowa — Republican casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam donated the maximum amount permitted to Ted Cruz's campaign last quarter, Federal Election Commission records released on Sunday show.

The Adelsons donated $2,700 each to the Cruz campaign on Nov. 18. The news arrives on the eve of the Iowa caucuses — a seemingly make-or-break moment for Cruz, who hopes to defeat Donald Trump.

After publication of this story, Sheldon Adelson's political adviser Andy Abboud told BuzzFeed News in an email, "The Adelsons gave to several candidates. Nobody has been endorsed."

Sheldon Adelson is among the most, if not the most sought-after donor in Republican presidential politics, and his intentions in 2016 have been the subject of much speculation. The Adelsons spent close to $100 million in the 2012 election, of which $20 million went to Newt Gingrich's super PAC.

Sheldon Adelson favors candidates who align with his fiercely pro-Israel views. He and Miriam Adelson have been said to be deciding between Marco Rubio — who locked up another important pro-Israel donor in Paul Singer in October — and Cruz. BuzzFeed News reported last year that Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-American doctor who is very influential within the Adelson's political operations, is a fan of Cruz. Miriam Adelson “loves her some Ted Cruz,” one person familiar with her comments last spring told BuzzFeed News at the time.

Sheldon Adelson has indicated he likes Cruz in the past; he gave Cruz a standing ovation after a speech he gave in May at a dinner for The World Values Network, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s organization.

Others in the Adelson family donated to Rubio, the latest FEC reports also show

Miriam Adelson's daughter from a previous marriage, Yasmin Lukatz, and her husband Oren each gave $2700 to the Rubio campaign on December 7. Patrick Dumont, the husband of Miriam Adelson's other daughter Sivan Ochshorn, also maxed out to the Rubio campaign.

LINK: The Most Important Republican Donor That You Don’t Know Is Married To One You Do

BuzzFeed News political correspondents Ruby Cramer, McKay Coppins, Evan McMorris-Santoro, and Rosie Gray are reporting from Iowa, along with Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith and U.K. political reporter Jim Waterson.

View Entire List ›

Scott Olson / Getty Images

INDIAN WELLS, California — On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, hundreds of GOP donors gathered in the California desert were trying to make sense of the presidential primary, nervously awaiting Monday night's results and plotting their next move in case Donald Trump actually pulls off a win.

The donors attending the semiannual gathering of the political network affiliated with the Koch brothers — the largest one yet with about 500 attendees — were briefed behind closed doors on the 2016 landscape and on of each of the presidential candidates' policy positions early Sunday morning by two of the top officials from the Koch network. Although the seminar stuck to policy during the 2016 briefing, presidential politics and the future of the party were on the minds of a lot of the donors.

"Absolutely, we're worried about Trump," said Liz Wright, a Denver-based donor who is backing Sen. Marco Rubio, in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "If he is the nominee, then who knows what will happen?"

Her husband, Chris Wright, who is the CEO of an energy company, added, "He doesn't believe in freedom at all. He's not a Republican, and he's hurting our brand."

But should donors have taken Trump more seriously early on and launched a campaign against him? "What could we have done?" Liz Wright responded. "Everything Trump said the media ate it up. Everyone is shocked."

Despite Trump rankling donors for months, the Kochs’ political network and its members were reluctant to do anything that might cause him to launch a third-party bid, sources said this weekend. Also, there was concern that attacks from the Koch brothers and their allies could have potentially added to Trump's momentum and his populist appeal with the GOP base.

But some donors, like the Wrights, said they're still hopeful that once the field narrows and it comes down to about three candidates, then an anti-Trump campaign could actually be effective.

"Our view is that Trump has a high floor and low ceiling," Chris Wright added. "But we'll be worried if there are lots of candidates for a long time.”

The Koch network has already spent about $400 million of the $889 million it intends to spend on conservative causes and candidates in the run-up to the 2016 election. BuzzFeed News was one of six news organizations to accept an invitation to cover this weekend’s gathering after agreeing to a set of ground rules, including not identifying attendees unless they agreed to be interviewed.

