Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  Trump tried to tamp down the civil war on his right, first by issuing a list of possible Supreme Court nominations within days of his Indiana win. The list of conservative jurists was developed with assistance from the Heritage Foundation, and it sought to give conservatives a solid reason to be enthusiastic about Trump. Even if they had questions about Trump as president, they could hope that he would save the Court from liberal judicial activism. It was the first time he had fully leveraged the unique situation brought about by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which left a vacancy in the majority of what had frequently been a 5–4 Court. Weeks later, with the same objective— consolidating conservative Republican support—he named Mike Pence as his running mate. In between, though, he undid much of the benefit of his “pivot” to presidentialness by publicly attacking the judge in the Trump University civil case. Trump called Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “Mexican”—he was actually a second-generation American citizen born in Indiana—and wondered aloud if he could get a fair trial from him.43 The remarks bought Trump a drop in the polls and considerable criticism from Republican officials. It was not the first time he stepped on his own lines, and it would not be the last. If the Court list had quieted his critics on the right, the Curiel comments inflamed them, showing Trump again to be a loose cannon who was about to be handed the party’s nomination in an eminently winnable year.

  It did not matter. RNC Chair Reince Preibus took pains to disclaim any desire to overturn the will of the primary voters. The convention met in Cleveland, swatted down the proposed NeverTrump rules changes, nominated Trump and Pence without obstacle, and prepared for the fall. The major note of discord was introduced by Ted Cruz, who had been given a prime speaking slot just before Mike Pence’s acceptance speech. Cruz congratulated Trump on his nomination, but refrained from endorsing him by name, calling on viewers to “vote your conscience.” He left the stage to boos. Trump had succeeded in doing what almost no one thought possible when he announced his run a year earlier.

  AN OVERVIEW OF THE SURPRISE

  Overall, Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican nominating contest was little short of astounding. He had defeated sixteen talented rivals and won more primary votes than any previous Republican aspirant despite having no political experience, breaking most of the received rules of presidential campaigning, being opposed by the vast majority of Republican officeholders and veteran activists, trampling on multiple tenets of traditional Republican doctrine, and polling worse against the probable Democratic nominee than all of his chief competitors.

  Through his decisive win in Indiana, Donald Trump prevailed in twenty-seven state contests—twenty-five primaries and two caucuses—of the forty-two that were held. Ted Cruz won five primaries and six caucuses (if one includes Colorado, Wyoming, and North Dakota, where no first round results were tallied but Cruz was reported to have won the most delegates through the process), Marco Rubio one primary and one caucus, and John Kasich one primary. Through that point, Trump had won 40 percent of the total vote, Cruz 28 percent, and Kasich 14 percent.

  Consequently, it is tempting to dismiss Trump as simply a minority nominee. No examination of his victory can ignore the fact that nearly two-thirds of the Republican primary and caucus vote went to someone other than Trump when it mattered. Trump was a singular figure whose unique campaign had the good fortune to be competing against sixteen more conventional opponents, at least half a dozen of whom were strong contenders. Even in Indiana, the last stand of the last holdouts, anti-Trump Republicans never got the one-on-one contest against Trump that might have stopped him. Not until mid-March did conservative leaders meet in Washington to formulate a strategy for unifying in the face of the Trump threat—too little, too late.

  This recognition leads one to dwell on the potential importance of contingency. What if the GOP had swung behind Cruz after Wisconsin? If Kasich had left the race sooner? If Rubio had not been ambushed by Christie in New Hampshire? If Bush had not run, serving as an establishment lightning rod to Trump’s lightning, or run but not trained most of his fire on Rubio? If the rest of the field had taken the fight to Trump in the fall before he consolidated his lead in state after state?

  Though the fractured field is the beginning of understanding the Republican primary campaign, it cannot be the end. One still has to account for the 40 percent who supported Trump through Indiana and their enthusiasm. In this respect, it is clear that Trump’s coalition was broader than many credited, and much broader than anyone else’s. Geographically, he won in states including New Hampshire and Massachusetts, South Carolina and Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee, Michigan and Indiana, Nevada and Arizona, Missouri and Maryland, New York and Delaware—New England, the deep South, the peripheral South, the Midwest, Southwest, border states, and mid-Atlantic: industrial states, financial capitals, and agricultural heartland. Demographically and politically, Trump had a core support that he secured consistently: lower-income voters, the less educated, older voters, more secular voters, those angry with Washington and Republican leaders, and above all those who called change their first priority. But he often carried with him other groups as well. Likewise, he won the voters most concerned with immigration, but those were usually only around 10 percent of the electorate; he won the nomination by convincing the much larger number whose first issue was the economy or terrorism. Trump also pointed the way to a new kind of victorious Republican coalition, an alliance between the somewhat conservative and the moderates lubricated by his own ideological amorphousness and unspecificity on policy matters. It was the “Republican Party,” not the “conservative party,” Trump reminded people after Indiana.44

  Trump’s adversaries clearly misgauged his “ceiling” of support, which continued rising slowly through the primary season, and probably overestimated the degree to which the non-Trump vote was a reliably anti-Trump vote. Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich might have been right that each of the others were blocking them from forming an anti-Trump coalition, but it is far from obvious that the coalition each could have constructed would have included the supporters of all three candidates. By the end, exit polls showed that many Kasich supporters would not support Cruz and vice versa. Polls in a handful of states testing hypothetical two-way races against Trump showed Cruz winning three of five but Trump consistently beating Rubio or Kasich.45 Moreover, Kasich’s voters often bore a greater resemblance to Trump’s than to Cruz’s, especially ideologically.

