Why?

One popular explanation of the rise and survival of Donald Trump is summarized by Senator Elissa Slotkin, who said that some of her constituents tell her "it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo."  That is, things were getting worse for a long time, under both Democrats and mainstream Republicans, so they got desperate and turned to someone that promised to be completely different.  My last two posts have been directed against this analysis:  most people don't think that their lives have been getting worse, or that they're worse off than their parents.  Then how would I explain the rise and survival of Trump?  

His initial success is mostly because of American political institutions.  First, it's possible for an outsider to become the leader of an existing party.  Members of Congress never had any special role in nominations, and state party leaders are weaker than they used to be.   You don't even have to appeal to the voters in general:  the Iowa caucuses and first few primaries have an outsize influence, so there's a good deal of unpredictability in who gets the nomination.  Second, the two party system is extremely strong, probably stronger than anywhere else in the world, and our system of electing the president helps to keep it that way.  Most nations which elect a president have a runoff if no one gets a majority in the first round.  The United States doesn't:  if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, it goes to the House of Representatives.  That means that if a political party nominates a candidate who many members find unacceptable, it doesn't make sense for them to break away and nominate another candidate.  In 1912, the Republicans nominated William Howard Taft, but former President Theodore Roosevelt ran as an independent.  He ran ahead of Taft, so if we had a runoff it would have been Roosevelt against Woodrow Wilson, and Roosevelt might well have won (he got 27.4% and Taft got 23.2%, making a total of 50.6%).  But as it was, Wilson won with a large electoral college majority despite getting only 41.8% of the popular vote.  

In March 2016, after Trump had become the front-runner for the nomination, an Opinion Research/CNN poll asked Republicans how they would feel if Trump got the nomination.  21% said they would be "angry" and another 12% said "dissatisfied."  The survey also asked if "you would like to see another Republican run for President as a third-party candidate or not," about 35% of those who said they would be dissatisfied or angry said no.  They were asked a follow-up question about whether that was because they would be comfortable with Trump as the nominee or because it would lead to a Democratic win, and about 90% said that it was because it would lead to a Democratic win.  

So the choice comes down to supporting your party's nominee or helping the other party's nominee to get elected.  There were a few previous cases when many members of the party were unhappy with the nominee, most recently McGovern in 1972 and Goldwater in 1964.  In those cases, many party leaders declined to endorse or even openly opposed them.  But partisanship has become stronger, so fewer people are willing to do that today.  According to Wikipedia, 31 Republican Senators and 19 Republican governors endorsed Trump in 2016, against only 14 and 4 for Goldwater in 1964.  

So Trump won in 2016 because he got the Republican nomination, and then party loyalty and negative partisanship took over.  But why did he get the Republican nomination?  It's natural to think that an important event must have deep roots in social and economic conditions--that voters turned to an outsider because they were profoundly dissatisfied with something.  But that's not necessarily the case--there are always people people who are discontented and looking for something different, and the nature of our system of nominating a president means that they have a chance.  For example, it's not clear that Republicans were more dissatisfied in 1964 than they had been before.  There are also changes in general mood that don't seem to reflect social conditions: e. g. people seem to have been discontented in the early 1990s, without any obvious reason.  So I think that there was a significant risk of a Trump-like figure before Trump came along.  

Then there's the question of why Trump survived and came back from his defeat in 2020.  I'll address that in a future post (probably not the next one, but pretty soon).  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]