None of the presidential candidates attended this weekend's gathering, but donors got a refresher on their public statements on certain policies, including "fiscal responsibility, reducing barriers to opportunity, and keeping America safe," during the briefing, according to a schedule provided to donors.

No candidate aligns perfectly with the Koch network's principles, but five of them meet enough of the criteria: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, and Jeb Bush.

Unsurprisingly, Trump does not.

The billionaire has not only frustrated donors with his rise in polls at the expense of other candidates, but also with his quick change in policy positions based on his audience. In the candidate survey Trump's campaign filled out for Freedom Partners, the umbrella organization of allied Koch groups, he said he was against ethanol subsidies, according to a network official.

But while campaigning in Iowa, Trump quickly reversed his position.

"Where are the ethanol people?" he asked the crowd in Des Moines at an event in December. "With the ethanol, really, [Cruz has] gotta come a long way because he's right now for the oil."

Donors say they haven't questioned the network's strategy of sitting out the GOP presidential primary and not going after Trump, but in recent weeks many of them have raised questions about the pro-Bush super PAC spending millions against Rubio — a move that has angered many who believe the former Florida governor's allies are taking out the only establishment candidate who has a shot of winning the GOP nomination over Trump.

Harry McMahon, an investment banking executive and Bush backer, insisted it was too early to write off Bush, but he didn't fully endorse the super PAC's decision to attack Rubio.

"The tactics of these super PACs are difficult to understand," he said in an interview. "You can infer from what they are doing that there's a fight for third place. But it sure does seem like a lot of money."

When asked if Bush should drop out depending on the results in New Hampshire, McMahon said he thought that might still be too early in an unpredictable election year. "I believe his supporters are sensible enough that once it becomes clear, they will make the tough decision."

Greg Lucier, a biotech executive who has given to both Bush and Rubio, is still holding out hope that support in the polls will not translate to actual votes. "We have to see who actually ends up voting for Trump, and then we can figure out how to respond."

But if it does, Lucier said donors should look beyond the federal level. "I don't mean to minimize the federal election. But focus on the state level, where real change can actually happen.”

Although the GOP primary was a big part of the chatter among donors, it was largely ignored during keynote speeches and forums that were open to reporters.

In an hour-long presentation Sunday afternoon, Charles Koch explained in broad strokes a "framework" he believes America desperately needs to get back on track. But Koch refrained from getting into presidential politics, mentioning only Sen. Bernie Sanders once, as he discussed how "cronyism" has caused socialism to become popular again.

"This is why socialism is so important and growing in this country, and why Bernie Sanders is so popular because a lot of what he says is true," he said. "The business people who are successful haven't become successful because they helped others improve their lives. It's because they helped rig the system. So if you're a young person and you see this and say, 'Well the government has made them all this money, then why do we need them as an intermediary? The government ought to just take it over.”

He then quickly moved on to the role of education and academic freedom.

Hours away from the caucuses, Koch steered clear of Trump.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Bernie Sanders took the stage for the final time before the day of the Iowa caucuses Sunday night, hoping that his campaign can capture the same insurgent, outsider spirit that lifted President Obama over his “inevitable” rival Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Sanders has attempted to draw a direct line between his candidacy and Obama’s, telling Iowa crowds last week his campaign is facing similar attacks from the Clinton machine that Obama did as his numbers rose in the weeks before the 2008 caucuses.

On Sunday, Sanders told Meet the Press that Obama has done a “fantastic job” as president and rejected the idea that Obama has left progressives disappointed.

But Clinton supporters and some Obama veterans have accused Sanders of trying to whitewash his past as a pointed liberal Obama critic for months. On Sunday, former architects of Obama’s 2008 revolution pointed out repeatedly on Twitter that Sanders wrote the lone blurb on the cover progressive pundit Bill Press’s new book about the Left and Obama called Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down.

