The Press Buckles Up for Six Months of Backseat Driving

As former Jeb Bush advisor Tim Miller recently revealed, among the unwelcome challenges faced by the modern presidential campaign is the relentless proffering of advice by top financial donors, who take the opportunity presented by personal access to the candidate or senior staff to promote their own theories on how best to win votes:

We could have probably had 19 full-time staffers dedicated just to the donor advice. . . . Donors had a lot of thoughts about [the candidate's] cable TV look. Donors are obsessed with cable TV. The most feedback we got was with regards to cable TV: Why aren’t you on enough? When you are on? Why is he not wearing a suit coat rather than a sweater? Can he get a new suit coat jacket?’

In some walks of life, professional expertise is given a modicum of deference; few airline passengers think that they know better than the pilot how to fly the plane, while most patients trust their dentist to fill a cavity correctly without the need for them to weigh in on the subject. Not so in politics. No record of previous experience or success is sufficient to insulate either politicians or their staff from the passing opinions of others, even if they are as ridiculous as the belief that entire elections can turn on the candidate's choice of suit coats.

Aside from wealthy supporters who are accustomed on a daily basis to being treated as if every utterance is sacred wisdom, a particularly rich vein of unsolicited input is supplied by journalists and pundits—especially if a candidate is trailing or falling short of his or her expected performance in the polls. Politicians also vary in the extent to which they are credited with political smarts by reporters and commentators, and those deemed less savvy are more likely to be the recipients of frequent second-guessing.

It's safe to say that very few members of the national media, whether liberal, conservative, or in between, are supporters of Donald Trump's campaign. In fact, many view him as a uniquely unqualified and destructive potential president. To these analysts, it is therefore critical to the health of the nation that Hillary Clinton defeat Trump in November. 

But Clinton is not particularly well-liked by the press in her own right, and her acumen as a candidate is routinely given little respect. Conditions are thus ripe for members of the media to spend the upcoming campaign picking over every strategic and tactical choice made by Clinton or her advisors, not only questioning the political wisdom of each decision but also suggesting that Clinton bears grave moral responsibility for keeping alive the possibility of a Trump presidency.

This behavioral tendency is already visible. On May 9, the New York Times ran a story about a series of anti-Trump attacks made via Twitter by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. One might think that it would be unadulterated good news for the Clinton campaign that a well-known liberal Democratic senator popular with Bernie Sanders supporters (and formally neutral in the Democratic primary race) was leading a rhetorical charge against Trump, laying the groundwork for a united partisan front behind Clinton in the general election. But to Maggie Haberman, a reporter with the Times who contributed to the story, Warren's offensive was actually important because she was "maybe signaling she doesn't think HRC is doing [a] bang up job [attacking] Trump" herself. Thus an article about Warren's successful engagement with Trump to Clinton's potential benefit (which contained no direct evidence in its text supporting Haberman's suggestion that Warren was in fact unhappy with Clinton or her campaign) became one more supposed indication of Clinton's own political limitations.

In the same vein, a May 6 press release produced by the Democratic National Committee that referred to Trump as "Dangerous Donald" drew an unusual amount of attention among journalists. Receiving boilerplate press releases is presumably an unremarkable daily occurrence for political reporters and is rarely worthy of comment. This time, however, members of the media acted as if the Clinton campaign had settled on its primary anti-Trump message for the entirety of the election season, collectively judging said strategy to be hopelessly lame—which therefore represented an unacceptable case of political malpractice in the face of the Trump threat. Anti-Trump (and anti-Clinton) conservative David Frum sketched out a Trump victory scenario for the Atlantic which suggested that the Clinton campaign might be so incompetent as to drive significant shares of Obama-supporting racial minorities, ideological moderates, and college-educated whites into Trump's corner—a prediction that seems fanciful given current evidence about these groups' opinions of Trump but nonetheless was taken seriously by some analysts. (Trump has a chance of winning, of course, but not because he is likely to attract a large percentage of the Latino vote.)

Expect this dynamic to hold for the remainder of the presidential race. Any indication of a rise in the polls for Trump will inspire a frenzy of media analysis about what Clinton is doing wrong—even if she remains in the lead and a favorite to win in November—while a widening of Clinton's popular margin will be interpreted as reflecting Trump's weaknesses rather than the political effectiveness of the Democratic opposition. The chief strategic decisions made by Clinton and her advisors may not always be correct, but they will be based on opinion surveys, focus groups, and other forms of data employed by modern campaign professionals—yet they will be subjected to routine second-guessing by media analysts who lack confidence that Clinton will defeat Trump on the basis of superior political skill.

Process Obsessions Aren't Enough to Sustain Sanders Past June

Yesterday, I wrote a long post interpreting the melee at the Nevada state convention on Saturday as reflecting the broader tendency of liberals to get bogged down in process arguments when denied political success, which can often prove counterproductive to their long-term goals. The Bernie Sanders campaign has become increasingly preoccupied with procedural issues, citing them as excuses for their inability to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

The New York Times provides additional evidence with an article eye-catchingly headlined "Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch." The piece seems intentionally written to provoke nervous Democrats into uncontrollable bouts of hand-wringing over the possibility of an angry and undaunted Sanders waging a kamikaze mission against Clinton all the way to, if not after, the national convention this summer. Stripping away the various inferences, suggestions, and on-background complaints from the Sanders campaign, however, leaves us with the following on-the-record quote from Sanders strategist Tad Devine, which is hardly a call to storm the barricades:

The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14 [the date of the final primary]. We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand.

It seems more likely that Sanders and his top aides don't really know today what they'll do once the primary season is over, and there may be some internal difference of opinion on the subject. That they remain privately as well as publicly preoccupied with process questions is clear: the Sanders camp is still nurturing long-held grievances about perceived unfair treatment by the Democratic National Committee, and one suggested set of demands at the convention would involve unspecified "fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future."

But complaints about nomination procedures, however valid they might be, are simply not important or motivating enough at the mass level to sustain a presidential campaign—especially a campaign that will not be able to claim the most votes or the most pledged delegates once the primary calendar is complete. Superdelegates, party activists, and Democratic voters are unlikely to view the Sanders campaign's gripes as justifying a post-primary battle over the nomination in the face of a general-election race against Donald Trump. It's one thing to continue a debate within the party over substantive policy priorities that might affect millions of people, but it's hard to run a serious campaign for the office of president of the United States that is primarily dedicated to the cause of exacting revenge on Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Why Bernie Sanders Loves to Argue About Process

The conflict that broke out last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Convention—which not only encompassed protests and physical altercations during the event itself but also included the subsequent defacing of the state party headquarters as well as multiple nasty phone and text messages directed toward the state party chairwoman and her employer—demonstrated that some liberal activists are neither as tolerant and cheerful as they might portray themselves nor as wimpy and passive as their detractors on the right might suggest. The nub of the disagreement concerned the procedural conduct of the convention itself, which was in charge of selecting members of the Nevada delegation to the Democratic national convention this summer.

Some Sanders supporters believed that the Nevada Democratic Party, which is under the firm control of Senate minority leader (and Clinton endorser) Harry Reid, had acted improperly in order to marginalize their candidate's strength (e.g. by rejecting the credentials of a few dozen would-be Sanders delegates). At issue was a handful of national delegate slots that might have allowed Sanders to gain a greater share of the Nevada delegation than he would normally be entitled to receive based on the results of the February caucus, which Clinton won by a five-point margin.

Though Reid strongly hinted after the rebellion in Nevada that Sanders would—and should—accept the results of the convention as legitimate and call on his followers to refrain from directing abusive behavior at the state party and its leadership, Sanders issued a statement that was relatively defiant, listing several grievances while minimizing the transgressions of his supporters. "If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November," he warned, "it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect they have earned."

These latest developments represent the fruition of a trend that has been building over the past few months. Ever since Sanders fell behind Hillary Clinton in the delegate count on Super Tuesday, his campaign has increasingly complained about matters of process, from the existence of superdelegates to the use of closed primaries (which prohibit participation by registered independents) in several states.

Liberals are particularly susceptible to process arguments for two reasons. First, liberal concerns about social equality more generally make it easy for left-leaning critics to accuse any disliked procedural attribute of being "unfair" and therefore unacceptable. For example, the Democratic National Committee's "Fairness Commission" prohibited the use of winner-take-all delegate allocation in primaries in the 1980s, on the stated egalitarian principle that delegates should properly be awarded in proportion to the popular vote, while Republicans—who are less deferential to claims that internal procedures are undemocratic—continue to allow states to use winner-take-all rules if they hold primaries after early March.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, liberals tend to view themselves as self-evidently standing for the rights and interests of "the people" against the elites. In a democracy, of course, the many should rightfully prevail over the few—so any political battle in which the left suffers defeat is easy to dismiss as the product of an undemocratic process rather than revealing the limits of liberalism's popular appeal. It is very telling that the statement released by Sanders after the Nevada convention began by referring to "establishment politics and establishment economics" and criticizing "big-money campaign contributions." Some critics, such as Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, found this strange—"you open with your stump speech?" he asked Sanders rhetorically.

