Thread: The Establishment Thinks the Unthinkable: Trump Could Win the Nomination

by ELIANA JOHNSON October 19, 2015 4:00 AM

It began as whispers in hushed corners: Could it ever happen? And now, just three months from the Iowa caucuses, members of the Republican establishment are starting to give voice to an increasingly common belief that Donald Trump, once dismissed as joke, a carnival barker, and a circus freak, might very well win the nomination.

“Trump is a serious player for the nomination at this time,” says Ed Rollins, who served as the national campaign director for Reagan’s 1984 reelection and as campaign chairman for Mike Huckabee in 2008.

Rollins is not alone in his views. “Trump has sustained a lead for longer than there are days left” before voting begins in Iowa, says Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “For a long time,” Schmidt says, “you were talking to people in Washington, and there was a belief that there was an expiration date to this, as if there’s some secret group of people who have the ability to control the process.”

But for Trump, a dip in the polls after the second debate that many predicted was the beginning of the end has arrested; and for nearly four months, he has remained at the top of the polls. Now, long-time GOP strategists who were expecting Trump’s act to wear thin a couple of months ago worry that he can’t be stopped, or at least that he has a significant chance of winning the nomination.

It’s a drastic departure from the near-universal sentiment of the Republican establishment voiced when Trump announced his candidacy in June. In the weeks following his campaign launch, many Republicans fretted not that Trump would win the nomination, but that his incendiary remarks about illegal immigrants would irreparably harm the GOP brand. (The former Bush-administration press secretary Ari Fleischer compared Trump to a roadside accident. “Everybody pulls over to see the mess,” he told Politico in late June. “And the risk for the party is he tarnishes everybody.”) Now, many members of the GOP establishment are concerned less that Trump will hurt the brand than that he’ll become its standard-bearer.

“I know all of us dismissed Trump, early on, all of the so-called experts,” Fox News’s Chris Wallace said Sunday. “‘Summer fling,’ ‘momentary amusement.’” But Wallace, who interviewed Trump late last week and aired portions of the interview on his show Sunday, said he finds himself feeling differently now. “As I watched that interview and I heard what he had to say . . . I am beginning to believe he could be elected president of the United States,” he said.

Wallace was struck by the sheer force of Trump’s personality, but there are other reasons to think he has a real shot at the nomination. Poll after poll this election cycle has registered the distaste of Republican voters for political experience; they prefer an outsider with a fresh approach to a battle-tested veteran. For instance, the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, published in early October, shows that by more than a two-to-one margin, Republican and Republican-leaning voters prefer a candidate with new ideas to one with a proven record. That’s a change: Republicans have traditionally preferred governors to senators, for example, because they prized their executive experience. And Pew notes that this is a shift in attitude that coincided with Trump’s ascension. “Just five months ago,” the polling company writes, “GOP voters valued experience and a proven record over new ideas, 57 percent to 36 percent.”

Trump is not the only candidate who lacks political experience, and Pew’s findings help to explain why the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is surging in the polls as well. But Trump has done something they haven’t, something that now-former presidential candidate Scott Walker demonstrated is difficult to do — sustain the momentum he developed in the weeks after he launched his campaign.

#share#Republican strategists say that momentum is key to notching wins in the early primary states, which themselves are essential to securing victories later on. “He has the potential to win Iowa and New Hampshire and more,” says Rollins. “No one seems to be developing to challenge him at this time.”

“Momentum matters a great deal,” says Schmidt. “You have to win in the early states to win in the larger mega-state primaries that fold out over the balance of March and April.”

Skeptics remain. Stuart Stevens, who served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, notes that Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire haven’t elected renegade candidates when they’ve had an opportunity to do so, as recently as last year. “I think a reasonable way to look at this is to look at who gets nominated for governor or Senate in these states,” Stevens says. In Iowa, the mustachioed Terry Branstad, whose political network is largely supportive of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, is the longest-serving governor in state history. In the 2014 Senate primary, Joni Ernst, then a state senator, beat back challenges from both the right and the left. New Hampshire elected the moderate Kelly Ayotte to the Senate in 2010.