“Lending your name & endorsement to this critique is no small thing in the heat of an election to replace Pres Obama,” tweeted former top Obama campaign aide David Plouffe. Other Obama campaign heavyweights tweeted similar takes. Ben LaBolt tweeted about the book. Dan Pfeiffer tweeted criticism of Sanders for campaigning with activist professor Cornel West, known for his scorching criticisms of the president from the Left. Bill Burton joined in that critique.

(West, a top Sanders surrogate for a while now, has tried to put distance between his previous language about the president and his current support for Sanders. “That’s in the past,” he told BuzzFeed News in November.)

It’s no secret that progressives were at times during Obama’s term in office extremely frustrated with the president. The activists Obama’s press secretary once dismissed as the “professional left” were dismayed by the president’s pace in evolving toward support for marriage equality, by White House efforts to strike a “grand bargain” with congressional Republicans that might have included entitlement cuts, by the administration’s long slog toward finally rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, and by his stepped-up deportation policy even after the expected Republican support for a massive immigration bill fizzled and all but disappeared.

That stuff, for the most part, was first-term Obama. The pen-and-phone Obama era, in which the White House was either confrontational or completely dismissive of the Republican Congress, has brought a warm welcome from that same professional Left. Liberals are happy — or at least happier than they were — with Obama. And now talk among the most powerful liberal activists is about preserving Obama’s legacy in 2016 more than it is about correcting his mistakes.

Clinton has spent the closing weeks of the Iowa race embracing Obama as closely as she can: She praises him at every stop, and has even mentioned him as a possible Supreme Court nominee. She is trying to run for the Obama mantle — to say that her brand of pragmatism is the only way to preserve what Obama has gained for the Left and to expand on it.

Sanders, meanwhile, has essentially made the case that he would carry forward the real Obama legacy — the promise of a new politics and a resurgent Left Obama offered.

That pitch, however, appeals too to progressives that still think Obama fell short.

A top Sanders supporter — the woman who runs the organization behind the lone super PAC supporting Sanders's bid for the White House — was not sparing when explaining her frustrations with Obama in an interview with BuzzFeed News in Iowa.

RoseAnn DeMoro, the longtime executive director of the National Nurses Union, was a speaker at Sanders's end-of-caucus rally. The NNU, the largest nurses union in America, backed Sanders early and has pushed for him hard. NNU Nurses are everywhere in Iowa Sanders is. The union is extremely activist, extremely liberal (it endorsed Ralph Nader over Al Gore in 2000) and very much a part of the Sanders machine.

DeMoro wants Sanders to be a different kind of Democrat than Obama was.

“People keep asking what's the distinction between Obama’s campaign and Bernie Sanders' campaign,” she said. “It’s pretty simple: Wall Street was Obama’s number-one funder. And Bernie has nothing to do with Wall Street.”

DeMoro said she blames Obama’s supporters for his having let the likes of former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner into his White House.

Sanders has one ongoing public problem with Obama — one he’s mentioned in speeches a number of times and speaks about publicly often.

“Obama’s biggest political mistake that he made is after his brilliant campaign in 2008 was that he basically said to the millions of people who supported him, ‘Thanks for getting me elected, I will take it from here,’” Sanders told MSNBC last September. “I will not make that mistake.”

DeMoro said she blames Obama's supporters — herself included — for the failure.

“The Obama movement abandoned him,” she said. “The base disappeared.”

In their place, she said, “we allowed Wall Street to get in the doors."

“They're like termites. They eroded the foundation of our democracy," DeMoro said.

“I don't blame Obama; I blame us,” she said. “And that's not going to happen again.”

And DeMoro gave voice to Sanders' id in Des Moines, going further than him and pushing harder on Clinton.

DeMoro drew loud boos for Hillary Clinton at the rally Sunday, where she quoted the former secretary of state’s skepticism about Sanders's single-payer health care plan, and called it “disgraceful.”

She reserved particular scorn, though, for Clinton hatchet man David Brock, who has been cited in coverage casting the Nurses’ support as just another outside group, and casting sanders's independence into doubt.