But from Sanders's perspective, it makes perfect sense: the economy is rigged, the campaign finance system is rigged, and so too are the state parties and the nomination process—all by the same dreaded "establishment" controlled by the "millionaires and billionaires." Otherwise, suggests Sanders, he would be winning—or would have already won, since the chief barrier to the implementation of democratic socialism in the United States is, in his mind, not the will of the American people but rather the illegitimate influence of moneyed interests. (He once remarked that the Republican Party would get only "5, 10 percent of the vote" if not for the behavior of the corporate media.)

This viewpoint also explains why the Sanders campaign has in fact been quite selective in its complaints about process. One could easily impugn the caucus system as undemocratic, yet Sanders's successes in caucus states make that argument an uncomfortable one. Even superdelegates, though a regular target of criticism from Sanders, are also cited by his campaign as representing their candidate's sole remaining path to a numerical majority, justifying his continued presence in the race. The events in Nevada arose out of an attempt to effectively overturn the results of the popular vote in the state on Sanders's behalf, which sounds undemocratic on its face—but if one views a Sanders victory as more legitimate by definition than a Sanders defeat at the hands of "establishment" figures Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, such tactics begin to look increasingly justifiable.

Sanders is far from the only left-winger who believes that if the political system itself is reformed (by overturning Citizens United, easing voter registration requirements, prohibiting gerrymandering, eliminating superdelegates, and other measures), an endless parade of liberal victories would follow. This line of thinking greatly exaggerates the degree to which public opinion in America collectively lines up on the left side of the ideological spectrum. The fiction that only the likes of the Koch brothers stand in the way of implementing progressivism in the United States makes it easier for the left to claim righteously that it represents the true voice of the people against the privileged few, but also represents an overly simplistic view of reality that cannot, in the long term, be a solid ground on which to build a political movement.

Liberal preoccupations with process may be ultimately counterproductive to the political aims of the left in other ways as well. If the lesson drawn by Sanders and his supporters from the 2016 nomination race is "the fix is in" rather than "good start—let's get 'em next time," it will be harder to sustain momentum for their agenda within the Democratic Party and the electoral arena more broadly past the end of this campaign.

In part, this is because complaints about a rigged system may breed more apathy and cynicism than motivation to remain productively active in party politics. But blaming defeat on outside forces also discourages the kind of internal stock-taking and retrospective evaluation that can allow a political movement to learn from its mistakes and increase its future effectiveness. If the Sanders cause is to outlast the Sanders presidential campaign, it needs to put the process complaints aside and figure out how to win more votes.

Emotion Meets Calculation in Both Parties

Late spring is an odd time in every presidential election year. The presumptive nominees of the two parties have reliably emerged by this point (if not before), yet the schedule of primaries and caucuses continues at a slow, drawn-out pace, sometimes contested by an active opponent or two who can still score a few popular state-level victories despite the unforgiving arithmetic of the national delegate count. The leading candidates prepare to fight each other for the support of swing voters in the general election, even as they attempt to inspire unity and enthusiasm within the popular bases of their own respective parties. With six months to go before the election itself, the political press and other attentive observers follow every strategic move with great interest while most voters remain only intermittently engaged in the day-to-day combat of the campaign.

Things are even stranger than usual in 2016. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have both claimed an insurmountable lead in delegates—Trump is now running unopposed in the Republican race—yet visible segments of both parties have not become reconciled to their nominations, as demonstrated by the events of this weekend.

Saturday's Washington Post brought news of a draft campaign that is actively attempting to recruit an anti-Trump Republican to contest the general election as an independent candidate. The ringleaders of this scheme (Mitt Romney, Erick Erickson, and Bill Kristol, along with a few veteran Republican political consultants) appear undecided about what qualities they are looking for beyond (1) antipathy to Trump and (2) some commitment to run as a conservative—as is clear from the rather incoherent collection of names on their wish list, which includes John Kasich, Condoleezza Rice, ex-Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, first-term Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, a couple of retired generals, and even Dallas Mavericks owner (and reality TV star) Mark Cuban.

It's easy to understand the frustration felt by conservative elites who currently face the prospect of choosing among Trump, Clinton, and a pro-choice/anti-interventionist Libertarian Party nominee on their November ballots. But their lack of success so far at persuading any of their targets to volunteer for this mission isn't hard to figure out, because it would be a big mistake for any sensible politician to agree. Siphoning off Republican votes from Trump would clinch a sizable Democratic victory—ignore the nonsense about how it might throw the election to the House of Representatives—and ensure that the candidate would go down in party history as the Republican version of Ralph Nader. Ex-McCain and Jeb Bush strategist Mike Murphy's idea that an anti-Trump conservative might only contest a handful of swing states is even sillier; why would a significant share of voters turn out to support a candidate who couldn't even claim a hypothetical chance of victory?

On the Democratic side, the Sanders campaign and some of its most fervent supporters have largely declined to acknowledge the true state of the delegate math, instead nurturing unrealistic theories that superdelegates will overturn Clinton's victory in pledged delegates at the national convention this summer. Such hopes sit with a certain awkwardness alongside claims that dastardly Democratic "bosses" have illegitimately manipulated the nomination process to prevent a Sanders nomination—a point of view that even fueled open conflict at this weekend's state party convention in Nevada.

Once the primary season is over, however, the political environment will change in a way that will make the Sanders campaign's position strategically unsustainable. Many of the superdelegates who are now publicly undeclared will likely endorse Clinton on or shortly after the final primary date (as occurred in 2008, with Obama in the front-runner position) One of those undeclared superdelegates is Obama himself, who can be expected to offer his public support to Clinton once the primaries are over. Sanders's own backers among the ranks of Democratic elected officials and national committee members will then exert pressure on the campaign to begin the process of promoting party unity.

Sanders may well withhold his formal endorsement until he secures concessions from the Clinton camp at the convention itself. But any attempt to continue an active fight against her past the end of the primary calendar will leave him open to substantial criticism from within the party that he is becoming a spoiler in the Democratic Party's battle against a potential President Trump.

In both parties, resistance among the losing factions in the nomination contest is still unusually elevated at the moment, preventing each side from quickly uniting around its future standard-bearer. But the strong emotions of disaffected activists are beginning to collide with the cold calculations of actual and potential candidates, who perceive substantial political risk from maintaining or exacerbating divisions within the party as it turns to face the opposition in a general election in which the political stakes will be particularly high. By October, it is likely that most of the current intraparty strife will be a distant memory, and the population of Republicans who remain unreconciled to Trump (perhaps a smaller and less visible group than those who are currently vowing to stand in opposition) will probably lack a prominent candidate of their own, leaving them with an unappealing choice between voting for Clinton and sitting out the presidential race.

Indiana Recap: We Have a Republican Nominee

1. The decisive victory by Donald Trump in the Indiana primary knocked Ted Cruz out of the race and confirmed Trump as the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee. The magnitude of Trump's victory compared to previous results in neighboring midwestern states suggests that he has gained popular momentum over the past month or so, which would have put him well within reach of a pledged delegate majority even if the margin in Indiana had been closer than it was. With Cruz departing the contest and John Kasich receiving an embarrassing 8 percent of the vote in a state adjacent to his own, Trump now faces an open path to a sweep of the remaining states on the primary calendar and an uncontested first-ballot victory at the national convention.

2. While he had previously declared that the Indiana results would be decisive, Cruz's exit in the immediate wake of his defeat was not universally expected. But Cruz, unlike Kasich, is young enough to consider seeking the presidency again in 2020 or thereafter. Staying in the race with little prospect of victory might only alienate Republicans whose support Cruz might wish to seek in a future contest. A guaranteed Trump nomination is also a better outcome for Cruz, in a strategic sense, than the possibility of an open convention throwing the nomination to an alternative compromise candidate. Trump will probably lose in the fall, and Cruz can run again in the future on the premise that the party suffered defeat by failing once again to nominate a true, principled conservative.

