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The 2016 Republican nomination contest is over. Donald Trump stands alone. This has surprised pundits, political scientists, and journalists alike. But why is it surprising that a candidate who led the race from July 2015 is going to be the Republican nominee?
Talk of a Trump “ceiling” was rampant from the time that he entered the GOP contest. His ceiling was 25 percent; later it was 30 percent; and then later it was 40 percent. Obviously, for many political observers, it was inevitable that the anti-Trump vote would coalesce around one of his opponents. However, as we saw with the abortive John Kasich–Ted Cruz alliance prior to the Indiana primary on May 3, it was impossible for even two of Trump’s opponents to coordinate their attacks on the front-runner. But even with a more successful effort at coordination much earlier during the campaign, it is very unlikely that Trump could have been stopped.
To explain Trump’s inevitability we need survey data from the early primary period with matchups of all candidates against Trump one-on-one. A survey asking only about first choices is not useful, since in a fourteen-candidate race no one is likely to achieve majority status. Fortunately, we have data to address this question.
At the time of our survey Trump had already broken through the 25 percent, 30 percent, and 35 percent ceilings that had supposedly limited his support. Slightly over a third (36.5 percent) of likely Republican voters rated him as their top choice, followed by Cruz and Rubio. Nonetheless he was still far short of the majority support that pundits thought he would need when the race came down to a two-person contest.
Based on respondents’ rankings of the eleven candidates, we were able to determine whether any other candidate would have been able to defeat Trump in a one-on-one contest. The answer was “no.” As the results in Figure 1 show, no candidate finished ahead of Trump, and only one, Cruz, even came within 10 percentage points of Trump. Even though almost two thirds of Republican voters supported a candidate other than Trump at the time of our survey, a substantial number of those supporting other candidates shifted to Trump when their favorite candidate was eliminated from the choices available.
Trump also dominated other candidates on electability. Notwithstanding the concerns of Republican elites, Trump was the only candidate a majority of GOP primary voters saw as “very likely” or “likely” to win the general election. Cruz and Rubio were the only other candidates that even a third of Republicans viewed as likely winners in November. So our data offer little reason to think that Republicans interested in winning could have been persuaded to defect from Trump.
One of the main reasons many political commentators were surprised by Donald Trump’s success in the primaries was his willingness to take extreme positions and use unusually harsh rhetoric in talking about immigration and related issues. Indeed, Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants and Muslims have been at the center of his campaign. And his pronouncements on these topics have greatly concerned many Republican leaders and elected officials who feared they would harm the party’s image and damage its electoral prospects. But how did his positions and comments play with Republican primary voters?
The clear answer is that they reflected the views of likely Republican voters extremely well. We asked a series of questions about Trump’s controversial proposals (banning Muslims from entering the US, building a wall on the Mexican border, and identifying and deporting illegal immigrants). On all three issues overwhelming majorities of likely Republican voters supported his positions: almost three quarters (73 percent) favored banning Muslims from entering the US, 90 percent favored identifying and deporting illegal immigrants as quickly as possible, and 85 percent favored building a wall on the Mexican border.
Trump supporters were more in favor of these proposals than supporters of other candidates, but as Figure 3 shows, large majorities of likely Republican voters who did not support Trump for the nomination did support Trump’s positions on his three central issues. Almost two thirds favored his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US and four fifths favored building the wall and identifying and deporting illegal immigrants. In fact 60 percent of non-Trump supporters took his position on all three of his distinctive issues.
Trump and his supporters were not in line with the opinions of a majority of Republican voters. Trump supporters were quite distinct from other Republicans on issues like raising the minimum wage and raising taxes on upper-income households. Almost two thirds of Trump supporters favored raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 compared with only 41 percent of other Republicans, and while almost half of his supporters (48 percent) favored raising the minimum wage, that was true of less than a third of those supporting other candidates.
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| James Ferguson |