“So,” Stevens asks, “could Donald Trump win a nomination for the Senate or governor in Iowa or New Hampshire?” “Not in a million years.” Then again, the early states have surprised before.

As Trump has become a more permanent fixture on the political scene, other questions linger. Can he vary his routine? Is he serious about building a ground game?

Over the past few weeks, the Trump campaign has begun at least to hint that it is interested in rounding out the picture of its candidate. Trump’s four children opened up to People magazine about their father for an article published earlier this month; on the cover, Trump shared the spotlight with his wife and his youngest son, Barron. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and his son, Eric, have begun making television appearances on behalf of their father. (Showing that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the younger Trump told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren last week: “Everything he touches turns to gold.”) Profiles of Trump’s wife, the former Melania Knauss, and of Ivanka, published in the New York Times and Politico magazine, respectively, have also provided glimpses of Trump the family man.

And while Trump is beginning to make traditional campaign expenditures and build a ground game in the early-voting states, he is spending less on these measures and undertaking them later than other campaigns, which have been putting the gears in motion for the past year or longer. Typically, in caucus states such as Iowa and Nevada, these sorts of political fundamentals matter. But Trump has already defied supposedly immutable laws of politics.

Trump’s supporters will surely cheer the emerging consensus, but, as Trump would be the first to point out, the establishment has been wrong before. Right now, it might find consolation in that fact.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...topic&tid=1707

That is great news!! What I don't understand at all, is why they would be so against him to begin with?! He's smart, he's hard-working, he's got a line of monumental achievements a mile long, he's a fighter, he's a negotiator, he cares about our people and our nation, he's efficient and fiscally conservative, he's charming .... why would the Establishment of the Republican Party hate him? That's the much bigger puzzle than why American Voters love Trump, that's simple, for all the reasons stated above plus his particular agenda which is to stop illegal immigration and excess immigration and fix our trade inequities, something Republicans have already wanted and Americans have always needed.

The media establishment finally admits Trump could win this thing

By Howard Kurtz
Published October 20, 2015

I remember shaking my head, on the day that Donald Trump announced, when NPR’s Mara Liasson declared that this would be the best day of his campaign and it was downhill from there.

Liasson cheerfully admitted she was wrong on my show, but she had plenty of company. Most of the media establishment seemed to fall into two camps: those who were skeptical that Trump was anything more than a sideshow, and those who attacked him as a clown and a charlatan.

Fast-forward to this past weekend when Chris Wallace, having just interviewed Trump for “Fox News Sunday,” said: “I know all of us dismissed Trump, early on, all of the so-called experts.” But after their sitdown, Wallace said, “I am beginning to believe he could be elected president of the United States.”

The so-called experts are starting to face reality. Joe Scarborough said yesterday that anyone who believes Trump can be stopped if he wins Iowa is “dreaming.”

None of this means Trump will win the nomination, let alone the general election.

But it means the media’s state of denial over a guy who has led the Republican polls for three solid months is drawing to a close.

National Review has taken notice, with the headline “The Establishment Thinks the Unthinkable: Donald Trump Could Win the Nomination”:

“Now, long-time GOP strategists who were expecting Trump’s act to wear thin a couple of months ago worry that he can’t be stopped, or at least that he has a significant chance of winning the nomination.”

Ya think?

I have spent months arguing with panelists on “Media Buzz” and other Fox shows who have mocked and minimized Trump. Having watched and interviewed him in New York since the 1980s, I knew Trump was a tough customer, a veteran of the city’s tabloid wars who became a reality-show star as well as a brand-name builder.

Pundits who thought Trump was all bluster were stunned to learn that he had struck a deep chord with many GOP voters. All the things that journalists have learned to value—political experience, policy depth, an organized ground game—didn’t matter with Trump. He sensed what they failed to see, that voters were so ticked off at Washington and political gridlock that they yearned for a tough-talking outsider—and he boasted about having been a wealthy insider who played the game.

One by one, the pundits are caving.