3. All the best evidence that can be brought to bear on the question indicates that Trump begins the general election with little probability of victory. Of course, dissenters will reply that few political experts foresaw Trump's nomination in the first place. But primaries are much more unpredictable than general elections, and Trump's political weaknesses are more vulnerable to attack by Democrats than by fellow Republicans. The complicated strategic dynamics of the multi-candidate Republican nomination race allowed Trump to escape being the target of a sustained negative campaign, but the Clinton campaign and allied Democratic groups will begin firing attacks in his direction immediately, hoping to "define" him quickly as an unacceptable candidate.

4. Yet a long campaign contains inevitable ups and downs in the standing of the candidates, as measured by public opinion surveys or as sensed by the political pundit class. Any signs of competitiveness or "tightening" will probably be heavily publicized by the segment of journalists who find stable races boring, are unimpressed with Hillary Clinton, and/or view Trump as having the potential to fundamentally reorder the electoral coalitions of the two parties. It is also clear that Trump is, in effect, judged by a different set of standards than other candidates; if Clinton or Obama or Mitt Romney had personally accused a rival candidate's father of associating with Lee Harvey Oswald based solely on a report by the National Enquirer, for example, it would be the biggest media story of the month and widely treated as a self-evidently disqualifying catastrophe. Expect much of the press to leap on any sign that Trump has become more "serious" or "presidential" over the course of the campaign—not because journalists are intentionally slanting coverage to favor Trump, but because change is always a better story than more of the same and "both sides do it" is often the default presumption.

5. We should not make too much of declarations from Republicans at this stage of the race that they will not vote for Trump in November. No doubt some disaffected partisans will indeed refuse to support him, though staying home or skipping over the presidential race on the ballot are both more likely forms of Republican protest than actually crossing party lines to vote for Clinton. But general election campaigns are usually effective at rallying partisans around their nominee—if only by reminding them of what they dislike about the opposition—and, unless Trump completely implodes, he is likely to gain the support of the vast majority of Republican identifiers who participate (with the possible exception of Republican Latinos, who may defect at higher rates). Even if Trump suffers a decisive defeat, this residual party loyalty will prevent the Democratic opposition from winning a double-digit victory in the popular vote or carrying more than 30–32 states. There is almost no chance of a true national landslide on the scale of 1964, 1972, or 1984 in today's highly partisan electoral environment—especially when the Democratic nominee is not particularly popular in her own right.

What Does Trump Tell Us About the Republican Party?

Donald Trump has confounded so many expectations, breaking so many supposed "iron laws" of American politics along the way, that it is tempting for those of us who initially and incorrectly dismissed his chances as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination to compensate for our error by proclaiming that the United States has unexpectedly entered a very different political age in which none of the old rules apply and a brave new Trumpian future awaits us all. In this vein, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, a conservative who shared many other normally-perceptive observers' previous skepticism of the Trump candidacy—as late as March 8, Douthat was predicting a Trump defeat—has written a new column trying to make sense of what the Trump phenomenon reveals about the state of American politics in general and the Republican Party in particular.

Douthat cites several previous characterizations of the political world that have been challenged by Trump's rise, including my research with Matt Grossmann concluding that the American party system is asymmetrically split between a party defined by a common ideological identity (the Republicans) and a party organized around a coalition of social groups (the Democrats). He writes:

But there was also a fair amount of political-science evidence that the Republicans really were a more ideological party than the Democrats, less inclined to view compromise in favorable terms, more inclined to regard politics through a philosophical rather than an interest-group service lens. 

Until Donald Trump blew this model up. Yes, Trump has adopted conservative positions on various issues, but he’s done so in a transparently cynical fashion, constantly signaling that he doesn’t really believe in or understand the stance that he’s taking, constantly suggesting a willingness to bargain any principle away. Except for immigration hawks, practically every ideological faction in the party regards Trump with mistrust, disgust, suspicion, fear. Pro-lifers, foreign-policy hawks, the Club for Growth, libertarians — nobody thinks Trump is really on their side. And yet he’s winning anyway. 

Or at least he’s winning a plurality. So perhaps Trumpism can be understood as a coup by the G.O.P.’s ideologically flexible minority against the conservative movement’s litmus tests; indeed to some extent that’s clearly what’s been happening.

It is true that Trump, almost uniquely for a Republican candidate, does not portray his political goals as derived from an abstract commitment to small-government principles or constitutional values. His is a much more colloquial style anchored less in hostility to federal power than in two other strains of conservatism—nationalism and racial resentment—that also have a long pedigree on the American right but have historically been less central to the intellectual foundations of the modern conservative movement or the practice of Republican Party politics. He has demonstrated that many Republican voters are not sufficiently alienated by such heterodoxies as support for current levels of entitlement spending, skepticism about free-trade agreements, and criticism of the Iraq War to turn away from a candidate whom they find otherwise appealing.

Yet it's difficult to conclude that Trump single-handedly disproves the existence of fundamental asymmetries between the parties. If Trump is not a doctrinaire conservative, neither is he a conciliatory moderate, and he is not running on a laundry list of detailed policy initiatives directed toward individual social groups, as is common practice among Democrats. (Indeed, Trump could hardly constitute better evidence in favor of our conclusion that many Republican supporters are motivated by broad rhetorical themes, not policy specifics.)

When Douthat writes that "nobody thinks Trump is really on their side," he's referring to a set of organizations and activists that have traditionally served as the leadership of the American conservative movement. It appears, however, that Republican voters look more and more to the most popular personalities in the conservative media universe (whose increasing and unparalleled influence is a major theme of our forthcoming book) for political guidance. If Trump is really a phony conservative, they reason, wouldn't Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity let us know?

Finally, while one might personally agree with Douthat's characterization of Trump as a "transparently cynical" candidate who "doesn't really believe in or understand" his own purported views, it is clear that Trump has managed to convince many Republican voters of the opposite: that he is a uniquely bold teller of truths who is courageously taking on a timid and corrupt Republican "establishment." It is perhaps appropriate for many conservatives who cheered on the Tea Party movement but are now aghast at Trump's success to consider the extent to which they themselves have contributed to the destruction of the national Republican leadership's popular credibility among the party's own primary electorate. Frequent depictions of figures like John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell as sell-outs and secret liberals have created a power vacuum that both Trump and Ted Cruz have filled, and have removed what would otherwise be a potentially powerful mechanism with which to fight them.

All in all, Trump is indeed an imperfect fit for a Republican Party that has traditionally conceived of itself as dedicated to the cause of limited government. But observers who are now proclaiming the Age of Trump should risk extrapolating too much from a single data point (some of us are old enough to recall when Ross Perot supposedly represented the future of American politics). If Trump, who lacks a loyal faction within the party's elected officeholders, loses the election, the Republican Party will retreat and regroup to consider its future and the lessons of the campaign—and many of the loudest voices within the party will unite in declaring that Trump was indeed a deeply flawed nominee.

Next time, they'll say, let's nominate someone different—a true conservative.

Northeast Tuesday: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. You can't beat somebody with nobody, and Donald Trump is running against a couple of nobodies in the Republican presidential primaries—at least as far as East Coast voters are concerned. Ted Cruz's brand of southern conservatism just doesn't play well among the Republicans of the eastern seaboard, and John Kasich is barely running a campaign at all (he has won fewer delegates than Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race six full weeks ago after a series of humiliating defeats). Trump racked up landslide margins in all five states voting last night, giving him enough delegates that he remains in sight of gaining an overall majority by the end of the primary season.

2. There may be less "momentum" than usual this year, defined as shifts in voter support from one candidate to another based on the results of the sequential primaries. However, any organized effort to block a Trump nomination depends on a perceived possibility of success, and Trump's five-state sweep last night is a body blow to the morale of the "Never Trump" movement. If he manages to win Indiana next week, he may even attain the status of "presumptive nominee."

3. It's likely that the less frenzied election schedule in the back half of the primary calendar has helped Trump on balance. The shock of his early success has worn off, and with no debates and fewer incidents of physical violence at his campaign rallies over the last few weeks, he has succeeded in entrenching himself as the familiar front-runner while Cruz and Kasich have struggled for attention. Trump might not have reached such a secure position in the race if prominent conservatives had used the last month-and-a-half to build a public case against him. But with DC favorite Marco Rubio out of the race after March 15, the only serious remaining alternative to Trump in the race was Cruz, and it's clear that few influential Republicans were interested in risking their own standing within the party only to benefit the junior senator from Texas.

