We have a debate coming next week and far from fading, The Donald is now in the strongest position he’s thus far occupied. He’s at 28 percent in the RealClear average. He’s got leads of +7 and +15 in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively. And he’s running closer to Clinton in general election match-ups (he’s -2 against her) than anyone except for Marco Rubio.
Yet even that isn’t the most impressive aspect of Trump’s rise. No, the most significant trick Trump has pulled is to radically change the public’s perception of him in just 12 weeks.
When Trump first launched, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten wrote a piece insisting that Trump wasn’t a real candidate because he combined two statistics that, when mixed, usually spell death for a politician: Very high name identification and very high unfavorable numbers.
Enten (who I like a lot, by the way) turned out to be very wrong. Back in June, Trump had 75 percent name ID among Republican voters, and a net favorability of -32. It’s supposed to be very, very hard to move your favorability numbers when you’re such a well-known commodity. Yet by August, Trump had shifted his favorability numbers an utterly insane 52 points, so that today he’s +20. I don’t blame Enten for not being able to predict that shift. I don’t think anyone, anywhere, could possibly have predicted it. This sort of thing never happens.
And when I look at the GOP race, that 52-point shift is what makes Trump really interesting. It suggests to me that Trump has tapped into more than just immigration. He’s mirroring a pessimistic view of the world–that these days America loses to everyone, as he puts it–no other candidate is willing to articulate. And he may have, like Rick Santelli before him, unwittingly created a political movement.
I still have a hard time believing that the same electorate that nominated Mitt Romney 48 months ago will nominate Donald Trump. For a whole host of reasons, I don’t even think I’d be comfortable betting $5 on him winning a primary. But at the same time, I’m not alarmed by Trump’s rise. In fact, at this point I think he’s actually been pretty good for Republicans. Here’s Allahpundit making the Republican case for Trump:
But there’s one other important way Trumpmania is useful, and it’s gotten overlooked in the attention to all of the other benefits I just listed: Trump has clarified how many of the outrages that sweep conservative media from day to day are based on true outrage and how many are purely opportunistic, seized on only because they’re useful in making a disfavored figure squirm.
That all sounds about right to me. If Trump isn’t the nominee and he decides to run a third-party campaign then it will be, as I’ve said before, disastrous for the Republican party. But as of now, he’s a (yuge!) net plus.
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