As kind of an addendum to the prior post:
The following tweet went round last night:
Here is how Trump's favorability compares to every nominee since 1992 pic.twitter.com/fytFSDp8wB
— Adrian Gray (@adrian_gray) February 23, 2016
Came up in discussion over at OT (this post is an amended comment) on Daniel Drezner’s theory that Republican donors, activists, candidates, and others who listen to Poli Sci types like himself were lulled into fatal complacency by the numerous assurances that Trump couldn’t win. Yet, even now, political observers in general can’t look at the graphic in that tweet without saying to themselves this Trump thing can’t possibly last.
I had the wayward thought last night that the Trump bubble, which many of us have been expecting to pop with an audible sound in one typically Trumpastrophic moment would just deflate on its own – that, one day soon, we’d just look up from our wailing and gnashing and notice that his support was declining, that people were just less interested in his latest verbal atrocities, that fewer people were showing up at his rallies and those who did were less excited… in short that the story would just move on without him, gradually, at least at first. It happens to shows that make a splash then turn boring. I thought it had happened months ago – after a tepid debate performance – and was wrong, but what if Trump, even if he runs the table during the next round of primaries, does so limply, losing a handful of states to Cruz and/or Rubio, while under-performing his polls in some places severely? At that point brokered convention scenarios might start getting more real (a reality show to top them all!) – unless the slide snowballs, and he stops winning at all: Then we’d be back to figuring out how much of a platform he’d get at the RNC.
The only real downside would be that all of our wailings and gnashings – and careful analyses and theoretical speculation etc. – would turn out to have been as much a waste of time as all of the bombastic campaigning and kerfuffles of the day.
If that’s what occurs, I hope it doesn’t happen – or isn’t noticed – until my current featured wailer-gnasher-theorizer has moved into the deeper archives.