4. Pennsylvania is worth keeping an eye on when calculating the overall Republican delegate count. Under state party rules, most of the state's delegates are officially unbound to any candidate. It appears, however, that the Trump campaign succeeded in electing many of its supporters to delegate slots, while a number of other delegates have promised to vote for the winner of the state or congressional district (which would also be Trump, who carried every district in Pennsylvania). Trump's numerical path to an overall majority is much easier if he can count on another 30 to 40 delegates beyond his official pledged delegate haul from the ranks of the Pennsylvania delegation.

5. Who was the last non-incumbent presidential candidate who easily captured the nomination of a major party and began the general election as the overwhelming favorite to win the White House? I'm not sure of the answer (even Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the clear front-runner in 1932, needed four ballots to be nominated due to the two-thirds vote required by the Democratic convention at the time), but both of these criteria surely apply this year to Hillary Clinton now that it is likely that she will face Trump in November. To hear much of the press tell it, though, she is in big trouble. Channel-flipping last night brought me to a panel of MSNBC reporters moderated by Chuck Todd who went on and on about Clinton's political weaknesses and the prospect of Bernie Sanders-supporting millennials deserting her in favor of Trump in the general election. One does not need to be a Clinton admirer to admit that, by all objective evidence, she is at this moment far and away the most likely person to become the 45th president of the United States next January, yet much of the news media is completely unable to acknowledge her good fortune—much less give her any credit for bringing it on herself with the application of political skill.

We are headed into a general election in which one nominee may have a steady and significant lead for the entire length of the campaign even as the press constantly warns that she is susceptible to defeat by the other party (which is, incidentally, busy tearing itself apart as it nominates a highly flawed candidate). Nothing is guaranteed in electoral politics, but a congenitally Trump-hyping media universe has not yet come to terms with his unprecedented weaknesses in appealing to a broader electorate outside the Republican primaries, and a press corps that has long been suspicious of Hillary Clinton is routinely inclined to overstate her political vulnerabilities.

Trump Can't Transform the GOP By Himself

One of the most common responses to the question What Does Trump Mean? seems to consist of speculation that Trump is poised to provoke a wholesale redefinition of the policy agenda and popular base of the Republican Party, threatening both its national electoral fortunes and its status as the political home of the American conservative movement for years or even decades to come. A newly-published article from the Washington Examiner does a good job of summarizing this point of view, though it has emerged repeatedly over the past several months.

It's easy to understand the palpable despair dripping off of both the conservative intelligentsia and the Republican consultant community at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Yet the future long-term effects of Trump's rise are difficult to predict, and there are many more reasons to doubt that his current success presages a large-scale realignment than there are reasons to believe it.

The potential for Trump to remake the GOP is obviously much greater if he were to be elected president. But even victorious presidential candidates do not receive automatic deference from the House members and senators of their party. Because there is little reason to believe that a President Trump would establish a particularly good working relationship with Congress even if it remains under Republican control, the likelihood of Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell collaborating to marginalize the conservative movement and lead the GOP in a new, more dangerous direction seems much lower than the Trump administration's agenda becoming hopelessly bogged down in the legislative branch due to bipartisan opposition.

If Trump loses the general election, and loses it badly—surely a much more probable outcome, from today's vantage point—his ability to exert enduring influence over Republican politics is even less clear. Trump leads no definable faction within the party. He has few acolytes among the ranks of Republican officeholders, activists, and interest group leaders who would be left to pick up the pieces after a defeated Trump returns to his eponymous Manhattan tower. Other Republican candidates in the future will adopt his positions and style in an attempt to replicate his success in the nomination process, but may well find that his celebrity status and unique persona were a necessary component of his popular appeal.

Trump may well cause Republicans some problems that persist past this November. He may tarnish the party's reputation more enduringly among young voters and Latinos, for example. But parties are resilient things, electorally speaking. Note how far the political landscape shifted between 1992 and 1994, or between 2004 and 2006, or between 2008 and 2010. Observers who bet on "permanent" majorities (or minorities) are routinely—and often rapidly—disproven. Trump may well be a nightmare for the GOP, but not one from which it is unlikely to awaken.

Don't Like the Presidential Nomination Process? Save Some Blame For the States!

When presidential nomination contests are not wrapped up quickly in the first few weeks of voting, the slower pace of the primary calendar thereafter produces fertile ground for widespread gripes about the nomination process itself. The daily thrills and plot twists of February and March give way to the more tedious week-to-week slog of April and May, leaving more time and energy for broader evaluations of the nomination system. Supporters of candidates who are still actively campaigning but face diminishing odds of success can easily direct their frustration toward the rules and norms that seem to be responsible for preventing their desired outcome, even as backers of the front-runner express annoyance that their own favorite is still forced to withstand fire from also-rans within the party.

This year, the various procedural quirks of the process have received more than the usual amount of scrutiny—perhaps because both parties' races are still nominally unresolved as of late April (for the first time since 1980), because the insurgent Trump and Sanders candidacies are particularly sensitive to any apparent evidence that the deck has been stacked against them by the dreaded party "establishment," and/or because the internet has a way of amplifying dissatisfaction of every sort.

Everyone, it seems, has a list of grievances. The Trump campaign is suspicious that delegates are being unjustly denied them by state party conventions in Colorado and elsewhere. Anti-Trump Republicans lament delegate allocation rules that have disproportionately favored Trump and prevented non-Trump sentiment from coalescing behind a single rival candidate. Bernie Sanders supporters decry the existence of closed primary rules in some states; Hillary Clinton supporters decry the existence of caucuses in others. Behind many of these complaints is the assumption that one or both national parties wish things to be as they now are, presumably for some nefarious reason or reasons, and not only allow but encourage various infringements on democratic principles in order to serve other, less high-minded purposes.

Other political scientists have defended the parties and their role in structuring the nomination process. I wish to make a slightly different point, which is that the national party committees, though nominally in control of presidential nominations, face significant practical constraints in imposing their will upon the state parties and state governments that actually operate elections. Many of the specific aspects of the process that provoke popular disdain—the disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, the inconsistency in delegate allocation formulas and voter eligibility requirements from state to state, the inept organization of many state caucuses—are, in truth, merely tolerated by the national parties. It is the states that insist upon them, and the states that therefore bear most of the responsibility for these departures from "pure" democratic equality.

Of course, the national parties could in theory attempt to impose stringent requirements on the states to smooth out these various inconsistencies, but practical complications are likely to ensue. If a national party were to mandate that all delegates be selected via primary elections, for example, but some states refused to authorize the public funds to hold them, what then? Would those states go wholly unrepresented at the national conventions—and, if so, would this be a more "democratic" outcome than the current system, which allows voters to attend party caucuses instead? Could the national parties insist on closed primaries nationwide, even though about half of American states do not have official party registration? Could they likewise require open primaries, even though some presidential primaries are held concurrently with primaries for down-ballot offices that might be influenced by the participation of voters from outside the party?

The imposition of strict national rules on the states and state parties is further impeded by the fact that the national parties, like the national government, are federal systems. National committees are comprised of representatives from the state parties, who select the national party chair and vote on internal party rules. A promise to crack down on the freedom of the states to run their primaries and caucuses as they prefer is unlikely to be a popular sentiment within any internal party committee or a winning platform for any candidate for national party chair. If anything, the state parties would prefer even more autonomy. Howard Dean ran successfully for chairman of the Democratic National Committee after the 2004 election by promising to direct more party money and resources to the state Democratic organizations, which turned out to be a very popular position among the ranks of the state party chairs who held seats on the national committee.

It is easy to look at the current complex and disjointed nomination system and call for large-scale reforms. Indeed, some reforms would be undoubtedly well-advised. But let's remember that others have come before us, with similar plans for changes to the process in the name of equality and fairness—and that their ambitions were foiled by the enduring ability of the states to defend their own turf against the attempted interference of the national parties. If you're looking to cast blame for what you don't like about the current nomination system, don't forget that the states deserve their fair share.

New York: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Donald Trump won the New York primary in a landslide, receiving about 60 percent of the popular vote and about 90 of the state's 95 Republican delegates. Trump undoubtedly benefited from a home-state advantage, but his performance bodes well for his chances in the five other northeastern states voting next Tuesday. Trump remains on track to flirt with an overall delegate majority by the end of the primary season in June.

2. Beyond the topline results, two additional developments represent good news for Trump. The first is Ted Cruz's poor performance. Cruz's brand of politics is not a natural fit for the Northeast, even among Republican voters, and he probably suffered from making a derogatory remark about "New York values" earlier in the race (perhaps not thinking ahead at the time). But the outcome in New York suggests that Cruz has not emerged as the main rival to Trump everywhere in the nation, and the fact that most of the remaining states on the calendar are located on the East and West coasts suggests that his campaign will face a serious challenge in consolidating the non-Trump vote and demonstrating positive "momentum" that might potentially impress Republican delegates weighing whether to throw the nomination to him over Trump.