Brock is “sexist to the core” and “an asshole,” she said after her speech.

DeMoro, whose union has long been a stalwart of the militant Left, also said she sees Sanders' campaign as unprecedented.

"I've never seen anything like this — never," she said.

Mike Huckabee said this about Ted Cruz: “What I find troubling is when a person changes their view based on which way the polls go or changes their speeches based on where they are geographically.”

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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, in a Friday interview, defended Donald Trump's changing position on abortion while attacking Ted Cruz for changing his views based on polling.

Asked on NewsMax Prime why he hasn't been critical of Trump's shift from being pro-abortion rights to anti-abortion, the former Arkansas governor said, "The difference is Donald Trump has certainly changed his view on abortion, he is pro-life now, but you know his view evolved over 20 years, not 20 months, or 20 minutes."

It's unclear when Trump shifted his views on abortion. He supported partial-birth abortion at one point in 1999 (before changing his mind on the procedure that same year), and cited a friend's personal choice to not have an abortion as a factor in why he changed his mind.

In the past week, Cruz and his backers have sought to highlight Trump's past position on abortion, launching a television ad featuring a 1999 Meet The Press interview in which Trump described himself as "pro-choice in every respect."

Huckabee, who in the final days before the Iowa caucuses has criticized Cruz for his tithing practices, labeling him a "phony" Christian, described the Texas senator in the interview on Friday as someone who changes his views based on polls or where he is speaking.

"What I find troubling is when a person changes their view based on which way the polls go or changes their speeches based on where they are geographically," said Huckabee, saying his stump speech was the same in Manhattan and Iowa.

"I just think that if a person is going to be consistent then you don't change what you say depending on where you are," said Huckabee. "And quite frankly, if Ted claims that he's the outsider, look at where the money comes from."

Huckabee said Cruz is a "wholly-owned subsidy of corporate interests."

“I don’t think I’m so tough,” Trump said in 2006.

Republican presidential frontrunner and noted flip-flopper Donald Trump has made being tough a hallmark of his candidacy.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Here's a sampling:

View Entire List ›

This is what happens when you spend an hour in an Iowa hotel room wading through political TV ads. BuzzFeed UK’s Jim Waterson is in the US for the primary season.

Watching TV in Iowa has become completely insufferable, due to the nonstop barrage of TV ads.

As a British person in Iowa, nothing quite prepares you for the sheer overwhelming nauseating sensation of high-powered and completely contradictory political messages being chucked out of the TV screens every 30 seconds during the caucus season.

In the UK we have tight restrictions on politicians buying adverts on TV and radio: They can't. Instead, each political party gets a handful of five-minute slots provided to them by public broadcasters during election periods, for which they produce boring and worthy films that no one watches or gives a damn about.

In the space of an hour there were at least 17 political adverts, many of them running side-by-side with directly contradictory messages, sometimes beside identical messages from associated super PACs, and sometimes just repeatedly hammering the same message until any sane person would want to turn off the TV.

First up: an advert about how people love Bernie Sanders, soundtracked by Simon & Garfunkel's "America".

You can tell they love Bernie because the signs say "We Love Bernie".

TV

This cuts to a shot of a small child stealing an animal, all in the name of politics.

TV

View Entire List ›

Joshua Lott / Getty Images

DES MOINES — At a rally on Saturday night in Sioux City, two days before the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz gave a show of force.

The introductory speeches lasted well over an hour. There was Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and Rep. Steve King, two key endorsements for Cruz who have accompanied him to many campaign events here. Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots came on to endorse Cruz, and brought along several activists from her group to talk about their support for the candidate. Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson gave a stemwinder that resulted in people in the audience making duck calls. Glenn Beck spoke for over 30 minutes in a dramatic address that at one point involved his producing what he said was George Washington’s copy of Don Quixote.

