How Trump can win

After months of treating the Trump juggernaut as a joke or a dream from which they will soon awake, leading Republicans are starting to prepare for the possibility he will win.

Another poll for ABC News and the Washington Post found that 42 percent of Republicans think Trump will be the nominee. An unlikely coalition of establishment Republicans and movement conservatives is beginning to panic about the possibility of him coming away from the Cleveland convention a winner.

Trump doesn’t just lead in the national polls. He leads in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada, the first five states where people actually vote.

Past insurgent candidates have gotten a boost from Iowa or New Hampshire only to fizzle on Super Tuesday, when the establishment has the most money to campaign and advertise in multiple media markets simultaneously. Trump will have the money and name recognition to keep fighting them on even terms.

Trump’s own lead in the polls isn’t the most important reason to think he could win, even though he has held on longer than most fad candidates in either party and has enjoyed a longer lead than Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain or Rick Perry did in the previous Republican primary campaign.

But Trump hasn’t led as long nationally as Rudy Giuliani did in the run-up to 2008 and America’s Mayor didn’t end up winning a single primary. It’s possible that Trump is Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain and Perry combined, or perhaps sharing that distinction somewhat with Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.

Even Trump’s highest poll numbers are generally less than the percentage Pat Buchanan won against President George H.W. Bush in New Hamsphire in 1992. His current RealClearPolitics polling average in the Granite State is identical to the share that Buchanan received when he won New Hampshire in 1996.

The difference isn’t that the populist insurgency has a much bigger slice of the GOP vote than before. It’s that the Republican establishment is so much weaker. Jeb Bush isn’t getting anywhere near as much support as his father in 1992 or Bob Dole in 1996. He’s even behind the weak 2012 front-runner Mitt Romney.

The former Florida governor is hovering between the high single digits and the low teens in New Hampshire. That’s after spending money on ads that don’t seem to have boosted his popularity at all. He’s averaging less than 7 percent in Iowa. The Pew poll showing Jeb at 4 percent nationally may be an outlier, but not by much. The major national surveys released so far in October show him between 5 percent and 8 percent, with only the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling showing him in the double digits at exactly 10 percent.

Bush’s favorability, and thus his room to grown, is also down. A Monmouth poll found that 37 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably compared to 44 percent who did not. In a Fox News poll, a higher percentage of Republicans said they would never vote for Bush than said the same about Trump.

It may be the only category in which Bush is beating Trump.

That’s not to say that Bush can’t be the nominee like his father and brother before him, to say nothing of most establishment candidates during the modern Republican primary process. But it will be a much tougher climb than previous candidates in his position.

Chris Christie, once viewed as Bush’s rival in the establishment primary, is doing considerably worse. He is fairly consistently polling in the low single digits and he’s having trouble raising money.

Marco Rubio is another possibility. Like Paul Ryan for speaker, he could be a compromise candidate between the establishment and the Tea Party conservatives. The Florida senator has a foot in each camp. Only Trump and Carson are polling better than Rubio nationally, though Ted Cruz is on his heels.

Polls generally show Rubio with high favorability ratings and he is frequently listed as a second choice for Republican primary voters, implying his support could grow as the field winnows. But which early state does he win? He’s active in Nevada, but Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — all states where he’s averaging less than 10 percent — vote first. If he waits until Florida to try and pull off a victory, like Giuliani he could find the race has passed him by.

If Rubio starts to rise, expect Trump to unload on him with both barrels. Immigration is likely to be the top target, given the senator’s previous support for the Gang of Eight bill.

Maybe Trump gets out-organized in Iowa, where his lead is in the single digits and turning out people in the precincts is crucial, and his momentum begins to fade. History suggests a strong social conservative has the best chance of doing so. But would establishment money really flow to Carson or even Cruz in order to stop Trump?

Trump’s voters appear to be more blue-collar and somewhat more moderate than the rest of the GOP primary electorate, more closely resembling Ross Perot’s base than the constituency of a typical Republican presidential nominee. But they are united while the other voters are split.

Barring a major shakeup in the race, what incentive is there for any candidate polling in the 6 to 10 percent range nationally or in the early states? Why would Bush back down for Rubio or vice versa? Unless money dries up for one of the campaigns or a candidate experiences a Scott Walker-like collapse, the field could remain fractured for a while.

Most Republicans would prefer a candidate other than Trump and many would actively dislike him being the nominee, perhaps dividing the party more deeply than at any time since Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. The problem is not that Trump is invincinble but that his opponents are too divided and the Republican establishment, such as it is, is now too weak.

Unless the anti-Trump vote consolidates around someone else, however, there could either be a Trump win or chaos in Cleveland.