The consensus as of today is that Donald Trump is slipping because his poll numbers in Wisconsin don’t look great and his negatives just get higher and higher. But the truth is that Wisconsin was always likely to be Cruz country. The GOP there is very organized and in much of the state it’s highly ideological. A true blue conservative like Cruz (or Rubio if he’d stayed in) could always have been expected to do pretty well there. It’s the home of the Scott Walker, the vote suppressing, evangelical union slayer who, unsurprisingly, endorsed Cruz.
As of now, Trump is still expected to win big in New York and in the rest of the primaries even with his high negatives. There are a still lot of angry white men and women who love them in this country. Whether there are enough to guarantee him the nomination remains to be seen, but he’s done very well despite running a campaign that’s completely unique in the annals of modern politics.
It’s always tempting to think of Trump as operating entirely by the seat of the pants, but nobody runs for president without some kind of a plan. This piece from Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine is a real eye-opener about Trump’s:
As early as 1987, Trump talked publicly about his desire to run for president. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and again in 2012 as a Republican (this was at the height of his Obama birtherism).Two years later, Trump briefly explored running for governor of New York as a springboard to the White House. “I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” he tweeted in March 2014.Trump taped another season of The Apprentice that year, but he kept a political organization intact. His team at the time consisted of three advisers: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg. Stone is a veteran operative, known for his gleeful use of dirty tricks and for ending Eliot Spitzer’s political career by leaking his patronage of prostitutes to the FBI. Cohen is Trump’s longtime in-house attorney. And Nunberg is a lawyer wired into right-wing politics who has long looked up to “Mr. Trump,” as he calls him. “I first met him at WrestleMania when I was like 5 years old,” Nunberg told me.Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.Meanwhile, Trump used his wealth as a strategic tool to gather his own intelligence. When Citizens United president David Bossie or GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump for contributions, Trump used the conversations as opportunities to talk about 2016. “Reince called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg. From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me. And so, Trump openly stoked racial tensions and appealed to the latent misogyny of a base that thinks of Hillary as the world’s most horrible ballbuster.
First of all, let’s address this issue of “The Apprentice,” which his interview with Woodward and Costa in the Washington Post shows was a very important factor in his running for president. In fact, he couldn’t stop talking about it regardless of the question. He was terribly torn about giving up the show to run for president, evidently unsure about what was the best use of his time. After much deliberation he finally decided being leader of the free world would do more good.