August is arriving, and we are entering week six of Donald Trump’s rise—first into the double digits, now into first place—in the national polls for the Republican presidential primary race. …
The fact that Trump’s very conservative, anti-immigration, militantly anti-establishment, and—most important—angry backers never cared much for the independent and sometimes-moderate McCain helps to explain why the comment had so little effect on the businessman’s poll numbers. But the McCain incident also suggests that, while Trump’s candidacy is almost certainly destined to fail, he is less likely to pop like a balloon than to deflate gradually, like a car tire with a leak. Republican pollsters and strategists privately suggest that his trajectory will resemble a bell curve: a roughly symmetrical rise and fall, much like those then-Rep. Michele Bachmann and businessman Herman Cain experienced in 2011. CONT.
Charlie Cook