Is Everything We Know Wrong?

Say what you will about the Romney 2012 campaign, but Stuart Stevens is bright, perceptive, and candid—always worth listening to. So I was struck by his observation about Donald Trump during the course of an interview with New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman: “For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong.”

This strikes me as exactly true. In order for Trump—or Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina—to win the GOP nomination, everything we know about American politics would have to be wrong. Think about it: In order for the same electorate which nominated Mitt Romney four years ago to switch to Donald Trump, the voters would have to undergo some sort of paradigm shift in preferences.