When Supposedly Smart People Start Sounding Dumb About Trump

For the record, before I write this, I would not vote for Donald Trump, ever. I don't agree with the campaign this man has run. With that said, I don't think he's simply "touched a nerve" in the Republican electorate- I think he's exposed it for what it is. I think a lot of conservative pundits hate that, because they want it to be about other things, like small government, or other "high-minded," intellectual conservative things. As a result, I think a lot of them are trying to "will him away," and get to a Republican nominee that is a little less inconvenient in their cause.

John Fund of the National Review is not a stupid guy. He's a conservative guy, so I don't agree with him on much, but he's not a stupid man at all. He writes after South Carolina about Trump:

Trump is the front-runner, but he has to find a way to win a majority of the delegates, and the kind of campaign he’s running is making it harder for him to crack a ceiling of about a third of the vote. In the run-up to South Carolina, Trump came out in favor of the health-care mandate, defended Planned Parenthood, accused George W. Bush of lying about the Iraq War, and stood by his call to impeach Bush. (He later retreated on the mandate and on Bush’s supposedly lying.) His consistent inconsistency helps explain why only four in ten GOP voters in a new Associated Press poll view Trump in a positive light. He will have trouble growing his coalition to win a majority of delegates, even as more candidates drop out.

Fund says a lot more in his piece- talking about how Trump's coalition at the moment is about a third of the GOP electorate, about how the "winner take all" states are not nearly as much a part of the math as we think, about how the contraction in this race and it's calendar conspire against Trump, and how he's really unlikely to win a brokered convention.

Ok, if you got all that, good. He isn't lying in his piece, nor is he grossly missing anything. If you constrict Fund's arguments to- 1. Trump is not winning a majority of the primary electorate yet, 2. Trump is not the likely choice of a brokered convention, and 3. Trump is not likely to rap this up soon- I'm not going to disagree. The problem is, Fund is seeing this through rosy-red GOP establishment glasses. A few points here:

1. The period of time to beat Donald Trump before the convention is closing. Ted Cruz has one win right now. Marco Rubio and John Kasich have none. I have no idea what the argument for Ben Carson staying in is. None are expected to win Nevada. None are going to run the table on Super Tuesday. By March 15th, Trump may not be close to winning the majority, but he'll probably have closed off many pathways for the others to get there either.
2. The field isn't likely to close further very quickly now. At a bare minimum,  even the most hopeful Rubio supporter has to admit that Ted Cruz is staying in the race through Super Tuesday, and has the money to stay in much longer, unless he quickly grows a conscience. Rubio isn't dropping out to help Cruz either, at least not before March 1st, and almost certainly not before March 15th in Florida, unless he were in a position to lose his home state. In short, neither is dropping out quick. John Kasich could potentially fall out of this race, but he seems intent on running through Michigan and Ohio. Ohio is a winner-take-all state on March 15th, and he's highly likely to win it. In other words, these three aren't dropping out.
3. The net result of a field that will be three or four deep through mid-March is Donald Trump can continue to win a lot of states with 30-40% of the vote. The one thing we know about voters is that they tend to gravitate towards winners, making it possible that his vote share could grow. Even if it doesn't, it means that Trump will continue to take up oxygen and delegates from the other candidates for weeks. In short, the status quo is likely to hold for a bit, and that favors Trump.
4. You don't have to win the majority of the vote to win the majority of the delegates in many cases. Trump won 29 of the 50 delegates from South Carolina at the moment he won the state. At last look, he won all of the Congressional districts (seven of them), and was closing in on 40 of the 50 delegates. Obviously Cruz and Rubio combined for more votes than Trump. Obviously he won under a third of the voters, but he won around 80 percent of the delegates. If he continues to win decisive minority vote shares and get first place in states, he is going to win a lot of delegates. Will he win the majority? Maybe, maybe not. He could though.
5. Regardless of what the establishment types like to say in national politics, it is very hard to deny the first-place finisher the nomination of either party. Just as Democrats dread a scenario where they have to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination based on super-delegates, Republicans denying Trump the nomination in some "grand coalition" of all the other delegates is a nightmare scenario for them. He may run third-party, or not, but his voters are just the types to not vote in November if denied their will in an "under-handed" manner. I doubt they really want this.

It is far from given that Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee. The expectation though that some sort of establishment is going to ride in and take this nomination from him is silly. It is an over-simplification that many people make, that somehow the parties are so strong that they can overturn the will of the voters. It doesn't quite work that way.

I think that Fund and other pundits on the right are very unhappy to see that such a large group of GOP Primaries are buying Trump's red-meat. They see a winnable election for them, drifting away behind absolute lunatic talk from a guy who has no connection to their intellectual movement. Here's Trump, exposing some of the more nutty elements of their party, and undercutting much of their argument for American conservatism. Like it or not though, right now this guy is the only candidate one can call a "front-runner."