Home / Robert Farley / A Man in My Position Can’t Afford to Be Made to Look Ridiculous

A Man in My Position Can’t Afford to Be Made to Look Ridiculous

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nbc-fires-donald-trump-after-he-calls-mexicans-rapists-and-drug-runnersAt the risk of eventually looking deeply ridiculous, I’m going to have to depart from Paul (and to some extent from Scott) regarding Trump’s candidacy. At this point, I’d rate the chances as Cruz 50%, Rubio 35%, Bush 10-15%, and Trump 0-5%.

Cruz’s path to the nomination is fairly clear; he wins Iowa, and Trump and the vote in the next few primaries is sufficiently divided between Trump and the remaining mainstream candidates that he wins or does very well in the first few contests.  The Establishment dislikes Cruz, but it will rally around him.

Rubio and Bush have very similar paths.  Each has to do decently enough in Iowa to have an impact on New Hampshire, forcing the Establishment to choose one or the other in order to avoid Cruz or Trump.  I appreciate that it’s trendy to be completely dismissive of Bush’s chances at this point, but expectations have gotten so low that if he stages any kind of rally in Iowa or New Hampshire, he’ll earn a strong comeback narrative and he’ll get a lot of his Establishment support back.  Given that he’s a known quantity and that the situation is fluid, I would not at all be surprised to see voters go with him as the safe choice.  But then it’s also possible he’ll be out when polls close in New Hampshire.

My case against Trump is pretty much identical to that of Nate Silver.  The party hates him; he’s polling worse in the states that have the earliest primaries than he is nationally; the people who’ve expressed a preference for him are the lowest information voters and the least likely to actually vote; there are deep questions about his organization (a problem tied to the party hating him); state polls and national polls are extremely volatile in the early going.   I think there’s a very strong chance that he’ll underperform in Iowa, which will make things very difficult moving forward. It’s also important to remember that while we’re treating state polls in isolation at this point, that’s not at all justifiable. Especially for the first few states, these polls have historically seen wild shifts based on the outcome of the previous contests.

While Trump may see some isolated success, I think the most likely outcome is that he doesn’t see the early success he’s expecting, and goes on to regularly run second or third for as long as he remains in the race, behind Cruz and whichever of Bush and Rubio survive. In the unlikely event that Trump does win some early primaries, I suspect that the party will fairly quickly unite around Cruz or Rubio, and that Trump will struggle to put together majorities. Either way, he’s drawing dead.

The impact of Trump, such that it is, will most likely manifest in giving Ted Cruz the advantage he needs to take the race, although it’s possible that Cruz might have won anyway.  The more interesting wild card is, of course, if Trump runs third party; even a limited impact (and I’d say he’ll manage something less than Perot ’92) will give Clinton a huge advantage in the general.

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