State Of The GOP Race | The Ashford Zone

The debate didn’t hurt Trump like may Republicans thought it might. By luck or design, Trump has figured out that the way to appeal to the GOP base is to be an asshole. Seriously. That demographic likes people who “speak their own mind” (the polite way to put it) regardless of the fact that he doesn’t have any concrete policies, or even evidentiary support for the crap he says.

The good democrats are saying nothing against Trump. He is a dream opponent because, while he may get as much as 30 or even 40% of the GOP vote, he’s virtually toast in a matchup with any Democrat.

And he’s already straining the other candidates. Rick Perry told his South Carolina staff that he can’t pay them, and he understands it if they want to find work elsewhere. Ouch. And South Carolina, being the third major primary/caucus is an important state.

So the question of last month becomes the question of this month… when will the defying-political-gravity magic of Donald Trump come to an end? In WaPo, Paul Waldmen writes “Bad news, Republicans: Donald Trump is practically bulletproof”:

This time, he’s gone too far. That’s what Republicans said after Donald Trump insulted John McCain over his military record, people lined up to criticize Trump and the party’s leaders hoped this ridiculous (if entertaining) political reality show could finally be wound down. But it didn’t turn out that way, and now they’re saying it all over again, after Trump sparred with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly during Thursday’s debate, then continued to throw insults at her all weekend. As The Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa wrote yesterday, “Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.”

Perhaps they really believe that in their hearts. Or perhaps they hope that if they tell themselves and the rest of the world it’s true, then it will come to pass.

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Nevertheless, the poll showed Trump still at the top with 23 percent support among Republicans. Don’t be surprised if the other polls we see in the next few days show his support essentially unchanged. I suspect that the people who are behind him don’t care if he threatens to run as an independent or if he insults women, just like they didn’t care that he jabbed at McCain and said we ought to deport 11 million people. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If this were an ordinary Republican presidential primary campaign — one obvious front-runner, five or six other candidates taking long-shot bids, a predictable arc in which a challenger emerges to that front-runner and is eventually vanquished — the presence of a character like Trump might not make much of a difference. In a year like that, he might still have managed to get support from the same one out of five primary voters who are backing him now, but it wouldn’t have put him at the front of the pack and made him the center of the campaign. After a while, he probably would have gotten bored and dropped out.

But by the time that happens, the party will have spent months tying itself in knots. The voters Trump represents will be only more convinced that their party is, in the words Trump himself might use, a bunch of total losers. The GOP’s image is already hurting, not only among voters in general but also among its own partisans; according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 32 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, and only 68 percent of Republicans view it favorably (86 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of their party).

In other words, when/if Trump actually crashes and burns, and even assuming he doesn’t run third party, the damage he’s done to the remaining field will remain. Trump supporters are enthusiastic and don’t care about party loyalty. (Cruz, by the way, is blatantly positioning himself to be the beneficiary of any Trump fallout).

Over at his site, Nate Silver does a great job of explaining how Trump could be leading in the polls, but losing the nomination. The problem with national polls of GOP voters is that they measure something not at all related to the real world in five ways:

However, the “election” these polls describe is hypothetical in at least five ways:

They contemplate a vote today, but we’re currently 174 days from the Iowa caucuses.

They contemplate a national primary, but states vote one at a time or in small groups.

They contemplate a race with 17 candidates, but several candidates will drop out before Iowa and several more will drop out before the other states vote.

They contemplate a winner-take-all vote, but most states are not winner-take-all.

They contemplate a vote among all Republican-leaning registered voters or adults, but in fact only a small fraction of them will turn out for primaries and caucuses.

This is why it’s exasperating that the mainstream media has become obsessed with how Trump is performing in these polls.

Silver writes that these polls are helpful, and you shouldn’t dismiss them altogether, but they don’t take into account what he calls “indicators” — outside factors that influence how an election turns out. In this case, endorsements and support from party elites is one type of indicator, Sliver says. And as for the polls themselves, you need to look at name recognition and media attention each candidate is receiving. And maybe most importantly, you need to look at the individual voter enthusiasm, as well as second-choice preferences, because candidates are going to drop out between now and the time people actually vote.

As for Trump himself, Silver rejects that he has tapped into some sort of new populism, or even that he is the most popular candidate:

It’s possible that many GOP voters are thinking about the race in just that way now. First, they ask themselves whether they would vote for Trump; if not, they then choose among the 16 other candidates. The neat thing about this is that you can overwhelmingly lose the majority in the referendum — 75 percent of Republicans are not voting for Trump — and yet still hold the plurality so long as the “no” vote is divided among a sufficient number of alternatives.

Silver says it is possible that Trump will remain high and even win in Iowa and New Hampshire. But maybe not. But he concludes: