Politico: There’s a measure of irony in that Trump’s candidacy—grounded in an anti-elite message and regular bashing of the political correctness “crap” rooted on college campuses—is such a boon to professors. Though Trump flaunts his academic bona fides—the degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an exceptional vocabulary (“I know words. I have the best words.”)—his almost proud indifference to detail and accuracy has made him perhaps the least popular candidate among the American professoriate in recent memory. None of the two dozen professors and student researchers interviewed for this story signaled they were a Trump supporter…
By research standards, the Trump phenomenon is still young, but fields are littered with the certainties it’s already shaken. For political scientists, Trump’s primary and caucus victories challenge the reigning belief that a strong party institution is the ultimate key to electoral success. For communications pros, his freewheeling use of social media and a penchant for saying things that alienate different segments of society shatter assumptions about what should kill a presidential campaign. Trump has even put his own imprimatur on the conspiracy theory playbook that typically targets powerful people and institutions. He has dropped the Obama birther shtick he peddled in 2012 in favor of a rhetorical dog whistle the size of a tuba that attacks far more vulnerable populations like Mexican immigrants and Muslims.
Trump’s candidacy is also a cannonball aimed straight at perhaps the most influential book on electoral politics in the past decade: The Party Decides, which argues establishment insiders ultimately determine who wins a presidential nomination, despite the primary voting process. Martin Cohen, the James Madison University political science professor who co-authored the book, has found his work the subject in recent months of an intense online debate over whether its findings hold up—or whether Trump’s success, in blunt defiance of his own party’s elders, is undercutting the entire idea. “Certainly, he’s had an impact on the way we think about politics and how they are supposed to work,” Cohen acknowledged, while still insisting that more study needs to be done to assess whether Trump is just an aberration who doesn’t change the fundamental findings spelled out in his book’s thesis…
Of course, academics like MacWilliams aren’t shying away from revealing some of their early findings. After all, the media beast is hungry and the opportunities for self-promotion are abundant while Trump’s campaign is still at the center of the political world. And there are numerous outlets hungry for their kind of analysis, from the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog to Vox, Huffington Post and Politico Magazine.
“I feel like a prostitute,” said Restad, the Oslo-based professor who earlier this month wrote an essay for the London School of Economics’ website about how American exceptionalism has returned with a force via the Trump candidacy. “If you put Trump in a title people will click on it.”
…Obviously, nobody knows what will happen at the conclusion of the 2016 election, but some are already focusing on what would be the ultimate research bonanza: a Trump presidency, perhaps the strangest and least predictable political development in American history. Last month, for example, University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore published a commentary predicting Trump “would face huge challenges in effectively overseeing the executive branch and pursuing a coherent policy agenda.”
But the very thing that makes Trump so interesting from a scholar’s standpoint also makes him impossible to pin down conclusively: He keeps producing a steady stream of surprises.
“The way I like to describe it to my friends is to imagine we were astrophysicists and there’s this weird blob of ectoplasm that seems to defy all laws of time and space,” Oliver said. “We’re desperately trying to get our instruments out to measure it while it’s going on.”
