Let’s give credit where it’s due. When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride nearly a year ago, few people outside Trump Tower thought he could win the Republican presidential nomination.
Now he has secured the majority of delegates. Before the Republican National Convention. Before the June 7 primaries, including New Jersey and California. Before receiving House Speaker Paul Ryan’s endorsement. Before Hillary Clinton.
Trump did this without a pollster. Without a campaign staff of even 100 people. Without moderating his rhetoric. Without acting presidential. Without the support of either the party establishment or the conservative movement.
The billionaire was ridiculed as not even being a real candidate. (There was a chart to prove it!) He quickly dispatched a field of 17 other contenders who were mostly highly regarded, including senators, governors and perhaps a half a dozen potential presidents, before Clinton could put away septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders. Today, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
When the Trump campaign predicted in an internal memo that their candidate would amass over 1,400 delegates, it seemed like an absurd projection. Now it’s not quite so farfetched. The Associated Press has him at 1,238 already. Winner-take-all New Jersey plus just half of California’s delegates would put him 25 votes away from this threshold.
Some of it was luck. Some of it was a series of well-timed implosions. Marco Rubio never achieved liftoff. Ted Cruz never really consolidated conservatives. John Kasich never came close to winning outside Ohio. The big Republican donors never opened their wallets against him and party leaders like Mitt Romney sat on their hands until it was too late.
For all of Trump’s complaints about the “rigged” process, many of the rules that were supposed to help the establishment — limited debates, winner-take-all and winner-take-most delegate allocation in places like the Northeast, some front-loaded Trump-friendly states — actually benefited him.
But with the exception of George W. Bush’s two terms, the Republican establishment has been getting weaker each presidential campaign. It took an even less probable series of events for John McCain to win in 2008. Romney struggled to put away Rick Santorum, and both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were bloodied by Pat Buchanan.
Trump not only identified a core of Republican voters who were angry at their party’s leaders, ranging from moderates who thought the GOP elected officials were too obstructionist to Tea Partiers who thought they were incapable of accomplishing anything for conservatives. He tapped into a large mass of voters who were instinctively pro-American and anti-liberal, but not really interested in the finer points of conservative ideology or policy.
So when Cruz and company hammered away at Trump for not being a true conservative, many of these voters replied, “So what?” And a subset of conservatives no longer trusted those who were willing to excuse transgressions by Romney, McCain or Bush.
Most political professionals were skeptical that you could minimize paid advertising by flooding the zone with earned media. Trump bet you could and he was right. It was seen as unlikely that you could bond with voters in the early states without traditional retail politicking. Trump’s large-scale rallies effectively replaced the grocery-bagging and glad-handling favored by old-school pols and were successful in big media markets too.
It will be difficult for Trump to replicate a lot of this in the general election. It’s entirely possible his lack of organization, his inability to soothe intraparty divisions and his demographic disadvantages will catch up with him as he faces a Democratic foe who is expecting to run against him and won’t be taken by surprise.
Yet you can’t count him out. His poll numbers have predictably improved, while Clinton’s unfavorable ratings have remained high (though lower than his). She is still keeping a relatively low media profile while he is ubiquitous. The race with Sanders is ending on a contentious note and the email situation, while unlikely to knock her out of the race, doesn’t appear likely to conclude with a total exoneration.
You may not like Trump, but you do have to admit he has some natural political talent. The GOP has been his latest corporate takeover.
