http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/03/01/whats_going_on_with_the_republican_race.htmlBy Sean Trende & David Byler
March 01, 2016
As of today, it looks more likely than not that the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump as its presidential standard bearer. There’s still an awful lot of football to be played – analysts on either side are willing to admit – but you can’t deny the ground has shifted pretty firmly in Trump’s favor. Since virtually no one saw this coming, it’s worth asking how this came to pass.
Most analysts, many of whom are on the left, have focused on Trump’s comments about deporting Mexican-Americans (as well as his recent comments about David Duke), and concluded his candidacy is entirely the result of white resentment and racism. To be clear, this doubtless propels some of his candidacy. But at a certain point, this suffers from the old “when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails” issue. History is rarely monocausal, and this is an unlikely exception.
As some of us at RealClearPolitics have written before, there is also a strong strain of anti-elite sentiment in the country right now, and Trump taps into that. The same sentiment is noted in this piece on Eric Cantor’s loss in 2014, which is worth rereading to get a better handle on how the GOP base views its “establishment.”
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