The conventional wisdom, as articulated by the political and media elites (the Pundocracy), was that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a political joke. They were wrong on that.
The Pundocracy than proclaimed that the Donald’s campaign would inevitably implode after a few months, like previous populist outsiders during the Republican primaries. They were wrong on that.
After Trump’s controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslim migration into the United States was announced, the Pundocracy lined up to announce that Trump had just killed his political campaign. Again, they were wrong about that. In fact, a majority of Republican voters and a plurality of the general public supported his proposal.
The Pundocracy, in the face of the sustained success of the Donald, took the view that he had a limit of voters support of 35%. This particular conventional wisdom was blown out of the window during the Nevada primary election, when Trump won with 45% of the vote.
The Pundocracy had also decided, that it was politically impossible for Trump to get any kind of electoral traction with minority voters. This conventional wisdom, albeit on a statistically small scale, was knocked off course when Trump won nearly half the Republican Latino vote, against two Latino opponents!
Now, the new conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump won’t get the majority of the delegates required to avoid a brokered convention, where the GOP elite may trip to stop him becoming the Republican party’s candidate. I predict that this conventional wisdom, like all the others, will be proven wrong in the coming months. Trump will likely start getting close to, and even surpass, the 50% support in the remaining Republican primary elections and will get the majority number of delegates required by the time the Republican Convention begins.
Of course, the greatest conventional wisdom bubble still in existence, is the idea that Trump does not have a realistic chance of defeating Hilary Clinton in November. I will discuss in a later post how he will go about defeating the Democrats, however, to sum it up, Trump will aggressively pivot to a new populist centre of American politics where opinion polls show the majority of voters are. This means protecting Social Security, Medicare, taking a sceptical stance on foreign wars, tax rises for the superrich, reforming Washington and the special interests and taking a more aggressive approach to free trade deals and off-shoring by US companies.
[…] and the firing of his closest aide Corey Lewandowski shows that he now “gets” the importance of the general election pivot I have written of before. The Republican Convention at Cleveland will be a key moment in reshaping perceptions of Trump and […]
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