Veteran Republican strategist and CNN commentator Alex Castellanos told Political Wire, “I’ve resisted the idea that Donald Trump could and would become the Republican nominee. Unhappily, I’ve changed my mind.”

Mark Leibovich profiled Trump in the New York Times Magazine, writing: “Initially, I dismissed him as a nativist clown…I was, of course, way too incredibly serious and high-*minded to ever sully myself by getting so close to Donald Trump.”

Even the Huffington Post has now run a piece titled “It’s Time to Admit: Nobody Knows Anything About the 2016 Campaign.”

The headline should have been that the Huffington Post didn’t know anything about the campaign. This is the liberal website so convinced that Trump was a bozo that it pulled the stunt of relegating him to the Entertainment section.

“Trump’s rise and sustained competitiveness in the race has been a trick that just about nobody -- perhaps not even the candidate himself -- thought that he could pull off initially, when those old rules still seemed to be in place,” the piece says.

Just about nobody? Lots of people figured it out months ago. This story amounts to a belated and grudging correction—and it ran in the Politics section.

Now I’ve heard all the theories about why Trump will still implode: His unfavorable numbers are too high. He’s hit his ceiling and it won’t be enough when the race is winnowed to three or so candidates. Voters will get serious by Iowa and New Hampshire and pick an actual commander-in-chief.

Well, any of those things could happen. But we’ve been through all these episodes that were supposed to end Trump’s campaign (about Mexican immigrants, John McCain, Jorge Ramos, the anti-Muslim questioner and on and on) and he’s still going strong.

Many conservative columnists continue to rip Trump as a fake conservative, but many voters apparently like his mix of right-wing ideas (tax cuts, immigration crackdown), moderate ideas (protect Social Security and Medicare) and even a couple of liberal ideas (taxing hedge-fund titans).

It’s been a humbling experience for media people who’ve been dead wrong about the 2016 campaign. As the Huffington Post says, “So many supposed experts have been so wrong about so many facets of the race.” A little humility might be in order.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015...in-this-thing/

GOP vet: Trump win looking more and more likely
By Byron York (@ByronYork) • 10/18/15 7:48 AM

"I've resisted the idea that Donald Trump could and would become the Republican nominee," writes GOP strategist Alex Castellanos in an email assessment of the presidential race. "Unhappily, I've changed my mind."

Castellanos, who once said flatly that "Trump is not going to be the nominee," writes "the odds of Trump's success have increased and been validated in the past few weeks."

The key indicator, Castellanos says, is the fact that Trump dipped in the polls and now appears to be rising again. "In my experience, that tells us something important," Castellanos explains:

Republican voters went through a period of doubt about Trump, an understandable window of buyer's remorse. They went shopping for someone else — but returned, finding no acceptable alternative who could match Trump's bad-boy strength and his capacity to bring indispensable change. ... Fearing they have only one last chance to rescue their country, they found no one else as big as their problem.

"In my experience, once voters doubt but return, doubting again is less likely," Castellanos concludes. "A candidate's vote hardens."

Castellanos, who played a key role in Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign, believes either Trump or Ben Carson will win the Iowa caucuses. If it's Trump, Castellanos sees him going on to win New Hampshire and then the nomination. Even if Carson wins Iowa, Castellanos sees a strong chance of Trump winning New Hampshire and then going on to take the nomination.

If Trump wins Iowa and/or New Hampshire, Castellanos sees a "desperate GOP establishment" trying to settle on an "anti-Trump," perhaps Marco Rubio, to bring Trump down. But that would be a very difficult task. "History is not kind to candidates who play the long game," Castellanos writes. "No GOP nominee in modern history has failed to win either Iowa or NH. Period."

Castellanos believes that will remain the case in 2016. And for those who say there is still plenty of time left for the race to change in all sorts of ways, Castellanos disagrees. "Time is running out. Benghazi hearings, a debt fight, Halloween, Putin kicking over our lemonade stand a couple of times, Thanksgiving, Christmas, then one quick month until we start voting Feb. 1st. This race is solidifying and there isn't much time left for it to change. As Yogi Berra might have said, 'what comes later happens earlier than it used to.'"

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/go...rticle/2574360