Gets My Vote for Best Polit-Junkie Think-Piece of 2015
Ironically enough, this “awesome” post by Dan McLaughlin/@baseballcrank – under the clickbaity title “Military Strategist Explains Why Trump Leads — And Will Fail” – ventures far, “long-read” far, into theory and speculation only to return to where the intuitions of many political observers begin – i.e., Trump’s doomed, Rubio may have the best chance to go up against Hillary, who has known weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but shouldn’t be underestimated – in other words, something close to Conventional Wisdom, and the main betting scenario, for months now.
Still, even if McLaughlin’s final message is close to “nothing to see here, move along,” I don’t think any self-respecting blog-reading political junkie will want to have missed his deft, frequently humorous, well-researched, intellectually adventurous analysis of the main candidates’ strategies and tactics as revealed in relationship to Trump’s unexpected centrality to the process so far.
Here’s a “money quote” focused on the Trumpster’s longer term prospects:
While Trump’s hold on that 25 to 30 percent of the vote has been surprisingly consistent, national and early-state primary polls since Labor Day have shown no growth in his support. Meanwhile, an increasing number of potential GOP primary voters view Trump unfavorably. That suggests potential limits on his ability to scale his current voter base upwards as past frontrunners-turned-nominee have done—unless he can adjust his message to the needs of a changed battlefield dominated by voters not already on the Trump Train.
Instead, he seems determined to bask in the glow of the people already backing him, feeding them increasing quantities of what has already bound them to his candidacy. This is where the risk of a closed loop comes in, if Trump disdains polls and research of his own. If Trump keeps being gratified by crowd sizes, poll standing, and tweets showing him with a solid quarter of the public on his side, he will simply keep building a bigger wall between the voters he has and the voters he needs.
I still don’t think he’ll get the nod, in no small part because I still don’t think he wants to be the nominee. But the “25-30%” is either a little behind the times or wishful thinking. He’s been polling in the mid to high 30s nationally for a while now, and the most recent one I’ve seen has him at 41%. Obviously, that 41 might or might not turn out to be n aberration, but as everything I’ve seen written about him over the past half year has incorrectly described anything remotely going Trump’s way as a aberration whose bottom was likely to fall out in that current week, well…
As I said, I still don’t think he gets the nod. But from high teens to 41% in 6 months doesn’t seem so “nothing to see here.” It clearly means something.Report
I agree that it’s not “nothing to see here”. I wish it was.
Suppport levels in the high-20s in September/October are meaningless. But now? With at least a third of the vote, six weeks away from the first primaries, and with no close competitors? It’s getting harder to believe that this is just a flash in the pan. It’s going from annoying farce to genuine danger.Report
Well, I did hedge a bit: “close to,” “final message.” Plus “nothing to see here…” was not meant as an absolute measurement even within narrow bounds. Obviously, we all think there are some things to see in the phenomenon.
I still don’t see the Trump candidacy as “genuine danger.” At most, I’d put at it approaching the upper limits of “not to be considered genuine danger.”
Trump’s “vote” – that is, his standing in the polls – is at its highest point right now, put at 33% in the RCP poll of polls: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html
He seems to be the immediate beneficiary of the decline of Carson – an even more unlikely figure, also for a time a serviceable message-candidate from the despised masses to their betters, more like the 2012 flashes-in-the-pan. The proximity of the San Bernardino atrocity and his related negative PR coup no doubt helped.
Though the main point of this OTC was to commend the article to the attention of people who like that kind of thing, I do think McLaughlin does an excellent job of explaining how Trump specifically got where he is and why the R candidates – along with the rest of the American political class and intelligentsia – were and remain unable to find the magic spell to make him disappear, in this period before political dangers are genuinely genuine. On the last note, OG Saunders might be right that real people are already being harmed, or he may be exaggerating, or it may be that that degree of harm might be one price of a having a free society and a pre-primary system controlled by mass opinion.Report
I confess I didn’t follow the logic of his demise. It seemed to assume that as other candidates drop out Trump won’t collect their voters. But so far I see no evidence that’s true. This week, Cruz is surging. But can he surge past Trump? That very much remains to be seen.
And if Trump, Rubio, Cruz and Others persistently split votes cast 35 / 20 / 20 / 25, then it would seem to me that Trump should be the one piling up the delegates, especially in winner take all states.
Anyhow, it should be an interesting winter.Report
You had me at baseballcrank. But then you lost me at federalist.
Seriously, how many times does Ben Domenech have to be a complete disgrace before he goes the hell away for good?Report
Domenech’s darkly speckled past aside, he’s a smart commentator, and the Federalist publishes interesting work. His piece on Trump and white identity politics http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/21/are-republicans-for-freedom-or-white-identity-politics/ as a challenge to Republican conservatism was also one of the better analyses of the Trump phenomenon published this year. In a crucial way, he agreed more with Katherine and Tod than with McLaughlin:
He ended the piece on a pessimistic note:
Plenty on the Left seem ready to join Trump or his followers on this path, while sincerely believing they have the complete opposite in mind. Speaking of the Left, David Niewert’s historical analysis was more substantial than Domenech’s, but crucially in agreement on the main theme – so more support for Tod and Katherine – http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2015/11/donald-trump-may-not-be-fascist-but-he.html:
A little too ideological for my tastes, however, and not really aimed at “political junkies,” which was the category for this “award.”Report
“Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
If that second quote is meant to refer to Canada’s last decade of Reform-a-Tory Conservative government, I don’t know that I’d characterize it as enduringly “classically liberal”
I mean, yes, they tore furiously at many of the areas of government that aim to do good – environmental protection, financial regulation, anything resembling rehabilitation of prisoners, science, demographic analysis, protection of human rights, etc. So limited government, sort of.
Except that they also weren’t that big on the civil rights thing that I understand to be part of “classical liberalism” – it doesn’t go very well with the “tough on crime” thing. They worked hard to invent lots of new crimes to be tough on, and to increase the invasiveness of government at its most maximal – the incarceration of humans – in terms of percentage of the population so invaded, duration of invasion, and intensity of invasiveness.
And they bent branches of government that weren’t meant for the purpose, into tools of invasiveness – notably the PMO directing the revenue agency to target its audits toward NGOs whose political directions were opposed to Conservative party priorities.Report
Trump’s candidacy will simply blow away like the fart in a wind storm that it isReport
Frog? Is that you? If so, just tried to write you a couple of days ago, but your email’s changed.Report
hiya Tsar, hiya, hiyaReport
http://www.toytent.com/Characters/pics/6260-2.jpg
hiya Tsar, hiya, hiyaReport
well seeing as political forecasting has proven William Goldman right ‘no one knows nothing’, I doubt he will fade away, our own would be Silvio is typical of a time, when a leader has used the constitution as a scouring pad, rewriting law by diktat, capitulating to the Persians, to the priests of Moloch et al,Report
as opposed to which publication, hold such a sterling record, Carlos Slim’s organ grinders, the baby Voxers,
Bezo’s spread sheet, how about the Sinaloa Chamber of Commerce newsletter, (The Times, Vox, Washington Post and Rolling Stone,) in that orderReport