Once again, Republican pollster Frank Luntz is investigating the Trump phenomenon:
Over three hours Wednesday in Alexandria, Luntz lobbed dozens of Trump-seeking missiles. All 29 in the group had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. All either supported Trump or had supported him earlier in the year. To Luntz’s amazement, hearing negative information about the candidate made the voters, only a few of whom gave their full names to the press, hug the candidate tighter.
“Normally, if I did this for a campaign, I’d have destroyed the candidate by this point,” Luntz told a group of reporters when the session ended. “After three hours of showing that stuff?”
With only two exceptions, the three hours of messaging, venting and friendly arguments revealed the roots of Trump’s support. Participants derided the mainstream media, accusing reporters of covering snippets of Trump quotes when the full context would have validated him. They cited news sources they trusted — Breitbart News was one example — to refute what they were being told.
“You know what Trump does?” said Teresa Collier, a 65-year-old retiree. “He says something completely crazy, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Then he dials back and starts explaining it and saying how he’d do it, and it makes sense.”
And Trump continues to lead:
Beating back the competition using an array of supporters who prefer to believe in their preconceptions to the point of disbelieving standard sources of information. He appears to have a hard core of supporters who are best described as fringe occupants.
But, unlike Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, his lead is only relatively commanding against his melange of challengers. The current polling numbers in Iowa are a somewhat different story, as a Monmouth University poll reveals likely GOP voters in Iowa favor Cruz, 24% to 19% for Trump.
So we’ve watched as the Republican rivals, with two exceptions, have remained in the race despite highly disappointing numbers. Steve Benen, commenting on the Luntz story, may have stumbled across the reason why they’ve stuck around despite the hurdles they’ve yet to traverse:
But imagine you’re a Republican consultant or a strategist for one of the 13 other GOP presidential candidates. Imagine you’re looking at the calendar, worried about the polls, and looking for ways to bring Trump down a peg. After reading about the focus group’s reactions to attacks on Trump, what in the world do you do?
The answer, I suspect, is to wait and hope – for Trump to defeat himself, for his supporters to get bored, and for other candidates to drop out.
Collect enough voters who’ve lost their favorite, and you catch up with Trump. The successful strategy will, of course, involve money, along with the preservation of capital until a sizable number of your rivals have dropped out and then you try to collect them. In the meantime, you must be their second or third choice, emphasizing your qualifications, while you hold your breath and suck up to your sponsors donors. Communication skills will be critical, in some cases to clarify your achievements, and in others to obscure your lack of qualifications. In the former camp might be governors Bush and Christie, while in the latter camp might be Cruz and Rubio, neither of which have achievements, merely ideology. It is my personal belief that ideology is not the same as achievements or competency. Whether that’s true for GOP voters is unclear.
In other news, both Trump and Carson have insinuated that they may leave the GOP if any ‘dirty tricks’ keep them from winning the nomination. Does the GOP risk losing perhaps 30% of their base as they realize the leadership will do what’s necessary to save the party from a bad nominee? Is the GOP in a no-win position? They may be better served by letting the nomination process go its natural route and endorsing the winner – and thus their candidates for other offices will stand a good chance of winning. But if 30% of their base stays home out of despair at the treason of the leadership, it could lead to quite the trouncing of the Republicans.
