The media must have a story. Jimmy Carville once observed that to understand reporters you must understand what they like. Actors like fame, Bankers like money, Reporters like news. And they need to write the news in order to get paid. So something must fill those now mostly metaphorical column inches. So prepare yourself to hear about the Trump Comeback.

This once again brings home my oft-made point about narrative, expectations and positioning in American politics. Clinton lately has been going very well indeed. She has out-spent, out-organised and out-polled Grumpy Trumpy all over the place. That has lead to lots of good coverage of Clinton projecting strength and competence. But the other side of that coin is that expectations for Trump’s performance are now incredibly low. So the next time his polling rises, expect a flurry of stories and commentary about it. Could it be an upset? Could Clinton be throwing away her lead? Is this all part of the great Mogul’s plan?

Of course not. It is almost certain that there will be some sort of correction in Trump’s favour as the race comes down to election day. That is to be expected and betrays no statistically significant new development in the race. It reflects the fact that as positions become clarified and the contrast between the two campaigns is drawn in ever starker terms voters of both sides usually give up on their more quixotic hopes for a candidate they actually like, hold their noses, think of England and pull the lever for their guy or girl.

As citizens generally rally to the flag in times of war and give up more nuanced objections in favour of cohering to oppose an existential threat, so to do voters generally rally to their team when the chips are down. Clinton is currently getting a higher percentage of Democratic voters than Trump is getting of Republican voters. Expect some of those people to come home for Trump and put the more outlandish pickups for Clinton (like Georgia) to be taken off the table.

But that isn’t really a story. That is just the mechanics of the system, generally predictable and to be expected. We could see something really unexpected, like Clinton increasing her lead from this position. That would take her into real landslide territory, making her victory historic not just because of her identity as a woman but because of its magnitude.

So when will this ‘Trump Comeback’ narrative take off? My bet is after the debate. At this stage expectations are so low for Trump that he would basically have to light his podium on fire to count as a real loss. Whereas Clinton would have to be Socrates reborn at this stage to beat expectations.

If you listen carefully the drumbeat has already begun, preparing for the coverage of the comeback. Part of this is a hedge on the part of news organisations not wanting to look foolish. Part of it is also journalists responding to the natural rhythm of the story unfolding before them. But Politico, Fivethirtyeight, CNN, the Huffington Post and all manner of other venues are publishing articles about the possible ‘turning point’ that is debate night. It is, they insist, the last chance of the Trump campaign to turn the ship around.

This is probably true. But historically the incumbent party usually loses the first debate. Remember 2012? Obama had a terrible night, Romney won the debate and got a pretty decent bounce in the polls. But there were more debates and the bounce turned out to be fairly temporary.

It’s not that their point is unsound. But it is incomplete. Elections are rarely decided by the tactical maneuverings of the campaign. They can give you an edge in a close race to be sure. But it is the big strategic factors that generally determine the outcome. The way the candidates are framed, introduced and perceived delineates the region in which each candidate exists and can manoeuvre.

Romney got clobbered at the end of his primary by a massive campaign of ads defining him in negative terms. Ads he was unable to respond to with his much depleted campaign war-chest. The campaign never really recovered, and ended the election with much the same level of support as he entered it with.

So could Trump make a comeback? Certainly. There is still time left. But will he? I don’t think so. Improbable events are by their nature unlikely. Trump changing his messaging and presentation to the extent necessary to have a significant comeback among the voters he needs is pretty damn unlikely. It would be a departure from the behavior he has evinced throughout this entire campaign.

Because running for president isn’t like a 100 metre sprint. It’s much more like the Tour de France or a decathlon. You need a variety of skills, not all of them that similar, and you need to be ahead at the end in aggregate terms. Simply winning the sprinter’s jersey or coming first in the high jump isn’t enough to give you the win.

Whether I am right about the alleged comeback occurring after the debate or not, expect the story sometime. Expect Wolf Blitzer to host some kind of quad-screened political shoutfest on the subject. Expect Fox News to wheel out Charles Krauthammer and others to opine about the Democratic party being disconnected from the ‘real America’, the mythical heartland nobody can ever quite locate on a map. Most of all, expect all sorts of clickbait implying Clinton is losing control (‘Could Trump be on his way to the White House?!?’ or similar).

But, dear reader, you will sail above the fray. You will understand that such minor corrections are likely to happen multiple times between now and November, that the needle will edge towards one party then the other depending on the vast and raucous theatre of the political system, and that one movement does not a symphony make.

 

 

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.