If there was anything that should have signaled that “this time would be different” from the very start, it was 17: the number of Republican candidates who entered the race.
.. It created a huge collective action problem, in which none of the Republican candidates had a clear incentive to attack Mr. Trump — just their rivals for their niche of the Republican Party. The effect was to legitimize Mr. Trump as an ordinary candidate and to damage the others.
.. The race narrowed to three candidates only after two-thirds of all of the delegates to the Republican convention had been awarded. It became a one-on-one race only after Mr. Trump had effectively secured the nomination.
.. But what wasn’t really discussed was what ultimately happened with Mr. Kasich. He was strong enough to prevent Mr. Rubio from consolidating the center-right of the Republican Party, costing him states like Virginia on Super Tuesday. But he wasn’t strong enough to become a plausible contender in his own right, like Mr. McCain in 2008.
.. This could just be the result of a simple analytical error: conflating opposition to ideologically consistent conservatives with an affinity for establishment-backed candidates.
.. Either way, I thought the party’s establishment could count on these voters, and instead they were among Mr. Trump’s strongest backers in the end.
.. His limited resources were irrelevant — he had unlimited free media.
.. An even bigger surprise was the complete failure of Republican elites to firmly and consistently denounce Mr. Trump. It’s why I thought he was done after his comments dismissing John McCain’s status as a war hero; I thought a “chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record” would follow, but it simply didn’t.
It never did.
..If the Republicans had delegate rules like those of the Democrats, Mr. Trump would not yet be the nominee. He would be counting on superdelegates.
..Two-thirds of all of the delegates were awarded in the 45 days after Iowa, making it important for the party to narrow the field quickly in a year when it was not positioned to do so.
Electoral Map Is a Reality Check to Donald Trump’s Bid
Mr. Trump has become unacceptable, perhaps irreversibly so, to broad swaths of Americans, including large majorities of women, nonwhites, Hispanics, voters under 30 and those with college degrees — the voters who powered President Obama’s two victories and represent the country’s demographic future.
.. “In the modern polling era, since around World War II, there hasn’t been a more unpopular potential presidential nominee than Donald Trump.”
.. If Mrs. Clinton somehow loses the Democratic race — unlikely given her delegate advantage — Mr. Trump could fare even worse in a general election against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has higher margins than Mrs. Clinton in head-to-head polling against Mr. Trump in most swing states.
.. There are likely to be around 30 million votes in this year’s Republican primary once all 56 states and territories finish voting in June. In the 2012 contest between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, about 129 million voters cast ballots.
Will the G.O.P. Response to Antonin Scalia’s Death Hand the Election to the Democrats?
It is well known, and accepted on both sides, that the Democrats’ hopes of holding on to the White House hinge on getting a high voter turnout on November 8th. If you were a Democratic strategist trying to maximize turnout, what would you most like to see? One possibility, surely, is the prospect of the election being transformed into a referendum on the President versus the do-nothing Republican Congress.