There is a persistent myth floating around that Donald Trump is successful. It seems like every time I see something about the election it is couched in terms so conservative as to imply we have entered some sort of strange new era. It is as the counter-argument to everything has become ‘but Donald Trump could be the president!’. Nothing is too crazy, nothing too fringe, nothing too outlandish anymore. This is wrong-headed. People act as if he has succeeded already. But he hasn’t. In fact Trump has done nothing to earn his reputation as a smasher of orthodoxy.

Today i’m going to confine myself to the electoral performance of The Donald. The dubious success of what he is pleased to call his ‘business career’ we will leave for part 2.

Trumps only political achievement worth mentioning is winning the Republican presidential primaries. That is it. He has no previous electoral experience. And he won them with a very weak showing. He got 44% of the total Republican primary vote. That means a majority of primary voters voted for somebody else. And before you think that is normal, Romney won in 2012 with 52%. Even McCain in 2008 (a highly contested race) managed 46%. Look back further and the numbers just get more depressing for Trump. George W. Bush took 62% in 2000, Dole took 58% in 1996 and so on. My point is, 44% is a distinctly unimpressive number.

Why was this so? The short answer is that there were too many Republican candidates. They split the vote, allowing Trump to win early states that made the momentum of his candidacy unstoppable. He was shut out in Iowa, but his win in New Hampshire (caused I believe by the splitting of the moderate vote) virtually ensured that no ‘moderate’ candidate had a launching pad early enough to mount a serious challenge.

In a sense the most surprising thing for me about Trump’s victory isn’t about Trump at all. What amazes me is that the elites within the Republican party have so lost control of their organisation. In previous cycles the less plausible candidates would have been influenced to withdraw their names so as to give the preferred choice of the elites a clearer shot. This time all such efforts seemed to fail. The monkeys have taken over the metaphorical banana factory.

All Trump has really done is prove you can win the Republican presidential nomination while saying and believing terrible things if the settings of the race are right. This does not make him a political genius, or an intrepid explorer beating a fresh path through the political undergrowth. It makes him a very lucky bigot who was able to meet the minimum necessary requirements to win a major party nomination at this time and in this way.

What would be really impressive is if he could win a general election in that way. On current evidence there is no reason at all to think he will.

This brings us to another common argument I encounter. If he is such a terrible candidate, why is he polling so close? I think a lot of people have the intuition that Trump is so outside of the mainstream we should expect to see close to no states voting for him, and Republican voters deserting the party in droves.

This was never realistic. Trump is getting about 80% of the Republican vote from last time if the numbers I have here are to be believed. Simply being the candidate of the Republican party gets you something around that number. Because who else are you going to vote for? It is essentially a binary choice. If you hate Clinton (and boy, do they hate Clinton) you are going to vote for the other guy.

Donald Trump has managed to orchestrate a scenario where he is that ‘other guy’. And he did it with significantly less aplomb than anyone else in recent history. That really is about it. The rest is just sound, fury and stupid hats.

So the next time you feel gripped by a sense of existential panic over the state of politics in the world’s superpower, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This isn’t some brave new world. Its just the old world with a very stupid, very ignorant and very badly coiffed man in a position of unexpected prominence for a few months.  And while I would argue strongly that this exposes pathologies within our process and discourse that demand urgent attention, it is in no sense a revolution.

The thing that ought to concern us is not that the world has changed, but that it has not been quite what we thought it was for some time. The cause of Trump’s rise is not his innate attractiveness but the atrophy and decay of the forces who should have opposed him. The disease is the unresponsiveness of the prevailing consensus to the real needs of people. Trump is just a symptom, as is the Brexit vote, the Front National and so on. The amazing thing is not that there is violent kicking against the established order. The amazing thing is that the old order appears weak enough to be susceptible to such attacks.