Nate Silver writes in August of 2015: The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. Like Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich, Buchanan, Huckabee and Forbes came nowhere close to winning the Republican nomination.
If you want absurd specificity, I recently estimated Trump’s chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.
COMMENTS:
* Is there any doubt that if Trump made it through Step 5 but then got nixed by insider maneuvering designed to block him that he would feel he had been treated “unfairly” by the party…and would then launch an independent bid for the Presidency? That would significantly hurt the chances of whoever the official GOP nominee was, particularly because primary voters who voted for Trump and felt he was robbed might stick with him.
So the GOP insiders would be faced with a choice: let the Trump nomination stand and lose the election OR block the Trump nomination, lose the election, make a portion of the base furious, and be blamed for the loss. Faced with that choice, it’s easy to imagine the insiders blinking and letting the nomination proceed.
* Trump for a greater America.
Revolution is the only solution.
Deport all the illegals along with their anchor babies back to Mexico.
Yea right, I know that some illegals didn’t come here from that cesspool called Mexico, but since they don’t really protect us from the flow we should return the favor.
President Trump in 2016.
* This is the same thing conservatives said when Nate predicted that Romney was going to lose. What you still don’t seem to get is that Nate, unlike you, doesn’t base what he writes on liking or disliking anyone. It’s called math. Which is why he’s always right.
* Trump supporters are hiliarious because they think hes some new phenomenon. But hes not. Hes Buchanon or Paul or Herman Cain. Hes riling up the base in a way that wont be sustained.
* I think the odds are VERY high that Trump drops out well before the convention. I think he has no desire to actually be President, he just enjoys the attention at this phase in the campaign.
* I think nobody in Trump’s position would do this unless he not only genuinely wanted to be President, he was further highly motivated to fix the country. Not only is it costing him money and aggravation and a lot of ill feeling from powerful interests, but it takes personal courage. If you look at the history of third party challengers, which he isn’t yet but might be indicative, the last two that were actually impacting the race were Wallace and Perot, and Wallace took a bullet and Perot stated he was intimidated out of the race (later to come back, but the stutter step cost him big in the polls.) Trump’s already been threatened by a Mexican gangster. He wouldn’t be going through all this aggravation if he weren’t seriously motivated.
* Nate,
This is a great article outlining the reasons that Trump will most certainly not be the nominee… But I think an honest assessment will indeed give greater weight to some of these obsticles than others.
1-2. Time. I would say that this is his second biggest vulnerability: He’s saying incredibly stupid things almost every time he opens his mouth… and every time he opens his mouth he becomes more embarrassing. You never know what stupid thing he might say might cause a supporter to drop him, or a non-supporter to declare “I would support Hillary over Trump”… but you know that it’s happening on a daily basis. However, I also must point out that all of this depends on how much money he throws at the problem. If he floods the airwaves and has paid doorknockers and ralliers and whatnot, he can easily recover from any major flub, and still look like the least idiotic douchebag in the GOP field.
3. Iowa and New Hampshire. Here I think your predictions are off. I think it extremely likely that Trump will claim one of the 3 tickets out of Iowa… and I think he’ll win NH in a landslide. Iowa is a caucus state. So there will only be a few tens of thousands of people participating at large, and they’ll be participating in a multi-hour ordeal where you have to stand firm in your support while you bully others to switch support. The tea-party is a fact-and-logic-immune cult that is long practiced at bullying… and Trump seems to be their messianic figure… so the caucus will be highly slanted towards Trump supporters, and he will absolutely do well. From there it will be a quick trip to where the democrats will be allowed to vote for Trump (making a big difference), or vote for Hillary (who will be nominated no matter what). I think Trump is going to get ~20% of the democratic vote here… just democrats wrecking havoc.
4. The winnowing. Here is where I feel Trump has no chance. As the field drops, he’s likely going to be the 2nd choice of less than 5% of the support for any given candidate. So in a field of 17, he might have 20% of the GOP vote, but in a field of 3, he probably won’t have more than ~24% of the GOP vote. His opponents will start beating him after New Hampshire, and they’ll beat him by very large margins in states with locked voting. From that point on, he’ll have to determine how much money he wants to flush over a lost cause.
5-6. I think Trump is more than capable of hiring people that can calculate electoral delegate strategies, and the people in the part are not likely to rip the part apart by overruling the people’s choice if he manages to scrape the delegates together.
Instead of each stage having a 50/50 chance of Trump surviving, I would rate it as follows:
Stage 1: 80%
Stage 2: 70%
Stage 3: 90%
Stage 4: 5%
Stage 5: 80%
Stage 6: 75%
All told, I give him about the same chance… I just think some of these threats are pretty navigable for him, and some of them are almost insurmountable.