The rally encapsulated everything that makes Cruz seem like someone who was made in a lab to win Iowa. Cruz delivered the same message he has given for months here, where he has stumped with discipline and hit upon a hardline religious conservative message that resonates with the evangelical voters who are so key to winning Iowa. His campaign prides itself on its ability to reach and turn out voters in this state, has locked up high-profile endorsements both in Iowa and the wider conservative movement, and marginalized other evangelical candidates.

Cruz has done everything right. Yet he is no sure thing to win on Monday — a potential rejection of everything we thought we knew about Iowa politics, or if he does win, a reaffirmation of the state’s fundamentals.

The final Des Moines Register poll on Saturday showed Cruz trailing Donald Trump by five points, and he’s been lagging behind Trump — the man who rejects retail politics, who’s known for money and women and celebrity, and who jets in and out for huge rallies — in other polls, too. The Trump phenomenon may simply be too strong and anomalous.

“If the Trump surge does happen it’s completely logical that the Cruz campaign could do everything right when it comes to uniting every anti-establishment Republican in the state, building this incredible coalition with a massive grassroots operation and cutting-edge analytics and data, and they hit their win number and it still isn’t enough if the Trump surge happens,” said Matt Strawn, former chair of the Iowa Republican Party.

Part of the reason why the lack of retail doesn’t seem to hurt Trump, Strawn said, is because he could be bringing new people into the process who don’t necessarily have the same expectations of candidate contact as seasoned caucusgoers.

Trump has broken all the rules for how a winning candidate in Iowa behaves. He only started doing retail stops recently, with a visit to a Pizza Ranch and an out-of-character stay in a Holiday Inn Express, as well. Trump has typically flown in and out of the state in a single day, holding one or two large rallies where he speaks from behind a podium, shakes some hands on the rope line and then leaves. His campaign is thin on the middle school cafeteria town halls and Casey’s General Store swing-bys that characterize other campaigns.

Cruz has criticized Trump for this style of campaigning, and has said multiple times that Iowa cannot be won from a TV studio in Manhattan.

Much has been made of Cruz’s operation in Iowa. Cruz himself, who is fond of talking about campaign process, has said his 2012 Senate campaign was modeled on Barack Obama’s: a robust, active organization that valued data. The campaign says it has 12,000 volunteers who are averaging 20,000 phone calls a day and knocking on 2,000 doors a day. His campaign has engaged everything from out-of-state volunteers housed in a dormitory nicknamed “Camp Cruz” to “psychographic targeting” data analytics — all written about extensively in the press — to target caucusgoers.

While Cruz has painstakingly targeted the right kinds of voters for his campaign, Trump has gone for the unlikelier caucusgoer.

“Donald Trump has remade the electorate in the image he needs to be successful,” Strawn said. “So I think if you were to take any lesson, it’s that you don’t have to accept the Iowa caucus electorate as it is.” (Cruz himself has “brought together a lot of factions that don’t normally play in the same sandbox,” Strawn pointed out, citing Cruz’s going after Rand Paul supporters.)

Though Trump is obviously the main agent of chaos disrupting Cruz’s path to victory, there’s also the strong possibility that previous Iowa caucus winners Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee are siphoning off enough support from him to weaken him just enough for Trump to emerge as the winner.

And not everyone agrees Cruz has done everything right. Craig Robinson, the author of the Iowa Republican blog and frequent Cruz critic, told BuzzFeed News he didn’t think Cruz had hit certain areas of Iowa that he should have, despite the fact that Cruz is completing the “full Grassley” of hitting all 99 counties on Monday.

“On the surface, he has checked all the boxes and even at the start of the race he was tailor-made for Iowa because his brand of politics matches the caucus electorate to a T,” Robinson said. But it “blows my mind,” Robinson said, that “here you have a strong social conservative candidate who the last time he was in Oskaloosa was October, last time he was in Pella was in June.” Robinson pointed out that these are areas where Cruz endorser Vander Plaats “owned” when he ran for governor.

There are “different expectations” for Trump, Robinson said, as “people accept the fact that Trump was going to campaign like a frontrunner and never get to some of the more rural spots in Iowa.”