3. Perhaps more importantly, Trump's victory speech departed from his signature cutting and bombastic style, lacking his usual tossed-off remarks belittling his Republican opponents. Some analysts have suggested that this new approach reflects a recent campaign shakeup in which nominal campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was unofficially supplanted by the more experienced Republican operative Paul Manafort. Trump's path to the nomination, still numerically unassured and perhaps hinging on the behavior of a pivotal bloc of unpledged delegates, will be smoothed considerably if he reduces the cloud of controversy surrounding his candidacy and signals a willingness to take advice from experienced campaign professionals.

In the past, the apparent emergence of a "kinder, gentler" Trump has been quickly reversed by a new eruption of slash-and-burn politics, so it is too soon to conclude that his speech marks a new strategic direction. Yet it is worth keeping an eye on his behavior in the coming weeks. At the very least, a more conciliatory Trump will dampen the energy within the party to organize a stop-Trump effort after the end of the primary season, which may allow him to claim the nomination even if he falls just short of a majority in pledged delegates. If a new, nicer style makes Trump's nomination more likely, however, it may not be in the interest of the Republican Party as a whole.

4. The Democratic race remains where it was before, with future nominee Hillary Clinton fending off a spirited but unsuccessful challenge from Bernie Sanders in New York, as she has done in the contest at large. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver attracted some attention last night by suggesting on MSNBC that Sanders will remain as an active candidate all the way to the July convention, pressuring superdelegates along the way to deliver him the nomination even though he will fail to receive a majority of pledged delegates. I wouldn't make too much of this, though. All political campaigns insist that a path to victory remains in sight, no matter how long the odds, right up until the moment of concession. Ultimately, the decision about what to do after the primaries are over will rest with Sanders himself, and there is no reason to believe that he will necessarily continue to contest the race once the voting ends. Some Democrats are worried about lasting divisions in the party if Sanders does not immediately rally around Clinton, but experience demonstrates that wounds incurred during the nomination season will be a distant memory by the time that the November election occurs.

Bernie Sanders and the Search for a Liberal Party

Jamelle Bouie of Slate has published a well-argued and beautifully-written piece placing the Bernie Sanders campaign in the larger context of Democratic Party politics past and present. While the headline ("There Is No Bernie Sanders Movement") will undoubtedly provoke complaints among some Sanders fans, the article itself is complimentary of Sanders, who has exceeded most expectations and demonstrated that a campaign devoted to purist liberalism can attract significant popular support. At the same time, the delegate arithmetic is clear: Sanders will not win the Democratic presidential nomination, and it is worth considering why his political message ultimately found a limited appeal even among the Democratic primary electorate.

Bouie's main conclusion, with which I concur unreservedly, is that committed liberals remain a minority within the Democratic Party. "The broad point," he writes, "is that a 'political revolution' can’t rest on a call for clean government and ideological rigor—the crux of Sanders’ general argument. The Democratic Party isn’t yet an ideological party, and many of its voters don’t put ideology or good-government reform at the top of their lists." From the standpoint of accumulating delegates, Sanders's fate was sealed by his inability to convince a greater share of African-Americans and other racial minorities that he would better represent their views and interests than would Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party is a group coalition, and Sanders was unable to build a broad enough alliance of groups within the party to overtake Clinton in the national delegate count.

The pattern of a liberal insurgent losing a Democratic nomination race to a more moderate, transactional rival is a common one; Sanders's counterparts in previous years include Howard Dean (2004), Bill Bradley (2000), and Jerry Brown (1992). Because Sanders outperformed these predecessors, Bouie suggests that his campaign could serve as the foundation for the rise of a new liberal movement that might succeed down the road in capturing control of the Democratic Party, just as the modern conservative movement identified with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan became the dominant faction of the Republican Party by the 1980s. In my view, however, this remains an unlikely development. Among the reasons why:

1. It's unclear how much of Sanders's electoral success is a product of Hillary Clinton's specific weaknesses. In particular, his overwhelming margins among young voters might have been attenuated had he been facing a more conventional Democratic opponent, or opponents, who could also claim to be a fresh political face and who remained free of the baggage left by the Clintonist compromises of the 1990s and early 2000s. If Sanders were running against some combination of Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Amy Klobuchar, would voters under the age of 35 appear equally enthusiastic about the prospect of implementing socialism as the defining creed of the Democratic Party?

2. Because Sanders is not himself a Democrat, he is not in a position after the election to lead an internal faction of Democratic politicians and activists dedicated to remaking the party as a vehicle of the liberal cause—and it is unclear who else within the party has the national standing and influence to do so on his behalf. Elizabeth Warren is the most likely figure, although it is unclear whether she wishes to play such a role. Sanders disproportionately receives support from voters who are not themselves Democratic identifiers; why would we expect these voters not only to join the Democratic Party but also to become active within its ranks if their political hero has never done the same?

3. The American left, such as it is, has long had an ambivalent relationship with electoral politics in general and Democratic Party politics in particular. While the conservative movement threw itself into gaining root-and-branch control of the Republican organizational apparatus and using it to persuade and mobilize voters on behalf of conservative candidates, there has been no sustained counterpart to these efforts on the left; leftists often prefer other forms of protest such as marches, occupations, boycotts, and internet activism. (To take a recent example, compare the Tea Party movement to the Occupy movement. One side emphasized engagement in partisan politics and electoral participation on behalf of a policy agenda, the other did not. Which approach was more successful?) The current activity on behalf of the Sanders campaign will not be sustained past the end of his candidacy if his supporters view his defeat as signaling the futility of electoral mobilization rather than as a promising start upon which to build a sustainable movement.

4. The final triumph of the conservative movement within the Republican Party did not occur until Ronald Reagan demonstrated that a conservative candidate could win a national election, thus removing the strongest remaining justification for the existence of moderate Republicanism. It is unclear at best whether a Sanders-style liberal is electable; Bouie notes that left-wing Democrats are rarely elected statewide even at the sub-presidential level outside of the Northeast and coastal West. 

Even if a future Sandersesque candidate manages to win the Democratic nomination, a general-election defeat would only reinforce the instincts of many party actors that purist liberalism is, regardless of its other merits, ballot-box poison in the United States. As a result, non-purist Democrats would gain substantial justification for their efforts to swing the party back toward the center (as previously occurred in the mid-1970s and early 1990s).

5. Finally, it is unclear whether Sanders-style liberalism would be successful as a governing strategy even if granted officeholding power by the American electorate. Sanders is less interested than most Democrats in conceding ground to expert-dominated technocracy or the constraints of political pragmatism, which allows him to propose a bold legislative agenda and make campaign promises that remain appealingly unrestrained by the disappointing limitations of practicality. Once the election is over, however, the concrete demands of Democratic constituencies will not be satisfied by mere symbolic measures. Sanders's single-payer health care plan, for example, may be more ideologically pure than Obama's comparatively kludgy Affordable Care Act, but if he can't get it passed—or if it is enacted but fails to provide the benefits that it promises—than many Democratic supporters will judge his approach wanting, and look around for an alternative strategy that doesn't make the perfect the enemy of the good. 

The current "impure" nature of the Democratic Party does not reflect the triumph of corrupt corporate sellouts over innocent idealists, but instead represents the hard-won experience of most core groups within the party coalition that incrementalism and ideological flexibility are the best way to realize their political goals. If Sanders, or a future Sanders type, wishes to convince Democrats to dispense with that assumption, he or she would need to demonstrate that a more dogged adherence to ideological doctrine is equally if not more successful in addressing the specific social problems that Democratic constituencies seek to solve. Until then, the Democratic Party will remain a party on the left, but not truly of the left.

Debate Recap: More of the Same

Despite some sparks of mutual personal irritation, Thursday night's debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders reflected the stasis that the Democratic race has acquired. Clinton is still the pragmatist with a safe lead, Sanders is still the purist with a devoted base of support. Clinton feels vulnerable enough to Sanders's attacks to insist that he is denying the degree of their actual agreement over issues such as a $15 minimum wage and reforms of the Social Security tax, but not vulnerable enough to actually move her positions on other issues where the two candidates clearly differ (such as foreign policy, free college, and single-payer health care) further to the ideological left.

Any possibility that either Clinton or Sanders might say something particularly new or interesting was snuffed out by the CNN moderators, who were especially fond of cutting the candidates off in mid-sentence just as they were engaging with each other or moving past the two-minute responses that they had already given in previous debates. All in all, it was not a newsworthy event.

