Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton’s classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls when he announced on June 16 to pass the other Republican candidates a month later and now stands at 26 percent, 14 percent ahead of any other candidate.

Trump’s constituency in many ways resembles that amassed by another celebrity candidate who defied the usual political rules, Ross Perot in 1992. Like Perot, Trump runs better among whites than blacks, among men than women, among non-college graduates than college grads, in the suburbs and countryside than big cities. Like Perot, he has no special appeal to traditionally religious voters.