Another potential issue, and one on which Cruz actually bucks the typical Iowa playbook: Cruz’s refusal to support the Renewable Fuel Standard, which has led to constant badgering by pro-ethanol lobbyists and audience questions at nearly every stop on the trail.

“He has taken a real battering from the ethanol industry,” said David Yepsen, a longtime former Des Moines Register reporter and Iowa politics expert. “What might have been had Cruz not taken that stance?”

“Everything we know about politics as usual for at least this cycle is different, because of a candidate like Donald Trump,” said Vander Plaats in an interview with BuzzFeed News on Thursday. Vander Plaats blamed “his celebrity status” and “all the free media” for Trump’s omnipresence.

Fellow Cruz endorser Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, cautioned in an interview with BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that the caucuses still require a different kind of campaigning than a primary.

“The caucuses are different than the primaries and it takes a little more effort to have people come together, so we’ll see,” Perkins said. But “I would never underestimate Donald Trump.”

Iowa is not a great sample of the American people and “ultra-conservatives” scare off rational, undecided independents, he tweeted in 2012.

Donald Trump Jr. Instagram

Via Twitter: @search

Via Twitter: @search

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Cringe.

So as you know, Sarah Palin has been in the public eye recently after throwing her hat in the ring as an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump for president.

Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images

But soon after she announced she was backing the real estate mogul for president, Palin found herself surrounded in controversy after her oldest son was arrested on suspicion of assault.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Track Palin was arrested in Alaska on Jan. 18 after allegedly striking his girlfriend and handling a gun while drunk.

Palin then angered a ton of people by blaming her son's alleged behavior to PTSD he suffered in the military, and linking it to President Obama's treatment of U.S. troops.

Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images

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Trump in Las Vegas last December.

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

The American political media notoriously packs this Iowa city every four years, driving mid-tier hotel room rates past $600 and making it impossible to get a reservation at Lucca on a Sunday night.

This year, we in the media are debating what exactly is going on out there down the long roads out from the state capital, and here is the question confusing us: What kind of a phenomenon is Donald Trump?

“I can't help but wonder if his Twitter account is more effective at this point than a TV ad,” mused CNN’s senior media correspondent, Brian Stelter, Sunday.

Here’s the question: Is Trump the last great television showman, revenge of a dying medium on the next generation? Or is he the thick-fingered, 69-year-old avatar of something entirely new, a politics driven by Twitter trolling and your Florida uncle’s Facebook page, and operating outside the traditional guardrails of American politics?

The results of the Twitter poll on this question are in. And it appears, inevitably, that the answer is: both.

The rise of Trump points to something that those of us who have spent a long time fighting about the relative importance of TV and new media to politics didn’t quite anticipate: That rather than being at war with one another, the new medium and the old are locked in an awkward embrace.

A few years ago, we spent our time tweeting about what we saw on cable news. Now much of cable news amounts to reading Twitter aloud. Trump dominates and serves television, and he uses social media to program it.

This is not to say that 2016 hasn’t offered glimpses of post-television politics. I began this presidential campaign cycle with a essay about how Facebook would dominate it, and I could claim vindication in Bernie Sanders’ campaign. He has harnessed the Senate’s biggest Facebook page into a movement that has given him a lot more money and energy than his profile would suggest. Bill Bradley would have had more juice if he had had Facebook.

But Sanders can't quite seem to run away even with Iowa, which rejected Hillary Clinton soundly in 2008. She of the wooden tweets has hardly been swept aside by the new media forces.

Trump, meanwhile, offers strong evidence for the enduring power of television.

Trump is obsessed with TV. His failed 1980s fantasy project on Manhattan’s West Side was to be called Television City. He owes his national fame to The Apprentice.

“He is TV,” said Robert Costa, a Washington Post reporter who has covered Trump closely, and who I grabbed on his way out of a Des Moines coffee shop. He noted that he sometimes calls out camera angles from the stage, and occasionally uses the word “ratings” to mean “polls.”