The news media face an incentive to hype the race to keep readers and viewers engaged. But assuming that the polls are right and Clinton gains a solid victory in the New York primary on Tuesday, the state of the delegate arithmetic will then become too clear-cut for anyone but the most committed Sanders supporters to ignore. While the final set of primaries will take another six weeks to play out, the final chapter of this contest is now coming into view.

How Many Sanders Voters Want Hillary to Win?

Ex-New Republic journalist John Judis has a piece on Talking Points Memo today in which he explains that his intention to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Maryland primary on April 26—he has even planted a Sanders lawn sign in front of his house, pictured in the article—should not be taken as evidence that he actually wants Sanders to be the Democratic nominee. In fact, says Judis, his and his wife's support for Sanders is "on the condition that we don't think he will get the nomination."

For Judis, supporting Sanders is a strategic act—to express approval for some of the issues that the Sanders campaign has raised, to push Hillary Clinton further to the ideological left, to lay the groundwork for a more ambitious national Democratic policy agenda in the future. But if Sanders were actually nominated in 2016, Judis worries that his favored candidate would have a difficult time winning a general election, and he is also "not sure whether [Sanders] is really ready for the job of president."

My anecdotal experience suggests that Judis is not alone. Sanders is winning some votes from Democrats who don't necessarily think that he would be the best nominee for the party, or even the most effective president, but are supporting him in the primaries because they wish to express their endorsement of his views and/or send a message to Hillary Clinton to pay more attention to the party's left wing.

It's hard to know exactly how large the contingent of "Vote Bernie, Hope Hillary" voters is, and doubtless they are outnumbered many times over by Sanders supporters who sincerely prefer him to be the Democratic nominee. But this phenomenon might account for part of the seesaw pattern of primary outcomes that we've seen this year on the Democratic side: a Clinton victory in Iowa was followed by a Sanders landslide in New Hampshire, which in turn was followed by Clinton wins in Nevada, South Carolina, and most of the Super Tuesday states—which then led to a Sanders upset in Michigan before Clinton swept on March 15, after which Sanders won 7 of 8 states leading into next week's New York primary.

As long as Clinton appears to have a lock on the nomination, Judis-style voters are free to indulge their symbolic support for Sanders. But if Clinton seems even slightly vulnerable—as after well-publicized Sanders victories—these voters might be less likely to depart from their sincere preference that she win the nomination, instead rallying behind her in the next round of voting. Of course, much of the apparent momentum shifts in the Democratic contest reflect differences from state to state in demographics and electoral rules, not changes in the actual dynamics of the race. But there may be an element of voter strategy at work here too.

Why Ryan Should Run

In the daydreams of most Washington Republicans and nearly the entire political press corps, Donald Trump is stopped short of a majority on the first roll call vote at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. After a few deadlocked ballots on which neither Trump nor Ted Cruz can manage to win enough delegates to capture the nomination, the lights dim, thick smoke and loud music fill the air, and the arena doors open to reveal...Paul Ryan, riding in on a white steed to save the Republicans once again!

While this seems like wishful thinking more than a serious prediction, there is some logic at work. Trump will find it difficult to win over Republican delegates who are not already supporters of his campaign. Cruz also lacks broad appeal within the party and seems unlikely to be a strong general election candidate. And Ryan has already played the role of "The Only Man Who Can Unite the Party" once before: last fall in the House speakership race, when he was prevailed upon to succeed John Boehner after Kevin McCarthy's ascension from majority leader was blocked by the House Freedom Caucus.

Tonight, Politico tries to spoil everyone's fun by publishing "Why Ryan Won't Run," an article full of on-background denials from Ryan aides that their man has any interest in being the savior of his party at the national convention. The piece is full of arguments that are convincing enough—taking the nomination under such circumstances would divide more than unify a party in which the vast majority of voters supported either Trump or Cruz; assembling a national presidential campaign from a standing start in July would put him at a disadvantage against the Democratic opposition; running and losing this year would probably foreclose any future ambitions.

And yet: in the unlikely scenario that Ryan is presented with an opportunity to maneuver his way to the nomination, it seems to me that he should grab it without delay.

The main reason I draw this conclusion is that it sure looks like the speakership will eventually swallow him up just like it did John Boehner. Ryan has been speaker for less than six months, and he's already facing a serious rebellion over the budget from Boehner's old nemeses in the Freedom Caucus (a development that would be a much bigger story if the political world weren't fully distracted by the presidential race; in truth, the dumping of Boehner was itself a remarkable event that never really got the attention it deserved either). Republican regulars, perhaps including Ryan himself, may have assumed that their party's internal divisions would be abated after the installation of a new, more conservative speaker without Boehner's history of slighting the Freedom Caucusers. Instead, it looks as if the problem is structural, not personal—and now the problem is Ryan's.

The best-case scenario for a successful Ryan speakership requires a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential race. The new president would take responsibility for shaping the party's legislative agenda, and hard-right dissatisfaction and troublemaking would likely decline—or at least find a new target.

But if the Republicans are defeated in the presidential election—a nearly-certain scenario if Trump or Cruz wins the nomination—Ryan's job as speaker will only get harder. Republicans are likely to lose seats in the House this fall, reducing the party's margin of control, but these losses will not be suffered by the Freedom Caucus, whose members occupy safe deep-red districts. A newly-elected President (Hillary) Clinton will stimulate a gushing stream of conservative outrage that will inevitably splash onto the Republican leadership in Washington, as it did in the Obama years. Like Boehner before him, Ryan will be caught between making the compromises needed to govern and satisfying the incessant demands of his own partisan-ideological base. And if the election is a true landslide, the House Republican majority itself will be in jeopardy (though this remains a remote possibility at present).

Several of Politico's sources in the Ryan orbit appear convinced of the idea that four years of this madness would somehow leave Ryan in a good position to seek the presidency. That seems unlikely, if not outright delusional. In truth, Ryan will be lucky to still remain speaker at the end of the next president's term, and any further ambitions will probably be closed off completely. If Ryan really envisions himself in the White House, he shouldn't have accepted the speakership in the first place—but if he still wants the job, the time to run is now.

What Does Trump Tell Us About Partisan Media Asymmetry?

This morning, Vox published a feature on my academic research with Matt Grossmann of Michigan State University, focusing on our new paper analyzing the asymmetric nature of the American media environment. We demonstrate that the presence of an extensive and influential conservative media universe has become a major component of the fundamental differences separating the two parties, and that Republican preference for explicitly partisan/ideological news sources over the distrusted "mainstream media" (with no corresponding sentiment among Democrats) has become a central attribute of contemporary American politics. Dylan Matthews does a great job of summarizing our arguments and main findings, and the entire paper is publicly available as well. (Here's a previous Vox piece on our party asymmetry project, which will take the form of a book later this year.)

In response, Kevin Drum asks a reasonable question: okay, but what about Donald Trump? Unlike most American conservatives, Trump doesn't talk much about constitutional principles or the virtues of limited government. He opposes cutting entitlement programs, criticizes free trade agreements, and thinks the Iraq War was a big mistake. Does Trump's rise actually demonstrate that, as Drum suggests, "perhaps the Republican coalition isn't as ideologically committed as we thought"?

In our view, the existence of the conservative media universe is actually central to the story of Trump's success. Fox News and other popular media outlets on the right have for years given Trump legitimacy as a political thinker and actor—especially during the Obama administration, when Trump emerged as an outspoken critic of the president. Trump has had some differences with Fox this year, but most of this tension is between Trump and a single Fox host, Megyn Kelly. (Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, by contrast, appear to maintain good relations with Trump.)

Many conservatives out in the wider electorate might have been open to the argument that Trump's various policy apostasies should properly rule him out of membership in the conservative movement, but regular voters are not necessarily going to reach such a conclusion by reasoning on their own. Some political authority that they know and trust would need to make this case against Trump in order for it to stick—and today, the authorities that Republican voters know and trust the most are not elected officials or policy intellectuals but leading personalities in the conservative media empire. By and large, these personalities—Hannity, O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh—have not criticized Trump in this manner, and in fact have often praised him, thus validating him in the eyes of the electorate as a true conservative in good standing.

It doesn't really matter much to Trump's supporters whether or not National Review, Mitt Romney, or the Republican community in Washington finds Trump ideologically acceptable. (By the way, check out Romney's favorability ratings among Republicans these days; he's not exactly a beloved elder statesman in the party.) The key actors in shaping public opinion on the right are conservative radio, cable news, and internet sources; as David Frum once remarked, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we're discovering we work for Fox."

