by: Jeff Greenfield
So far, every poll seems to only be giving him more strength. Who would have thought even a month ago that as we enter the first GOP debate of the presidential election that Donald Trump, The Donald Trump, would be the leader in every single national poll and gaining strength in all the early primary and caucus states? Time and time again, in just a few weeks, his candidacy seems to have survived what we professional political observers all think are obviously fatal gaffes and flubs. Could this be the rare instance when politics is actually about to go haywire?
If you threw a ball up in the air and it didn’t come down, what would you think? Maybe it landed on the roof or got stuck in a tree. You would not think that the Law of Gravity had been repealed.
So if you’re trying to figure out why Donald Trump has so far left the political class in a state of stunned disbelief, it might be wise not to abandon every assumption about politics, but to ask a different question: When and why do voters behave in ways that seem to break the rules? When are bedrock assumptions about campaigns rendered at least temporarily inoperative? In this context, poll numbers taken months before an election don’t count; while they can measure a public mood, the choice of a candidate is something like a customer in a store trying on hats. The more telling question is: When do voters actually cast their ballots in ways that upend core premises?
Source: POLITICO - TOP Stories
No comments:
Post a Comment