If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered.
Donald Trump has been the bane of everyone from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom about how American political parties’ nominations are determined.
It wasn’t supposed to work this way. For many months after he announced his candidacy, most political observers figured he didn’t have a chance.
In an August 2015 post about a month after he declared, Silver gave Trump a mere 2 percent chance that he would secure the GOP nomination. Operatives within the Jeb Bush campaign literally greeted the titian tycoon’s official announcement with “barely concealed delight” according to the Times.
It’s the beginning of March and there are still many delegates Trump needs in order to reach 1,237—the number needed to receive the nomination at the Republican National Convention on the first ballot—but the odds are obviously in Trump’s favor now.
With a few notable exceptions such as Scott Adams, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, most political observers figured Trump would share the fate of previous conservative insurgent candidates like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, or Rick Santorum, who all became overnight favorites but then saw their popularity wither as they received more attention from the media and rival campaigns. The general assumption was that even though he began leading the pack in mid-July of 2015, Trump would eventually fall back and be overtaken by a more conventional candidate.
There was good reason to suspect this. After all, it was a pattern that had happened for many candidates. In The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck documented the phenomenon, which they called “discovery” and “scrutiny.”
But Donald Trump broke the model. While he has continuously received a massively greater amount of media coverage than the other candidates, the additional scrutiny has not harmed Trump’s numbers. In fact, they’ve only increased. Defying numerous predictions that Trump had a natural “ceiling” of support, a majority of Republicans in surveys said they were willing to vote for him as early as December. As of January, 56 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they thought he would be a good or great president.
As 2015 wore on, some observers (like Bloomberg Politics reporter Sahil Kapur) argued that the dynamics of the race such as the divided field actually favored a Trump victory. Generally speaking, these predictions had no effect on the opinions of the biggest donors and the highest-level consultants. The Right’s grandest of poobahs wouldn’t even listen to the opinions of experienced operatives like Alex Castellanos and Liz Mair, who both warned that Trump actually could prevail.
In October, Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief political strategist, insisted Trump would drop out before the Iowa caucuses. He was only slightly less confident in December when he argued that Trump would not win a single state. Karl “The Architect” Rove wasn’t as biting in his predictions but he was certainly in agreement with Stevens. At the end of November, the former George W. Bush strategist said that only Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio had good chances of becoming the Republican nominee.
Unlike the magical thinking and data-denying that Republican election consultants pushed in 2012 (which culminated in Karl Rove’s famous refusal to admit defeat on live television), the insouciance about Trump was actually based on some valid ideas. Nor were the consultants alone in saying Trump didn’t have a prayer. In December, Nate Cohn of the New York Times correctly noted several examples of past cycles in which the candidate who was the front-runner at year’s end failed to become the nominee and accordingly pronounced Trump’s chances as “not good.” Silver also continued to deny that the real estate magnate could pull it off.
If you were looking to, there were other reasons to downgrade Trump’s prospects. Until February 24, the GOP front-runner in the polls hadn’t received a single endorsement from a currently serving Republican elected official. The front-runner’s inability to muster testimonials was a big deal to political scientists and journalists who have touted the idea of an “Invisible Primary” where various candidates jockey for position outside of public view to get the best staff members and the most money.
There certainly is data behind that supposition, even though the number of open nomination contests in history is still rather small. Nonetheless, the idea that party grandees were the primary determiners of their own standard-bearers caught on among journalists like wildfire. The title of a 2008 book, The Party Decides, became a mantra that was almost inescapable up until Donald Trump’s smashing Super Tuesday victories. Many political observers simply couldn’t believe it was possible that Trump would be allowed to get to the point where he is today, on the cusp of victory.
The question of why the Republican powers-that-be didn’t spring into action until Trump had notched victories in three separate elections is one that journalists and historians will be asking for many years. The answer may already have been provided, however, by Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University who also frequently comments on electoral matters.
Drezner offers two reasons why no one decided to act. The first theory is that it attacking Trump was not in the interest of any of his rivals individually. Not too long after he entered the race, it became clear that Trump was very adept at using his speaking and adversarial negotiation skills in the political arena as he demolished the poll numbers of Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson.
This created a social dilemma in which all of the non-Trump candidates wanted the same outcome but fearing the risks, were unwilling to cooperate to attain it. Instead of banding together to vanquish the outsider as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio did in the most recent debate, the other 16 candidates mostly did nothing until their funds or support dwindled away, after which several would launch hopeless kamikaze attacks on Trump. Even now, as Trump is within sight of victory, both Cruz and Rubio are still competing in the same states, essentially guaranteeing a Trump triumph.
The other theory rests on the very fact that so many people believed Trump would be prevented from becoming the nominee—surely voters would suddenly became more “serious” or right-leaning billionaires would spend tens of millions on attack ads against him. But it became a self-defeating prophecy. The candidates, donors and their consultant remoras never bothered to take action against Trump because each of them individually thought that it wouldn’t be necessary.
At first blush, this would seem to mean that the problem with The Party Decides is that it was too true to be true. But that isn’t actually what the book or the theory says. As Silver noted in a post written at the end of January (after he had become more willing to admit Trump’s chances and having re-read the book), the argument uses a different definition of party “establishment.”
While conservative activists, commentators, and journalists frequently use the term to refer to official Republican Party functionaries, the authors of the now-maligned theory have a much more sophisticated and inclusive definition: it also includes the very same talk show hosts, television commentators, writers who erroneously believe themselves to be outsiders looking in. This is also what Trump supporters surely have in mind when they think of Fox News journalists like Megyn Kelly, CPAC participants, and the numerous highly-paid heads of various activist and policy organizations.
When the notion of a right-wing consensus is considered in this light, it becomes obvious why Donald Trump has done so well in this cycle. The party has not decided. In fact, the party may no longer even be able to decide anything of significance.
While it is true that Donald Trump had zero endorsements from currently serving elected officials until February 24, the reality is that Republican politicians in general have, with the exception of some centrists, basically avoided endorsing any candidates this cycle.
As Silver and his colleagues have documented via their “Endorsement Primary” tool, Republican officeholders are generally not endorsing much. The chart is even more damning for the GOP, however, because it uses the most popular endorsement recipient, Marco Rubio, who is now a distant third in the contest with actual voters. Were Trump to be on the chart, he would only have 29 points, far lower than any other previous candidate.
There is one other notable aspect to the chart above. The second-lowest scoring candidate 30 days after the Iowa caucuses is Ronald Reagan during his 1980 run.
Perhaps official seals of approval from the party are not as significant as they’re made out to be, but if there is something to them, it would seem to indicate that the turmoil currently roiling the right is indicative of big changes. A Donald Trump nomination will either see a dramatic expansion of the Republican voting rolls with a partial exit of a disgruntled liberal minority or it will see the opposite: a mass exodus from the GOP and the consignment of postwar fusionist conservatism to the ash heap of history. Trump will either be the next Reagan or he will be an anti-Reagan.
That the latter scenario is even possible means that the party—politicians, donors, advisors, activist leaders, policy mavens—refused to avoid it in the first place by adapting policies more appealing to the public and its voters. That it then declined to even treat the ensuing illness suggests that whatever the outcome of a Donald Trump nomination, the American Right is in need of wholesale reform at the very highest echelons.
Matthew Sheffield is a journalist currently working on a book about the future of the conservative movement to be published this summer. He is a former columnist for the Washington Times, the creator of NewsBusters and the former managing editor of the Washington Examiner.