  Thus, the split field is not enough to explain Trump by itself. Nor is the prevalence of open primaries, sometimes blamed by Republicans for Trump’s ascendancy. While Trump did well in open primaries among non-Republican voters, his vote percentages among Republicans beat his vote percentages among non-Republicans in seventeen of the twenty-six contests through Indiana for which there were exit or entrance polls; in another three, his Republican vote percentage matched his non-Republican vote. In every critical open primary that he won, Trump won among Republicans as well as among the interlopers.46 While some analysts blamed racism or anti-government extremism in the GOP electorate for Trump’s rise, a more plausible explanation would focus on his serendipitous role as the most outside option in a year ripe for outsiders, both inside and outside the Republican Party, and both inside and outside the United States. He was the only candidate wealthy enough and blunt enough to be independent from every establishment, political, economic, social, cultural, and media. And yet the media also showered $2 billion of free attention on him, though much of it was negative.

  In the end, Trump won the Republican nomination because he jumped out to an early lead, consolidated it while his opponents were busy fighting among themselves, and held on despite late advances by others. The polling history of key primary states such as New Hampshire and South Carolina show a Trump lead that was established in the summer and fall of 2015. In the twenty-six states through Indiana that had exit or entrance polls, Trump won the vote, usually handily, among those who reported that they had decided their vote more th
an one month before. He lost the last week of the campaign in nineteen of the twenty-six states, averaging only 28 percent among these late deciders versus 56 percent among the early deciders.47 In the delegate count, Trump seized the lead in New Hampshire and never gave it up. David Kochel, Jeb Bush’s chief strategist, argued that, in retrospect, “At a certain point, probably in August (2015), Trump was Godzilla walking into a power plant. Everybody thought he’d blow up, and he just got stronger every time.”48

  To assess Trump’s 2016 primary success, one must also take a longer view of politics, institutions, and society. For example, one has to take a deeper look at the respective party coalitions. Ever since the McGovernite takeover of the Democratic Party in 1972, Democrats have made inroads into the suburban professional class while repelling white working-class voters with policies ranging from forced busing to abortion on demand to anti-anti-communism. As a result, white working-class voters became an increasing proportion of the Republican vote. In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixiera, in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority, noted the importance of this trend to George W. Bush’s 2000 victory over Al Gore.49 However, for years Republicans had primarily appealed to this group on the basis of cultural issues, moral issues, or simple patriotism. Although a handful of Republican presidential aspirants such as Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum experimented with economic themes, Donald Trump was the first to appeal to this group forcefully and wholeheartedly on the basis of economic concerns.

  He was not only filling a vacuum within the Republican Party but also filling a vacuum in national politics more generally. Although there was often intra-party dissension at the congressional level on issues of trade and immigration, for decades there had been something of a cross-partisan consensus at the presidential level in favor of free trade and loose enforcement of immigration law. Millions of Americans had legitimate causes for concern. Although nearly all economists agree that free trade is a net benefit for the country as a whole, some individuals, regions, and sectors of the economy found themselves at the losing end. It can hardly be considered unproblematic that there are 11 million people residing in the United States in violation of the laws of the country. And then there was what seemed to many the suffocating pretensions of political correctness, a political culture of euphemism so feckless that self-evident acts of jihadism had to be discussed as “work-place violence.” Yet there was no one at the presidential level speaking to those concerns—until Trump. Political analyst Michael Barone also noted that, through the end of March, Trump’s greatest primary successes came in states with the lowest levels of social connectedness, his worst showings in states with the greatest social connectedness.50 He was, like many populists (or demagogues) before him, speaking for people who felt disconnected from the dominant structures of society. In these respects, Trump’s rise appears considerably less surprising.

