American party politics has been turned on its head by the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. Trump quickly vaulted to the top of the national polls last summer after launching his bid for the Republican nomination. He has remained at the front of the pack despite his unorthodox résumé, outlandish statements, and idiosyncratic approach to the campaign. Having just dominated Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in the “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses, Trump is in the best position to become the party’s nominee. How did this happen?
Trump violates conventional understandings of how presidential nominations work. Let us consider what political scientists would generally agree three rules of the nomination process.
Rule one is that presidential candidates become credible national figures by working their way up through the hierarchy of elected offices. Aside from presidents and vice-presidents, the most common offices held by presidential contenders are governor and U.S. senator.
If he wins the Republican nomination, Trump would be the first nominee since 1952 not to have served in high-level elective office. The Republican nominee that year was Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general who oversaw U.S. operations during World War II. Primary voters in the modern era have sometimes considered other non-traditional candidates such as Republican businessman Herman Cain in 2012 and Democratic activist Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, but all of them gave way to candidates who had held significant public office.
Rule two says that success in the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire is built on small-scale “retail politics” such as face-to-face meetings with candidates, canvassing, and phone calls. It is essential that a campaign’s field operations make good use of data and effectively deploy campaign volunteers to identify and turn out supporters.
Trump has eschewed traditional retail politics in the early primaries and caucuses. He was slow to develop a data operation and did not linger to chat with voters in the early voting states. In 2012, Rick Santorum spent more than 100 days traveling in a pickup truck to small events around Iowa to win the caucuses. In 2008, John McCain climbed his way to victory in the New Hampshire primary by holding scores of “town hall” meetings across the state. In contrast, it was news that Trump stayed one night in a discount hotel in Iowa just before the caucuses. He has focused on large-scale rallies that limit personal interaction with voters and allow him to fly back to New York City on his jet each night.
Rule three is that candidates establish themselves during the “invisible primary” phase by raising large sums of money and attracting the endorsements of party insiders.
Trump has spent almost no time raising money or seeking endorsements. He has not held a single fundraising event and instead has been largely funding his campaign through personal loans. Rather than pay for television advertising, Trump benefits from free media coverage of his campaign rallies and social media activity. Not a single sitting governor or member of Congress had endorsed Trump before Iowa and New Hampshire. Early on, the party establishment appeared to be circling around former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush’s time-tested approach of racking up supporters and raising large sums of money (through a super PAC) failed in a remarkable way when he suspended his campaign after failing to finish better than fourth in any of the first three voting states.
Although Trump is clearly avoiding the traditional path to the presidency, his candidacy is not entirely without precedent. Candidates with weak connections to the party occasionally have success seeking the nomination (former general Wesley Clark in 2004). Likewise, extremely wealthy candidates have sometimes used the money made in the private sector to underwrite their presidential campaigns (publishing tycoon Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000). Extreme policy views are also not uncommon in the nomination season (Representative Tom Tancredo in 2008). Trump is tapping in the populism and distrust of institutions that fueled politicians as disparate as Sarah Palin and independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot.
Even with these parallels, Trump has some unique advantages. As a celebrity who starred on a popular reality television show, his bombastic style and business dealings were already familiar to many voters. He was thus unlikely to suffer from the “discovery, scrutiny, decline” boomlets that took down candidates such as Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2012. He also has deep experience working the media.
His epithets toward Muslims, journalists, and even his fellow Republican candidates help attract rather than repel audiences. Television news programs have given him far more airtime than other candidates, even more than is given to some general election candidates. His tweets are read by millions of followers and often drive the news cycle in way that no other candidates do. In debates, Trump zinged Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for sinking in the polls and tagged Jeb Bush as “low energy.” Through most of the invisible primary the other candidates mostly decided to criticize one another rather than risk a Trump backlash.
Trump also benefitted from an extremely large field of contenders. Whereas most open nominations attract fewer than 10 entrants, the 2016 Republican field reached as high as 17 announced candidates. Amidst this chaos, Trump’s sharp tongue allowed him to stand out. One wonders if Hillary Clinton might have wrapped up the Democratic nomination sooner if she faced a similarly large field and if Trump would have had more difficulty if the Republican race early on had been reduced to two or three main candidates.
Barry C. Burden is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He tweets @bcburden.
Image: Jilbert Ebrahimi
