An exchange on the BBC after the Nevada caucuses had given Donald Trump 46 percent of the vote said it all. A perfectly pleasant BBC interviewer asked a political consultant (as best I recall): “Well, at present they’re voting for him,” he said.
Good heavens, so they are. Not fellows wearing three-piece suits in Washington, the consultant added, but people who think of themselves as Republicans or as conservatives in towns and cities across America.
Now, that might not continue. It’s always an error to suppose that the future will be nothing more than a continuation of the present. Extrapolating current trends gets both economists and political pundits into big trouble. Besides, Trump is a phenomenon, like a comet, and sometimes they just cross the sky and disappear in a welcome blaze, like, for instance, a tax-returns scandal. Even without that, he has high negatives in national polls, which means there’s a real risk of his being denied the nomination or imploding after getting it.
On the other hand, it’s equally mistaken to assume that everyone not voting for Trump is consciously voting against him, in a way that isn’t true in the case of other candidates. In reality, it’s very unlikely that if either Rubio or Cruz dropped out, his votes would transfer en masse to the remaining one. That’s a general truth of politics, but it also seems to be confirmed by the evidence of current polls that Trump is making inroads into all sorts of voter categories where no Republican has gone lately. Trump’s boast of this progress doesn’t automatically refute it.
To reduce any tension (and also to enable us to concentrate on questions more important even than the horse race), let me declare my hand. Though I’m not enthusiastic about any of the candidates — after Reagan and Thatcher, anyone else is a letdown — my sympathies are with Ted Cruz, for the pedestrian reason that I agree with him more on most issues than with the other candidates. If he were to be eliminated, I would almost certainly prefer Trump to Rubio (for reasons that will emerge later). And though it’s just possible that I would endorse a worthy third-party conservative if nominee Trump were shown to be even more of an unguided missile than hitherto, I cannot see myself casting a vote for Hillary Clinton — not least because, as a British citizen with a green card, I don’t have a vote to cast.