As I read the following article I was thinking how most people never took Trump seriously in the beginning. However, someone who is a billionaire you HAVE to take seriously because they have advantages the rest of us don't have. When you see Trump flying to (anywhere) in his own personal Jet (which is like is world car) you know you are in a different league of candidate where money buys whatever you want it too.
Don't underestimate the advantages he will have in the general election too where he can hire private investigators to dig up the very worst dirt on the Clintons from throughout their lives too.
begin quote from:
| New York Times | - |
A
campaign rally in Bridgeport, Conn. Blue-state Republicans helped put
Donald Trump over the top. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times.
What I Got Wrong About Donald Trump
We will never know just how wrong we were about Donald Trump.
Did
he have a 1 percent chance to win when he descended the escalator of
Trump Tower last June? Twenty percent? Or should we have known all
along?
Was Mr. Trump’s victory a black swan,
the electoral equivalent of World War I or the Depression: an unlikely
event with complex causes, some understood at the time but others
overlooked, that came together in unexpected ways to produce a result
that no one could have reasonably anticipated?
Or
did we simply underestimate Mr. Trump from the start? Did we discount
him because we assumed that voters would never nominate a reality-TV
star for president, let alone a provocateur with iconoclastic policy
views like his? Did we put too much stock in “the party decides,” a theory about the role of party elites in influencing the outcome of the primary process?
The answer, as best I can tell, is all of the above.
I
do think we — and specifically, I — underestimated Mr. Trump. There
were bad assumptions, misinterpretations of the data, and missed
connections all along the way.
But
I also think Mr. Trump was a tremendous long shot when he entered the
race, and even for months thereafter. Victory wasn’t inevitable — and it
took a lot to go his way.
The number 17
If
there was anything that should have signaled that “this time would be
different” from the very start, it was 17: the number of Republican
candidates who entered the race.
The
sheer number of them kept many donors and officials on the sideline,
waiting to see who would emerge as a strong contender. It diffused
whatever power the “party elite” had to influence the outcome.
It
created a huge collective action problem, in which none of the
Republican candidate had a clear incentive to attack Mr. Trump — just
their rivals for their niche of the Republican Party. The effect was to legitimize Mr. Trump as an ordinary candidate and damage the others.
And
at just about every stage, there were too many candidates to mount a
truly effective anti-Trump effort. By New Hampshire, there were still
nine. In South Carolina, there were six. On Super Tuesday, there were
five. The race made it to three candidates only once two-thirds of all
of the delegates to the Republican convention had been awarded. It
became a one-on-one race only once Mr. Trump had effectively secured the
nomination.
Maybe
Mr. Trump really did have a “ceiling” at various stages. There was
evidence for it in public polling and in the actual results. We’ll never
know.
Another
result of the large field was that Mr. Trump’s opposition was always
far less organized and underfunded than it would otherwise have been. A
candidate like Marco Rubio never had a chance to take advantage of the
benefits that usually accompany elite support; he didn’t have time.
Weak and factional opponents
It
was clear from the start that Jeb Bush was a weak establishment
front-runner. I never thought much of Mr. Rubio’s chances. And Scott
Walker, on paper the best of the bunch, quickly raised doubts about his
preparedness.
It
was also obvious that the “mainstream” candidates could face serious
challenges on their flanks: from John Kasich on the left and Ted Cruz on
the right. The notion that successful factional candidates could
prevent a mainstream candidate from building a broad coalition was also
discussed at several times, even in the specific context of Mr. Kasich.
It’s basically what happened to Mitt Romney in 2008.
But
what wasn’t really discussed was what ultimately happened with Mr.
Kasich. He was strong enough to prevent Mr. Rubio from consolidating the
center-right of the Republican Party, costing him states like Virginia
on Super Tuesday. But he wasn’t strong enough to become a plausible
contender in his own right, like Mr. McCain in 2008.
In
the end, Mr. Kasich was strong enough only to block a viable mainstream
candidate, leaving Mr. Cruz as the sole remaining candidate to defeat
Mr. Trump. This, to me, is a “World War I” black swan advantage for Mr.
Trump — parts of it were foreseeable, but not the totality of what
ultimately happened.
The failure of a broadly appealing candidate to break out left Mr. Trump with one rival: Mr. Cruz.
I
think we got a lot wrong about Mr. Trump, but I think we nailed Mr.
Cruz. He was strongly opposed by party elites and had so little appeal
to voters who didn’t consider themselves “very conservative” that he
couldn’t win the nomination. It was a lucky break for Mr. Trump.