For years, these conservative media outlets have played a key role in undermining the popularity of the "Republican establishment" among the party's own voters. It's hardly surprising that conservatives in the electorate are open to a candidate promising to overturn that very establishment—and that large, loud components of the powerful conservative media apparatus are doing little to stop him, if not actively cheering him on.

How Hard Will Republican Leaders Fight for Ted Cruz?

Over the past few weeks, several prominent leaders of the wilting faction of Republican Regulars—including Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Lindsey Graham—have called on party voters to unite behind the presidential candidacy of Ted Cruz. To observe that these expressions of support have been "grudging" is to understate the matter considerably. Romney announced that he was voting for Cruz in the Utah caucus but refused to acknowledge that he was officially endorsing the senator; Bush simply issued a short statement to the press, suggesting that he was not ready to hit the campaign trail on Cruz's behalf any time soon; and Graham, who previously compared the competition between Cruz and Donald Trump to a choice between death by gunshot or by poison, openly conceded that his sole purpose in backing a candidate for whom he has considerable contempt was to resist an even less palatable Trump nomination.

Today, Politico reports that these recent public gestures represent a larger shift in thinking among Republican politicians and strategists. Washington Republicans continue to disdain Cruz as both personally dishonorable and politically toxic, but many have concluded that his probable defeat in a general election would be less damaging than a Trump-led ticket to both the down-ballot fortunes of Republican congressional candidates in 2016 and the long-term health of the party beyond this year.

Left unexplored in the Politico article, however, is the key matter of delegate math. At this stage of the nomination process, Cruz has no realistic chance of winning an outright majority of delegates by the end of the primary calendar, and is nearly as unlikely to pass Trump (who is now almost 300 delegates in the lead) in the overall count. Anyone still contemplating the prospect of a Cruz nomination needs to acknowledge that such an outcome can now only occur as a product of a contested convention at which a pro-Trump plurality is outvoted by a pro-Cruz majority consisting of an alliance between Cruz's own pledged delegates and those originally bound to other candidates—an event that would produce certain controversy, if not outright procedural (and even physical) conflict.

For Republicans who have resigned themselves to Cruz as not merely a stalking-horse for a deadlocked convention that would ultimately nominate someone like Paul Ryan but as the only plausible remaining alternative to nominating Trump, this is an important point to realize. It's one thing to concede today from an armchair that Cruz is a preferable nominee to Trump, but committing oneself to a bloody battle at the convention in order to throw the nomination to Cruz will require a much greater investment of energy, degree of coordination, and assumption of political risk. Republican Regulars may have made their peace with Cruz's status as a better option than Trump. But are they really willing to go to war for him?

Dumping Trump at the Convention Requires Help From GOP Voters

Anecdotally, it seems as if some of the fight has gone out of the Never Trump movement this week. Anti-Trump Republicans have continued to blast away at their nemesis in the press and on the Internet, but Trump's multiple electoral victories on Tuesday have dimmed his critics' hopes that Republican primary voters will rally around the two other remaining candidates in order to send a clear sign that they, too, find Trump an intolerable choice for the nomination.

Whether Trump will actually gain an outright majority of pledged delegates remains mathematically unclear and probably will not be resolved until June 7, the final date on the primary calendar, when delegate-rich California and New Jersey have scheduled their primaries along with three smaller states. But we can conclude at this stage that Trump is positioned to hold a delegate plurality at minimum, and with it the standing to argue that he, as the first choice of Republican voters, cannot rightfully be denied the nomination.

One set of issues raised by the prospect of a contested convention is procedural, encompassing party rules (and their interpretation and possible revision), the selection of delegates, and so forth. But another set involves the question of legitimacy: whether the national party organization has the "right" to block the popular choice of the Republican electorate from receiving its presidential nomination, and whether doing so would or would not cause more damage to the Republican Party—both in the short and long term—than ratifying the expressed preference of party members.

Given the magnitude of the threat posed by Trump to much of the existing Republican leadership, it is somewhat remarkable how little open resistance there has been (one short speech by Mitt Romney does not really constitute a party-wide revolt). It is possible that party leaders are quietly confident that Trump can be defeated down the road; more likely, they are more or less resigned to a Trump nomination unless the voters themselves shift against Trump in the remaining primaries. This behavior suggests the existence of a powerful norm respecting the perceived democratic legitimacy of the primary process even when it results in a deeply undesirable outcome.

Put simply, Republican leaders are unlikely to risk building a coordinated effort to block Trump at the convention unless they feel as if the voters are behind them. If Trump's support were to decline significantly in the later primaries, so that he barely crawled across the finish line with a plurality of delegates, anti-Trump forces might be emboldened to carry the fight to Cleveland. Alternatively, if the Republican electorate as a whole expressed obvious buyer's remorse—for example, if a majority of Republican identifiers told pollsters by July that they supported an effort to discard Trump in favor of an alternative candidate—the anti-Trump Republicans could claim a popular legitimacy of their own to rival that conferred on Trump by the electoral process.

Absent such signals from the voters, however, the usual presumption that a first-place candidate should rightfully claim victory is likely to hold—and a demoralized Republican leadership will reluctantly acknowledge that the people have spoken.

The State of the Race: Clinton vs. Sanders, Trump vs. Math

Since the night of the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic presidential nomination race has been a competition between two candidates: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The Republican contest, however, has now become a closely-matched battle between a single candidate, Donald Trump, and the number 1,237—a sum representing the delegate total that a Republican candidate needs to win in order to be nominated at the party’s national convention this July.

Last night’s primary elections in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio clarified the status of both parties’ nomination races. On the Democratic side, Clinton’s victories in all five states, including a 2-to-1 popular margin over Sanders in Florida, gave her a virtually insurmountable lead in the national delegate count. Sanders will presumably fight on into the spring, but his campaign cannot realistically overtake Clinton’s numerical advantage among pledged delegates—and he is even further behind when the heavily pro-Clinton population of superdelegates is added to the arithmetic.

For the Republicans, Tuesday’s election results extended Trump’s lead over the other remaining candidates who nominally represent his political competition. Even more importantly, however, they increased the probability that he will prevail over what now looms as his most formidable opponent: the requirement that presidential nominees win an overall majority of delegates.

Trump benefited from a Republican party rule that allows states voting or after March 15 to allocate delegates to candidates via non-proportional formulas. (In contrast, the Democratic National Committee imposes a uniform proportionality requirement on all state primaries and caucuses.) His decisive victory in Florida received particular attention in the news media for ending the presidential candidacy of Marco Rubio, who was favored by many Republican leaders and campaign professionals. But it was also noteworthy for significantly bolstering Trump’s position in the delegate hunt, since the state awards all 99 of its delegates to the winner of the statewide popular vote.

In Illinois and Missouri, most Republican delegates are allocated in a winner-take-all fashion at the level of individual congressional districts. This procedure also favored Trump, who tends to attract a broadly-distributed geographic base of support. Trump received 41 percent of the statewide popular vote in Missouri—edging out rival candidate Ted Cruz by less than 2,000 votes—and 39 percent in Illinois, but appears to have accumulated as much as three-quarters of the delegates from both states.

Trump lost Ohio, and its 66 delegates, to John Kasich, but even in defeat the news was not all bad for the front-runner. Kasich had indicated that he would fold his campaign if he lost his home state, but the results in Ohio keep him in the race for now. Kasich’s continued presence as an active candidate will reduce the share of delegates won by Trump in upcoming state primaries that continue to employ proportional allocation formulas, but the likelihood that Kasich and Cruz split the anti-Trump vote may allow Trump to gain substantial numbers of delegates from the larger number of winner-take-all states even if he falls short of an overall popular majority. In any event, the delegate allocation rules from this point forward provide the leading candidate with a clear structural advantage; as long as Trump keeps winning states, he will receive a disproportionate share of the remaining delegates.

It is yet impossible to predict with certainty whether or not Trump will succeed in reaching the magic number of 1,237 delegates by the end of the primary season, which is still nearly three months away. But Tuesday’s results virtually ensure that Trump will at least come close to that milestone—absent a spectacular and unprecedented collapse in his popular support—and will be able to claim more state-level victories, more popular votes, and more delegates won than any other Republican presidential candidate.

Trump has made it clear that he will demand the nomination even if he only achieves a plurality, arguing at the March 10 debate in Miami that “whoever gets the most delegates should win.” But the members of the Republican Party who cannot accommodate themselves to the Trump candidacy—a faction led unofficially by 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney—have staked their hopes on stopping Trump short of a majority and maneuvering in a contested convention to award the nomination to somebody else.

