“When Trump announced that he was running last summer, his lack of establishment support and high…”
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016“When Trump announced that he was running last summer, his lack of establishment support and high unfavorables made it extremely easy to very smart people to confidently assert that he had almost no chance at securing the GOP nomination. I certainly predicated my own horrible, no-good, very bad predictions on this kind of analysis. So why has it been proved wrong? My hypothesis is that GOP decision-makers also read the same analyses and concluded that they did not need to do anything to stop Trump. Sure, his poll numbers stayed robust even after he kept saying racist and insulting things, but there were good auxiliary hypotheses to explain why that was the case. They kept reading analysis after analysis in 2015 about how Donald Trump had little chance of winning the GOP nomination. They read smart take after smart take telling them that Trump didn’t have a chance. Even as the media covered Trump, even as late as the South Carolina debate, pundits were also talking about how his latest transgressive comment would doom his chances. So GOP party leaders didn’t take any action. Except that the reason smart analysts believed Trump had no chance was because they thought GOP leaders would eventually take action.”
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There may be something to this. Another factor is that many analysts live in the same bubble as party leaders and aren’t in touch with what motivates voters.
(via dendroica)
It wasn’t just that all the candidates on the Republican side assumed someone else would take care of Trump. It’s that they had a positive incentive to go easy on him. They wanted his voters. Assuming Trump was going to be driven out, the others wanted to be the second choice of his supporters, which meant being nice to him. It was a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. They all could see it happening, but no one was willing to take the hit for their team. What will be interesting now is trying to figure out, of Hillary and Bernie, which is likely to be more effective in taking the fight to Trump when the fighting finally happens.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1Rl9HD5.
