Donald Trump vs. the Modern Political Campaign
the whole machinery of the modern campaign serves to constrain an individual candidate’s ability to chase votes. Seeking donors requires promoting an economic vision that turns off working-class voters. Winning the favor of élites means presenting detailed policies to show that you are a serious candidate, but policies are trade-offs, and each will alienate someone. Employing political professionals, who will want jobs with other candidates in the future, lessens the likelihood that your campaign will scorch the earth—by demonizing an ethnic group, for instance—in order to win. If the pros sound a little jealous of Trump, it’s because he raises the alluring, impossible alternative. What if they could just opt out?
.. The most compelling demographic analysis of Trump’s support is that he is leaning on the “missing white voter,” a type first identified by the analyst Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, just after Obama defeated Romney. Trende concluded that seven million fewer white people had voted in the 2012 election than had in 2008, and that the missing voters had certain identifiable characteristics. They were more rural than suburban, poorer rather than richer, and less rather than more religious. White voters in the South turned out just as strongly in 2012 as they had four years earlier, and so did evangelicals. The missing voters were from the Midwest, the Northeast, the red parts of blue states. “In other words,” Trende wrote, “H. Ross Perot voters.”
.. That Trump had opted out of the machinery of the modern campaign freed him to chase a group of voters who were traditionally hard to reach. With no need for donors, he could go all in on economic nationalism; with no inclination to woo party élites, he could simply decline to assemble policy proposals; and with no aspirations ever to run again, he could demonize multiple minority groups. (One way to read this last sequence is as a logical escalation: he targeted Hispanics, saw his poll numbers soar, and then targeted another group that was less popular—Muslims.) Early in his campaign, Trump sometimes seemed to be polling the people who turned up at his rallies. “How many people here believe in global warming?” he asked the crowd at a New Hampshire event I attended in September, apropos of nothing. Then he waited to see how many hands rose. “Very few,” he said to himself, approvingly. “Very few.”
.. A darkly comic possibility looms. Awaiting the Republican nominee is arguably the most controlled campaign in recent American history, Hillary Clinton’s