May 12, 2016

Sorry, But I Still Don’t Know How Donald Trump Managed to Win

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jon Chait says there’s a simple reason that Donald Trump defied expectations to win the Republican nomination: “The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.” Atrios says Chait is blind: “We hippie liberals have been telling you for years that a sizeable chunk of Republican voters are absolute blithering idiots.”

Hmmm. I have to say, I’ve been reading Chait for years, and he’s never held back his contempt for Republicans or Republican voters. Whatever his faults, having too rose-tinted a view of the GOP hasn’t been one of them.

In any case, I think they’re both missing the point. Whenever you look at anything even vaguely related to public policy,1 the key question is “Compared to what?” Whatever you think of the Republican electorate, they made it through 2008 without nominating Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson. Then they made it through 2012 without nominating Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann. Instead they nominated two very normal party warhorses, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

So what happened? Did the GOP electorate suddenly lose a couple dozen collective IQ points over the past four years? I suppose anything’s possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. Something other than the idiocy of the Republican base was at work here.

But what? Sometimes I feel like I’m the last person in America who still isn’t quite sure how Trump managed to win. Seriously, America, WTF? But at a guess, the key factors were these:

  • A large and weak field. The traditional mainstream candidates—in particular Scott Walker and Jeb Bush—turned out to be stunningly bad campaigners. The best of the remainder were Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Rubio was pretty obviously too young and too out of his depth, while Cruz was just really, really unlikeable.
  • Trump is sui generis.2 Republicans have survived their Palins and Cains and Carsons, but Trump is just better at being a demagogue than any of them. He’s the perfect TV candidate in a TV era.
  • Simple bigotry. The GOP has long had a significant base that’s susceptible to racial appeals, but ever since Pat Buchanan’s suicide run in 1992 everyone assumed this would henceforth have to be kept carefully buried by anyone who wanted to be taken seriously. Trump surprised everyone by unburying it with no apologies. And guess what? It turned out nothing much had changed over the past two decades. Buchanan won about 30 percent of the vote in the early contests of the 1992 race, almost exactly the same as Trump got in the early contests this year. Against a single strong competitor, this wasn’t enough for Buchanan, but against a fractured field, Trump’s frank appeal to the racist vote was enough to keep him in the lead.

Can a richer, shrewder, less ethnic, less Catholic version of Pat Buchanan win the presidency? I don’t think so, but at this point, frankly, I’m afraid to venture an opinion.

1And if there’s anyone vaguely related to public policy, it’s Donald Trump.

2Admittedly, this is just a fancy way of saying: ¯\_(?)_/¯

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate