Trump Is Exploding...

5 Political Myths Trump Is Exploiting

Why did The Donald's rise surprise so many pundits? Here's what they've been getting wrong for years.

By Emily Thorson

Late last semester, a student showed up during my office hours. She sat down across from me, looking worried. I assumed she wanted to discuss her upcoming paper, but she had something else in mind. “Professor,” she said. “How did Donald Trump happen?”

This is the question everyone seems to be asking these days. Trump’s rise has defied the predictions of pundits and pollsters, repeatedly embarrassing those who swore that he would flame out. I’m a political scientist, and I count myself among that number. In September, I offered my students a $500 bet that he wouldn’t become the Republican nominee — a wager I’m increasingly glad that none of them took me up on.

But while the magnitude of Trump’s victory has come as a surprise to many, it has also made for an incredibly exciting time to teach political science. This isn’t just for the immense attention Trump’s campaign has suddenly brought to the most obscure corners of the democratic process, or how anxious it makes my students. It’s because Donald Trump has provided high-profile, living disproof of some of the most familiar myths of American politics.

You’ve heard them too: “Voters have become extreme,” or “This mistake could end his campaign,” or “Obama’s success has shown that race doesn’t matter”—all pieces of warmed-over analysis that political scientists no longer take seriously. For years, I’ve relied on academic studies to demonstrate just how incorrect these clichés are. Now, I can point to a much more viscerally compelling piece of evidence; His name is Donald Trump.

As Trump hacks a new trail through presidential politics, he’s also performing a kind of service by clearing out some of these tropes, hopefully for good. If we’re going to understand how Americans really vote—and, yes, how Trump happened—the first step is to realize just what we’ve been getting wrong.

Myth 1: Americans’ political beliefs put them into clearly divided “liberal” and “conservative” camps.

If you are taking the time to read this article, then your political opinions probably have something in common with those of my students, along with those of most journalists and academics: They are, on the whole, ideologically consistent. People who are ideologically consistent hold beliefs that line up with each other as we’d assume in modern party politics: For example, a liberal who supports gay marriage probably also supports government spending on social programs and protecting the environment.

Many of us intuitively believe that there is something “right” about these particular combinations of beliefs—that a liberal or conservative ideology reflects an underlying and internally coherent worldview. While that is not entirely wrong, it is also the case that our beliefs about which issues “go together” are shaped by political elites’ efforts to establish winning electoral coalitions. These competing interests can result in internal party conflict as partisans struggle to define which issues will define their party. This process is perhaps best demonstrated by the Republican Party’s difficulty reconciling the often anti-immigrant sentiments of its base with the economic interests of its donors, many of whom benefit from immigration (both legal and illegal) — a conflict Trump has used to his full advantage.

Many conservative Republicans have been appalled by Trump’s rejection of party doctrine. He dislikes free trade, opposes some cuts to the social safety net, speaks positively about raising taxes on the wealthy (though it’s important to note that his policy proposals do not reflect this rhetoric), and occasionally defends Planned Parenthood. His views are sometimes in direct contradiction with the GOP platform, but for a huge swath of voters, this is actually a strength — they themselves do not follow Republican orthodoxy and are not ideologically consistent. Survey data show that compared with other Republicans, Trump supporters are less opposed to abortion, more skeptical of trade, and substantially more anti-immigration.

Your own beliefs, if you examine them closely, are probably not perfectly aligned with either major party — few people’s are. Because the United States has a two-party system, it is impossible for every voter to have a political party with views that match their particular combination of stances on the issues. As such, blocs of people whose ideologies do not match up with the explicit views of their party’s elites will always exist — indeed, one could also make the argument that, like Trump, the success of Bernie Sanders speaks to a similar, though smaller, bloc on the left. But unlike Trump, Sanders is not the presumptive nominee of his party. The fact that Trump has been so successful suggests that there is a substantial disconnect between voters and elites on what “being a Republican” really means.

Myth 2: Gaffes and negative coverage can change the race.

As in previous elections, journalists have paid inordinate attention to all the candidates’ so-called gaffes, and Trump is a veritable gaffe factory. But none of the outrageous things he says or does seem to have much of an impact at the polls. Why is he immune?

Pundits have suggested that this is something special about Trump — a testament to his Teflon-like durability. But most people simply don’t follow politics closely enough for gaffes to matter. This doesn’t mean that they are stupid — in fact, I would argue that a Pennsylvania voter whose primary falls in late April is acting very rationally when he chooses to skip the media’s frantic coverage of the Iowa caucuses in January (after all, it’s quite plausible that the candidates who won Iowa won’t even be in the race by the time he casts his ballot). But it does mean that, despite journalists’ obsession with candidates’ missteps, coverage of these mistakes only reaches a small number of voters.

