As a political scientist, I feel I owe you an apology. To say my discipline has been behind the curve this electoral season would be putting it too charitably. We haven’t missed one curve yet. We’re speeding through all of them – backwards. At the beginning of this year’s US presidential campaign we confidently assured you that the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t last, that the Republican base was just having a little summer fling. We told you we knew how presidential primaries worked. We’d studied them for years, knew the incentives, the structural dynamics, the statistical patterns. Been there, analysed that.
But Trump was just the first curve. CONT.
Lloyd Gruber (LSE), USApp