  Not least, Trump’s rise was made possible, if not inevitable, by changes in the presidential nominating system that were inaugurated in the McGovern-Fraser reforms of 1972, which sought to make the system more “democratic” and more open to political outsiders. The party establishments, to use a term greatly in vogue in 2016, were stripped of much of their power to influence presidential nominations. Caucuses were made more open, primaries proliferated (though the McGovern-Fraser Commission did not explicitly call for an increase in primaries), and popular results of both caucuses and primaries were tied more closely to delegate outcomes. Gone was the role of the national convention as a mediating institution exercising judgment to pick the best candidate; gone was the ability of the party organization to block extreme or unqualified aspirants; gone, perhaps, were barriers to popular demagoguery. The “popular arts” feared by the Founders were to be rewarded rather than diverted.51

  Although the reforms were undertaken with Eugene McCarthy’s movement campaign in mind, it is far from clear that the reforms worked to the benefit of grassroots political movements. Movements thrive on organization. Candidates such as Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, Pat Robertson, and, in 2016, perhaps Ted Cruz were movement candidates. All did better in caucuses than in primaries, because organization is the coin of the caucus realm, but the reform system deemphasized caucuses and multiplied primaries. It has not been movement outsiders but what one might call “unconnected outsiders”—outsiders trading on personal charisma and often-vague promises to the alienated and not connected with an existing organized movement— that have seen their stock rise in the modern system. These candidates tend to do better in primaries, which can be won by ephemeral appeals through media, than in caucuses. In different ways, George Wallace and Jimmy Carter were early examples. Donald Trump was the most recent example, the unconnected outsider in purest form (even Wallace and Carter had been state governors).52 To Trump’s defenders, he had simply used the system to his benefit, as any candidate should be expected to do. To his detractors, he was the embodiment of the longstanding fear that the reformed nominating system was bound at some point to produce a dangerous demagogue or a popular but unqualified buffoon. Or both.

  Demagogue, buffoon, budding statesman, or something else, Trump had defied the odds to become the Republican nominee. And the surprises were only beginning.

  NOTES

  1. Brett Steidler, “Vegas sets odds for Republican nomination,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 7, 2015, http://www.reviewjournal.com/politics/elections/vegas-sets-odds-republican-nomination.

  2. Stephanie Cegielski, “An Open Letter to Trump Voters from His Top Strategist-Turned-Defector,” March 28, 2016, http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector.

  3. An interesting exception can be found in Henry Olsen and Dante J. Scala, The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2016). The authors did not predict Trump’s nomination but noted that he “throws a wrinkle into our analysis, as so far he draws from all factions of the party. The primary factor behind his rise is an outsider appeal to voters without a college degree” (142).

  4. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.

  5. Ben Schreckinger, “Trump Attacks McCain: ‘I like people who weren’t captured,’ ” Politico, July 8, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/trump-attacks-mccain-i-like-people-who-werent-captured-120317.

  6. Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get about the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class.

  7. Emily Shapiro, “San Francisco Shooting Suspect Says He Kept Coming Back to the City to Avoid Deportation,” ABC News, July 6, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/US/san-francisco-shooting-suspect-coming-back-city-avoid/story?id32247731.

  8. James Hohmann, “Trump’s Pollster Says He Ran a ‘Post-Ideological’ Campaign,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/12/05/daily-202-trump-s-pollster-says-he-ran-a-post-ideological-campaign/5844d166e9b69b7e58e45f2a/.

  9. Tom Davis, “Donald Trump Had Expected to Drop Out in 2015, Endorse Chris Christie, New Book Says,” http://patch.com/new-jersey/mendham-chester/donald-trump-expected-drop-out-2015-endorse-chris-christie-0.

  10. M. J. Lee, “Let the sparks fly: Carly Fiorina takes on Donald Trump,” http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/politics/republican-debate-cnn-2016/.

  11. Paul’s campaign manager, Chip Englander, argued at a panel discussion after the election that the San Bernardino attack completely upended Paul’s campaign strategy. Hear the first panel on http://iop.harvard.edu/get-inspired/campaign-managers-conference/campaign-president-managers-look-2016.

  12. Hohmann, “Trump’s Pollster Says He Ran a ‘Post-Ideological’ Campaign.”

  13. Nicholas Confessore and Karen Youresh, “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com
/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html?_r0.

  14. Eliza Coillins, “Les Moonves: Trump’s Run is ‘damn good for CBS,’ ” Politico, February 29, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001.

  15. Justin H. Gross and Kaylee T. Johnson, “On Twitter, Trump ‘punches down’ far more than any of his rivals,” Washington Post, October 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/27/trump-hurls-far-more-attacks-via-twitter-than-any-of-his-rivals-sad/?utm_term.ce22af74721a.

  16. Guy Benson, “Video: Atheist Voter Confronts Rubio in Iowa,” http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/01/20/rubio-321-strategy-n2106714.

  17. “Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus,” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/ia/iowa_republican_presidential_caucus-3194.html.

  18. See http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/IA/Rep.

  19. New Hampshire Republican Presidential Primary, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/nh/new_hampshire_republican_presidential_primary-3350.html.

  20. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-gop-fear-and-loathing-in-new-hampshire/article/2581329.

  21. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/nh/new_hampshire_republican_presidential_primary-3350.html.

  22. http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/NH/Rep.

  23. South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/sc/south_carolina_republican_presidential_primary-4151.html.