In reality, then, there’s nothing special about Donald Trump’s ability to shrug off his mistakes: Political scientists have seen this dynamic at play before. As John Sides and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate in their book on the 2012 election, The Gamble, the truth is that this immunity is the rule, not the exception. Romney’s “47%” comment and Obama’s “You didn’t build that” misstep produced no real movement in the polls, despite the attention they received in the media.

Indeed, most so-called gaffes matter very little in the long term. Most of the people who are paying attention enough to notice them have already made up their minds, and those who could potentially be swayed by a slip-up simply don’t follow politics closely enough to have heard about them. This is not to say that some of Trump’s missteps won’t come back to haunt him in the form of Democratic-sponsored ads in the general election, but in the short term, the lesson is that Trump is special, not because his gaffes don’t matter, but because he realizes his gaffes don’t matter—and takes full advantage of that fact.

An important corollary: Because many people aren’t paying close attention to politics, the volume of coverage that a candidate receives may shape their attitudes just as much as the content of this coverage. The amount of media coverage Trump has received dwarfs that of other Republican candidates. It’s easy to see why: His penchant for outrageous statements makes him a journalist’s dream. But this near-constant coverage sends a message to voters, especially those paying only tangential attention to the race: Trump is a viable candidate worth serious consideration.

Myth 3: American politics is no longer driven by race.

After Barack Obama’s inauguration, it was easy — and reassuring — to believe that the country had finally moved beyond the racial divides that have long shaped the American political landscape. Racial fault lines run deep in American life, and for generations, presidential candidates have carefully tiptoed around the topic.

Not Trump. From the beginning of his campaign, he has loudly declared such tiptoeing to be part of the problem, choosing instead to make issues of race and identity a centerpiece of his political strategy. He has characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and, more recently, implicitly condoned attacks on black activists at his rallies.

These actions are not isolated incidents of racist speech; they are critical parts of Trump’s larger campaign narrative, which seeks to “make America great again” by rewarding those whom he sees as deserving (the people who originally “made America great”) and punishing the undeserving (those he sees as contributing to the nation’s downfall).

Trump’s laser-like focus on who deserves what — and his willingness to explicitly draw connections between deservedness and race — resonates with many Americans. Political scientist Harold Lasswell famously described politics as being about “who gets what, when, and how,” and decades of research has demonstrated that Americans’ beliefs about “who is getting what” in American politics are deeply intertwined with their racial attitudes. Trump's rhetoric has not changed public attitudes toward immigrants or minorities. Rather, it has tapped a set of beliefs already held by many Americans: that the system treats white people unfairly, and that minorities are getting more than they deserve.

Myth 4: Most political events have a single, elegant explanation.

If there’s one thing that defines political punditry, it’s the ability to find quick, identifiable explanations for big news developments. These explanations are hugely appealing — and, almost by definition, wrong.

This semester, I am teaching two courses: one on media and politics, the other on research design. While Trump’s ascendance is immediately relevant to the first course, it also has much to say about the second, particularly in how we explain political phenomena. Much of social science (including political science) is about understanding causation, from targeted questions (do campaign ads increase turnout?) to much broader ones (why do some democracies fail?). One of the most important lessons I teach my research design students is that most of these questions have no single correct answer.

When that student stopped by my office last fall to ask how Trump happened, I gave her a lot of answers: the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, the increasing disconnect of Republican elites from their voters’ preferences, the vagaries of the electoral system, Trump’s detachment from party elites. But each of these explanations is, by itself, incomplete. Trump’s willingness to make outrageous statements would not have garnered him the volume of coverage it did without the modern media’s insatiable need for content. And for Republican voters’ disaffection with their party elites to have electoral consequences, it needed a candidate with pockets deep enough not to have to rely on those elites for campaign financing.

We should all be skeptical of anyone who claims that they have isolated the reason for Trump’s success. Politics is more complicated (and, I would argue, more interesting) than that.

Myth 5: Norms of political behavior are durable and resilient.

The political process is shaped by both formal rules (e.g. caucus math and the Electoral College) and informal norms (e.g. candidates’ participation in debates). But it’s easy to forget that these informal norms only matter as long as we all believe in them.

This election has been—for me and for many who closely follow politics—a lesson in just how powerful these unwritten rules of behavior have been in shaping previous campaigns, and just how easily they can be shattered. Again and again, Donald Trump has shown a willingness to violate the accepted norms of campaigning that candidates have followed for decades. To name a few: Candidates do not explicitly insult each other during debates. If violence breaks out at a candidate’s rally, the candidate will not condone that violence. Candidates do not directly criticize former presidents from their own political parties—and so on. By violating those norms—often with very little consequence—Trump has demonstrated how fragile they really are.

What lessons will future candidates (presidential and down-ballot) take from Trump’s success? Will we see a new crop of politicians who eschew the norms of civility that have structured most elections in our history? Or is Trump an anomaly? We may begin to find out the answers to these questions in just a few months, as candidates at all levels gear up for the 2016 race.