http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431687/print The Myth of Trump’s Inevitability
By John Fund — February 21, 2016
In his victory speech in South Carolina, Donald Trump vowed to sweep the twelve primaries held on Super Tuesday, March 1, and implied the race would then be over: “Let’s put this thing away!”
He also belittled rivals who claimed that as the field shrinks, they will be able to close on Trump and deny him the nomination. “They’re geniuses!” he mocked. “They don’t understand that as people drop out, I’m going to get a lot of those votes also.”
Not so fast, Donald. We have had three contests so far, and the field has narrowed from twelve candidates before Iowa to five now. But Trump’s numbers have bounced around from 24 percent in Iowa to 35 percent in New Hampshire to 32 percent in South Carolina. His average is a tad under 31 percent.
Trump is the front-runner, but he has to find a way to win a majority of the delegates, and the kind of campaign he’s running is making it harder for him to crack a ceiling of about a third of the vote. In the run-up to South Carolina, Trump came out in favor of the health-care mandate, defended Planned Parenthood, accused George W. Bush of lying about the Iraq War, and stood by his call to impeach Bush. (He later retreated on the mandate and on Bush’s supposedly lying.) His consistent inconsistency helps explain why only four in ten GOP voters in a new Associated Press poll view Trump in a positive light. He will have trouble growing his coalition to win a majority of delegates, even as more candidates drop out.
continued