Who
knows what would have happened if Mr. Rubio hadn’t stumbled in that
debate ahead of New Hampshire, and took second instead of Mr. Kasich.
Perhaps Mr. Kasich and Mr. Bush would have left the race, allowing Mr.
Rubio to consolidate the center-right of the party — and maybe even win
it all? We’ll never know.
Misunderstanding the moderate blue-state Republicans
The first big article I wrote on the Republican race wasn’t about the importance of endorsements or party elites. It was about blue-state Republicans.
Continue reading the main story
In
recent cycles, they had backed the establishment against conservative
candidates. They were a big reason I believed that an
establishment-backed candidate had an advantage against a conservative
outsider, despite the turn toward Tea Party conservatives in Congress. Polling data showed they were well educated and moderate — natural allies for the establishment.
To some extent, this view has been vindicated. Mr. Cruz, this year’s conservative outsider, was pummeled in the blue states.
But
it was completely wrong in a far more important sense: The Republicans
in these states were no allies of the establishment, at least not
against Mr. Trump. The blue-state Republicans gave him his first win in
New Hampshire, and later, they put him over the top.
This
could just be the result of a simple analytical error: conflating
opposition to ideologically consistent conservatives with an affinity
for establishment-backed candidates.
Or perhaps they would have voted against Mr. Trump if someone other than Mr. Cruz had been the principal opponent to Mr. Trump.
Either
way, I thought the party’s establishment could count on these voters,
and instead they were among Mr. Trump’s strongest backers in the end.
There’s
an important lesson here: These aren’t liberal or moderate Rockefeller
Republicans. These are voters who showed a surprising tolerance for Mr.
Trump’s extreme comments on immigration, women and other issues.
Overestimating the resolve of the G.O.P. elite
I
didn’t consider myself that much of a “party decides” disciple at the
beginning of the race, but I was sure of one thing: It would be
extraordinarily hard to win if a candidate were deemed unacceptable by
the party’s elected officials, donors and operatives.
Such
a candidate would lack the resources and staff to run an effective
campaign. He or she would face both a chorus of vocal opposition from
credible leaders and a well-financed fight to the end.
In the end, Mr. Trump didn’t face many of the challenges that outsiders usually do.
His
limited resources were irrelevant — he had unlimited free media. His
weakness at delegate selection conventions could have cost him the
nomination, but he ultimately won enough contests to all but ensure a
first-ballot victory.
An
even bigger surprise was the complete failure of Republican elites to
firmly and consistently denounce Mr. Trump. It’s why I thought he was
done after his comments
dismissing John McCain’s status as a war hero; I thought a “chorus of
Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more
liberal elements of his record” would follow, but it simply didn’t.
It never did.
The
Republican elite treated Mr. Trump as it would have treated a fairly
ordinary candidate, even as he said extraordinary things. That’s a big
part of why he won.
I
did not expect that the party would cede its biggest prize to an
outsider who had so many dissenting policy views and who faced so many
questions about his fitness for the presidency.
Missing the importance of celebrity coverage
Maybe
because I never cared much about pop culture and don’t watch much
television, I never would have guessed that Mr. Trump would be able to
sustain nonstop dominance of television media for the entire campaign
season.
The
tremendous news media coverage of Mr. Trump was a big reason he looked
like a “boom, bust” candidate, like Herman Cain in 2012. But Mr. Trump’s
media coverage never faded.
If
you had told me about the persistence of the coverage, I wouldn’t have
dismissed his chances. After all, the media was the fuel of his rise
from the start.
The rules
Mr. Trump benefited from party rules and a calendar that made it far easier for him to win the nomination.
If
the Republicans had delegate rules like those of the Democrats, Mr.
Trump would not yet be the nominee. He would be counting on
superdelegates.
He
was also helped by this year’s calendar. Two-thirds of all of the
delegates were awarded in the 45 days after Iowa, making it important
for the party to narrow the field quickly in a year when it was not
positioned to do so.
Even
when it looked as if Mr. Rubio might benefit from unified Republican
support, he had only a week for fund-raising and to try to build a
strong organization ahead of Super Tuesday. With the calendar from 2012,
he would have had five weeks.
But perhaps above all else ...
We
were just overconfident. There haven’t been very many presidential
elections in the modern era of primaries. There certainly haven’t been
enough to rule out the possibility that a true outsider could win the
nomination, even if it seemed very incongruent with what had happened in
the post-reform era.
That’s a lesson to keep in mind heading into the general election.
No comments:
Post a Comment