This plan has always faced significant obstacles, from the inherent difficulties in coordination among a large population of party officials and delegates to the certainty of outraged protest not only by Trump but also by Cruz, the probable second-place finisher in the delegate race, who is unlikely to represent the Republican leadership’s favored alternative prospective nominee. But perhaps the most powerful force working against the stop-Trump movement is the widely-accepted norm of democratic legitimacy awarded to the leading candidate in an electoral competition. Even the recipient of a mere plurality can claim to be the people’s choice, at least in comparison to any other single individual, and Trump, as a near-certainty to place first in the delegate count, will surely do so with no little vehemence.

Tuesday’s results indicate that Trump could well achieve an outright majority of delegates by the end of the primary calendar—and will otherwise fall short by a relatively modest margin. Republicans dedicated to blocking his ascent must not only mobilize to develop a procedural plan to take control of the nomination process on the inside, but must also begin to persuade the American public that denying the prize to the leading Republican candidate is not an unfair and illegitimate use of power by party elites. Otherwise, the conflict and rancor that we have seen so far in this campaign will pale in comparison to what lies ahead.

Dumping Trump Without Choosing Cruz

The more subdued Donald Trump who showed up at last Thursday's debate was seemingly eager to coast on his front-runner status without risking any political damage by indulging in his usual pastimes of making controversial remarks and aggressively belittling his opponents. But this new "kinder, gentler" phase of the Trump campaign lasted less than 24 hours before the candidate plunged the Republican race back into turmoil. Trump's abrupt cancellation of a planned Chicago rally on Friday in the face of a large contingent of protestors, his subsequent verbal defense of supporters who engaged in violent acts against his critics, and the attempt of one anti-Trump activist to rush the stage during a Saturday morning speech in Ohio—to which Trump later responded by accusing the man of terrorist connections—added up to one particularly unsettling weekend of the campaign, inspiring a variety of political analysts and thinkers on the left and right alike to condemn Trump as a uniquely malignant force in American politics whose pursuit of power must be stopped for the very sake of the nation.

It is safe to assume that the majority of Republican leaders are privately aghast at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Apart from highly dubious assertions that he expands the traditional appeal of the GOP to independents and Democrats, Trump brings nothing to the party table. He is neither consistently loyal to conservative principles nor devoted to the Republican Party as an institution. His political rhetoric, business record, and decades of media pronouncements are rife with potential attack-ad fodder. He leads no larger faction within the party that can demand deference from its elected officials. He is, by all evidence, the most unpopular major political figure in the eyes of American voters, and he inspires especially intense antipathy among several key groups—racial minorities, young people, single women—whose electoral participation is undependable but whose energetic mobilization in November would be particularly beneficial to the Democratic opposition. It is reasonable to expect that a Trump candidacy would produce a potentially cataclysmic Republican defeat, with damaging consequences enduring for years to come.

And yet luck smiles on Trump. For, in an unlikely twist, his chief rival in the nomination race is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the one Republican politician whom party elites detest more than any other (Trump included). The undoubtedly-strong instinct of many Republicans to denounce Trump, to call for all right-thinking party members to unite in order to ensure his defeat, is stayed by the consideration that such an effort at this stage in the race would primarily benefit Cruz.

Over the weekend, the nomination race provided quantitative evidence to bear on this matter in the form of the District of Columbia Republican caucus. DC is, of course, overwhelmingly Democratic, and its relatively modest population of registered Republicans is mostly composed of political professionals: congressional staffers, campaign operatives, think tank fellows, and the like. About 2,800 of them turned out on Saturday to register their presidential preferences, producing a narrow victory for Marco Rubio—still the favorite of Republican politicos if not Republican voters—over fellow "establishment" type John Kasich. Unsurprisingly, Trump finished far behind the two leading candidates, gaining less than 14 percent of the vote—his worst showing by far in any primary or caucus in an English-speaking state or territory.

He still placed ahead of Cruz.

For the majority of Republican elites, the presidential primary process—up to and including the convention itself—is not currently dedicated to the lone purpose of preventing the unique national catastrophe of a Trump nomination, but has instead evolved into a frantic exercise in steering the prize away from Trump and Cruz alike. Single-minded efforts to minimize Trump's delegate count at any cost might have the unwelcome consequences of opening a window for Cruz to claim an overall delegate plurality, if not a majority—a particularly troublesome development from the perspective of party leaders, who would have much less pretext to deny the leading candidate the nomination at the convention if it were Cruz, not Trump, who wound up with the most delegates.

What does this mean for the Republican contest from this point forward? If the polls are accurate, Marco Rubio is likely to lose his home state of Florida by an ample margin on Tuesday, which would make it nearly impossible for him to avoid folding his campaign. Assuming that John Kasich does well enough on his own home turf of Ohio that same day to justify soldiering on, Kasich would then become the only non-insurgent in a three-candidate contest—and thus the lone remaining factor keeping either Trump or Cruz from assembling a majority of delegates. Republican regulars would likely provide Kasich with the necessary resources to stay in the race for the long term, rendering him a stalking horse—now there's a newly-relevant entry in the American political lexicon!—for an eventual establishment-approved nominee to be chosen at the convention itself.

It's a pretty crazy scheme that just might work. But let's be clear: this plan is not merely dedicated to the cause of averting a national crisis by stopping a uniquely destructive individual from capturing the banner of a major party. It is also a scramble by desperate Republican leaders to seize control of a nomination process heretofore dominated by a mass electorate that has repeatedly registered a preference for not one but two candidates whom most party elites view as thoroughly, and equally, unacceptable.

Debate Recap: Would Republicans Really Stand Up to Their Base to Dump Trump?

The Republican debate in Miami Thursday night surprised almost everyone with its unexpectedly calm tone and focus on policy, to the extent that Donald Trump himself remarked on stage that he "cannot believe how civil it's been up here." Undoubtedly, all four candidates are running short on energy after weeks on the campaign trail. Trump clearly chose to sit on his lead in the race and refrain from stirring up more controversy, John Kasich remained loyal to his strategy of selling himself as the most positive candidate in the race, and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who have tussled with Trump in the past, no longer exhibit confidence that attacks on the front-runner will benefit their own campaigns.

Late in the evening, conservative writer and radio host Hugh Hewitt asked the candidates about the prospect of a contested convention in which no single candidate held a majority of delegates. Kasich and Rubio, neither of whom could plausibly receive a majority themselves at this stage in the race, both dodged the question. Trump replied that he believed that "whoever gets the most delegates should win" even if the total fell short of an overall majority, which he referred to as an "artificial" and "random" number. Cruz did not explicitly agree with Trump's position, but argued that "some in Washington" are "unhappy with how the people are voting and they want to parachute in their favored Washington candidate to be the nominee. I think that would be an absolute disaster and we need to respect the will of the voters."

Trump and Cruz both understand that they are disliked by Republican Party leaders and that recent talk of a contested convention is coming from corners of the party that wish to block their ascent. Trump, anticipating that he will lead in the overall delegate count at the end of the primaries, is signaling that he will demand the nomination anyway even if he fails to accrue an overall majority. Cruz would presumably do the same if he manages to surpass Trump in delegates, but he may also be keeping the option open of arguing that any convention bent on denying a majority- or plurality-winning Trump the nomination should rightfully turn to him, the likely second-place finisher, instead. It is clear that Cruz would prefer a Trump nomination to an insider-blessed compromise choice, for reasons I have discussed before.

Any contested-convention scenario would thus surely occur over the intense opposition of the party's two leading presidential candidates (who between them will likely have attracted at least 70 percent of the total popular vote and an even greater share of the delegates), further validating the central premises of both men's candidacies that the "Republican establishment" is out of touch with, and even hostile to, the party grassroots. One can only imagine the protests that would ensue, egged on by talk radio hosts and other populist voices as well as Trump and Cruz themselves, against such a maneuver. Republican members of Congress and other elected officials would likely be threatened with future primary challenges for even suggesting publicly that the top choices of the voters be denied the nomination, much less carrying it out—and such threats are by no means idle in today's Republican Party.

The nomination of Trump in particular might well turn out be such a disastrous event that it would be worth whatever price Republican politicians would need to pay to prevent it from happening. But both Trump and Cruz provided notable reminders last night that the cost of choosing a nominee who is not one of them is likely to be high indeed. While it's comforting for many Republicans—and fun for many analysts—to envision a surprise twist ending to the nomination process in Cleveland this July, such an outcome remains somewhat improbable from today's vantage point. How likely is it that a party leadership that has become scared to death of its own popular base would reject the preferences of that base in the most dramatic possible manner?