Despite getting drubbed in Wisconsin this week, Donald Trump has won more votes than any other Republican candidate this year. So, he’s doing OK, right? Well, for all the talk that unbound delegates and quirky convention rules could prevent Trump from winning the GOP nomination, it’s easy to forget that Republican voters also play a part. Trump’s 37 percent of the cumulative primary vote and 46 percent of delegates won so far may sound impressive, but his percentages make him the weakest Republican front-runner, at this point in the process, in decades.
Of course, a front-runner is still a front-runner, but by historical standards Trump is limping along — hence the increased chances of a contested convention.
This is the seventh Republican primary in the modern era (beginning in 1972) without an incumbent president in the race; here’s the cumulative vote percentage that each eventual nominee received over the course of the primary season in those seven campaigns: 
Past GOP nominees such as George H.W. Bush in 1988, George W. Bush in 2000, Bob Dole in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 had bigger shares of the vote at this point, even if they started out slowly. You’ll also note, however, that the two most recent Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, weren’t doing too much better than Trump is now.
McCain and Romney, though, were far ahead of Trump at this point in the delegate race. All the eventual nominees studied here won a majority of the delegates allotted1 by this date. Trump remains short of a majority.
You’ll also note that past nominees tended to increase their delegate and vote leads from this point forward, mostly because their rivals had faded or dropped out. In 2008, McCain vanquished Romney by early February and Mike Huckabee by early March. About this time four years ago, Romney lost his main competitor, Rick Santorum, after winning the Wisconsin primary. That left McCain and Romney with an easy road to winning larger and larger shares of the delegates and votes in the remaining contests.
Trump isn’t so lucky. Ted Cruz is almost certainly going to fight hard all the way to the last primaries on June 7 and beyond. (John Kasich might, too.) Unlike Santorum, who ran out of money after losing Wisconsin in 2012, Cruz is flush with cash. That doesn’t necessarily mean Trump won’t end up with a higher share of support overall than he has won in primaries so far. He should add to his total in the New York primary later this month, for example. But after New York, the calendar becomes considerably tougher for him.
Unless something radically changes, Trump will finish the primary season with the lowest percentage of the primary vote and the lowest share of delegates of any Republican presidential primary vote leader since caucuses and primaries became the main method for selecting nominees.
#1: Pinguinite To: ConservingFreedom (#0)
Has there ever been a republican primary season frontrunner that's been dogged as Trump has?
Pinguinite posted on 2016-04-11 14:54:31 Reply Private Reply
#2: Vicomte13 To: Pinguinite (#1)
Vicomte13 posted on 2016-04-11 15:03:15 Reply Private Reply
#3: jeremiad To: Pinguinite (#1)
jeremiad posted on 2016-04-11 16:09:29 Reply Private Reply
#4: Tooconservative To: jeremiad (#3)
He really seems to have little grasp of what a political party is, how and why you build up local campaign organizations to elect you (and help elect the party's other candidates for God's sake!).
He acts like it's a campaign as an independent candidate. Kind of like how Bloomberg, a lifelong liberal Dem and big donor, was denied a chance to run for mayor as a Dem so he registered GOP so he could run anyway. But he never really pretended to be a real Republican, like Guiliani was.
Tooconservative posted on 2016-04-11 16:35:29 Reply Private Reply
#5: jeremiad To: TooConservative (#4)
jeremiad posted on 2016-04-11 22:18:00 Reply Private Reply
#6: Pinguinite To: jeremiad (#3)
Trump is like a new soccer player playing the game for the first time. He shows up on some Saturday morning with no uniform. He goes out into the field and lacks all of the basic skills of play. All the other players laugh at him for his apparently clumsiness in the field.
But then he starts to score goals anyway. And all the regular players then get really resentful and start to hate the kid, mocking and jeering him for all his weaknesses. They resent him because he's doing better than they ever have without first earning his place on the team. They are both jealous of his success and despise everything he stands for and everything he is.
The spectators don't realize this, of course. They just think it's cool that this new kid is scoring lots of goals, and don't realize he's a new and crude player.
That is Trump, the GOP establishment, and the voters.
With that metaphor out of the way, Trump is inexperienced in political machinations, but he's also very smart. He wouldn't have lifelong success with so many businesses if he were not. He knows what he is up against and he has ample monetary resources in his favor. He also knows how to lead, as all successful business people do. He's also not afraid to change his mind. This has meant flipflopping on a few issues, but it also shows he's open minded and can adapt to changing situations.
I certainly don't make any guarantees he'll succeed in getting the nomination. But anyone who tries to put Trump in a box defining limitations based on past performance may be disappointed. Certainly everyone who failed to take him seriously early in the primaries were.
Pinguinite posted on 2016-04-12 00:08:15 Reply Private Reply