https://twitter.com/LeftyMarkRose/status/709863757867040768
The pundit class has been flirting with the notion of a Republican crackup for some time now, but it is relatively difficult to find data which undergird the common intuition that GOP voters have been drifting away from the party establishment. Difficult, but not impossible. Thankfully, the folks at FiveThirtyEight put together a wonderful interactive model called the Endorsement Primary, which purports to measure establishment support in terms of weighted endorsements from party officials. They helpfully included data from Presidential races back to 1980 to give the reader a sense of how often (and when) such endorsements have proven predictive in the past.
Today is 52 days after the Iowa caucuses. By this point in the election cycle, the following campaigns were prohibitively far ahead in the endorsement race: Bush 2000 (616), Dole 1996 (534), McCain 2008 (238), Romney 2012 (224), Bush 1988 (228). Only Reagan’s 1980 run was not clearly favored by the party machine by the time we had progressed this far into the primary cycle, though he was at least ahead of the pack.
This election cycle is demonstrably different than any other in my lifetime. The GOP establishment initially lined up behind Jeb Bush, and then behind Marco Rubio, and most recently behind Ted Cruz. The first of these candidates dropped out after failing to win anything, the second after failing to win his own home state, and the last one has no plausible path to an outright delegate majority. His best and only hope is to force a brokered vote at the convention, and even then it is difficult to imagine a significant number of unbound delegates (typically longtime party faithful) coalescing in Cruz’s corner. Even with this sort of encouragement:
What we are seeing this time around is a measurable divergence between the GOP voters—who have been favoring Trump consistently enough to give him a healthy delegate lead—and the party establishment who have been repeatedly backing losers. For the first time in a long time, the leadership of the party is not actually leading the party.
At least we can rightly say that we live in interesting times.
