For months, the conventional wisdom has been that Donald Trump was going to collapse any minute now. He was just one crude comment, one over-the-top attack on an opponent, one untraditional political move away from imploding and letting this become a race between professional politicians once more.
It’s safe to say that this isn’t going to happen. Even the tightening we’re now seeing in a number of Republican primary polls is mainly attributable to Ted Cruz picking up Marco Rubio’s voters as the field finally winnows. But Trump is holding on to his core support.
Yet the antics that once led people predict a Trump collapse do seem to finally be making it difficult for him to expand that core. Cruz now has a legitimate shot at upsetting the billionaire in Wisconsin, a state far outside the Texas senator’s usual comfort zone.
Organized anti-Trump voting may not have changed the outcome in Utah or Ohio, but it does seem to have swelled Cruz and John Kasich’s winning margins, denying the Republican front-runner delegates from both states.
As Trump lobs attacks at Heidi Cruz on Twitter at a point where he should be uniting the party and reassuring establishment Republicans who dislike her husband, he at the very least is making it more difficult for Cruz and his supporters to switch over to him at some point in the future — even if you believe, as many current Trump supporters fervently do, that Cruz somehow “started it” with the ad run on his behalf in Utah by an unaffiliated anti-Trump super political action committee.
This is even more apparent in the general election, where the recent polling does suggest something of a free fall. You have to go back to the middle of last month to find a national poll included in the RealClearPolitics average where Trump beats Hillary Clinton. In six of the last eight, she enjoys a double-digit lead. His favorable numbers among key demographics have been tanking.
The case for Trump as a general election nominee has always rested on four things. First, that he will swell not only the GOP’s share of working-class white voters but also the raw numbers of them who show up at the polls in November. Second, that he will do no worse than a conventional Republican with minority voters and perhaps slightly better because some will have formed their opinions of him as a celebrity or businessman before he began running for president.
Third, and most critically, is that Trump will be able to turn around his favorability ratings among non-Republican voters as he did with the GOP primary electorate. Fourth is that he will be willing to take risks in his attacks against Clinton and those risks will pay off.
Those last two are really being tested. Trump is starting to anger Republicans voting for other presidential candidates, making his task of turning around his general election favorability all the more difficult. And his broadsides against “Lyin’ Ted” may test the theory that he can go after Hillary in a way that voters will find appealing.
For Republicans, there is an unsettling possibility: that everything they predicted would undo Trump is finally coming to pass after it’s too late to do anything to stop him that won’t divide the party.
The stakes of Wisconsin are getting higher.
