Like a previously undiscovered earthquake fault, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is threatening to fracture the Republican electoral coalition along new lines. In the process he could disrupt both the demographic and geographic alignments that have defined previous races for the GOP nomination—and scramble the assumptions of his rivals about the […] Read more »
How the ‘Trump factor’ came to dominate the 2016 election
It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s campaign as pure theatre – many have; many still do. But there’s more to the Trump drama than meets the eye. For all his theatrics, Trump has caused a stampede in the Republican Party and he’s done this using a classic, class-based divide-and-rule strategy. […] Read more »
RAND 2016 Presidential Election Panel Survey
The RAND Corporation kicked off its 2016 RAND Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS) with an initial survey covering late December 2015 and early January 2016, and will continue surveying through the months leading up to the presidential election in November. … The survey confirms Donald Trump (the favorite of 38 […] Read more »
The Duel: The Trump and Cruz campaigns embody opposite views of politics and the future of the G.O.P.
… Pundits have taken to endlessly discussing the different “lanes” the candidates occupy, an idea best articulated in a new book, “The Four Faces of the Republican Party,” by Dante J. Scala and Henry Olsen. They describe a Republican primary electorate that, since the nineteen-eighties, has been divided into four […] Read more »
How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996
Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again? … That’s pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat Buchanan in a 1996 essay, “From Household to Nation,” in Chronicles […] Read more »
Three Theories Of Donald Trump’s Rise
… As far as I can tell, there are three main theories about the rise of Trump; respectively, they pin the credit (or blame) for Trump on Republican voters, Republican elites and the news media. Each theory interprets his polls differently and comes to different conclusions about how much staying […] Read more »