Trump campaigns like a television producer, a veteran television producer noted with some admiration to me this weekend.

“As a video guy — everything you look for, he has it,” said the producer. “That staging, that flash, and he says 10 new things every day.”

These are the old TV values, and there’s little doubt at Trump’s strength in that old world. But Trump is a particularly good fit for the new world of TV, one that shapes itself in relation to the digital conversation.

TV, noted another cable news veteran, is in the process of trying to find distribution on Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.

“That means creating content optimized for social — which means less substantive stuff, and perfect for Trump,” he said. “This whole cycle is social media driving TV and vice versa.”

Trump is also much discussed on Facebook, and he tweets a lot; he has an as yet unused Snapchat account. But the extent to which the television networks have served Trump’s rise is a source of some embarrassment for their staffs. CNN President Jeff Zucker, who helped create The Apprentice at NBC and has seen Trump drive healthy ratings, has beaten back internal complaints about Trump’s place on the network.

Here on the ground in Des Moines, however, there are signs that the media is reconciling itself to handling the would-be strongman — whose dark talk about Muslims in America Hillary Clinton called “shameful” and “dangerous” in her closing speech Sunday night — like another member of the club.

Sunday, Trump offered warm, personal greetings to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the Bloomberg Politics chiefs and quasi-official faces of American political media — "Mark and John, their families are here. Great people," he told his crowd in Sioux City.

(The rest of the political press has directed a mix of puzzlement and rancor at Heilemann and Halperin, who are also the authors of Game Change. The hot press rumor this strange season is that the two have planted secret microphones around town in service of their Showtime documentary. A cross-section of Washington media types whispered about it at a party the two men co-hosted Sunday morning, and Heilemann told me with some frustration that the rumors are both “ridiculous” and “unequivocally false." "We are not recording anyone surreptitiously," he said.)

Their party, the Iowa Caucus Snowflake Garden Brunch, was held in a fancy old Des Moines building called the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates. The whole club — the American political-media elite — were there. And among their number were the Trump sons, Eric and Don, passing out business cards embossed in gold with the logo of their employer, the Trump Organization.

The young men were, by all accounts, very civilized, and welcomed into Washington’s transplanted society. They found common ground in discussing the Trumps' role in bringing the chef Laurent Tourondel’s restaurant, BLT Prime, to the District; the bistro took a place in the Trump International Hotel after an earlier chief decamped over Trump’s xenophobic remarks.

The Trump sons seemed particularly interested in meeting television producers.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Approximately 119 previous Jeb Bush donors gave to Marco Rubio for the first time in December.

That's part of an accelerating trend over the last few months as Bush's candidacy slowly tanked during the fall, according to a BuzzFeed News data analysis of the most recent campaign finance reports.

Because FEC filings are long and complex, we used a script that matched first name, last name, and zip code to identify the donors. That’s a decent rule of thumb, but not perfect; it doesn't account, for example, for people who moved between ZIP codes, for who donors misspelled their names, or for ZIP codes with multiple people with the same name. Hence, the word “approximately.”

And although it's not a huge number of donors, it's not insignificant either — the donors contributed approximately $249,500, per BuzzFeed News data analysis.

Here's how many former Bush donors Rubio appears to have picked up each of the past few months:

BuzzFeed News

Bush himself also appears to have picked up some donors who'd given to Rubio but never Bush in these months, but not as many as Rubio, and not on the same trajectory:

BuzzFeed News

During a debate in late October, Bush attacked Rubio's Senate voting attendance — an attack that Rubio responded to by telling his fellow Floridian, "The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you." Since then, Bush hasn't exactly backed away from the critique, and the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise has spent an estimated $20 million attacking Rubio.

Those attacks have been a long-reported source of discomfort for Bush donors, at least some of whom are also Rubio fans.

Elsewhere, Ted Cruz also picked up some Bush donors, albeit on a smaller scale as his candidacy took off in the final months of 2015. Again, these numbers are approximate: