Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter revisited, Part I: A quick look back at 2016

 I have intended to write something about the Trump-Carter comparison for a long time.  And over the last couple of weeks, with Trump's possible collapse, my assessments are being updated in real-time, and the timeliness of the comparison begs posting.

When I started The Unmutual Political Blog-- the predecessor to this venue for shouting into the Void-- it was because I had one particular series in mind:  "Trump to Political Science:  Drop Dead."  The title was an old, and obscure reference, because that's what I do, but the substance was as follows.  Way back in the before-time of 2016, my fellow political scientists were in the grips of their own, little cult.  The cult of The Party Decides.  And as a result, they were getting a lot wrong about the 2016 election.  Trump wasn't "supposed" to get the Republican nomination.  Long before my colleagues realized that their models were being broken, I started a blog for the purposes of explaining how and why Trump was debunking so many beloved political science models.

Some history...

In 1968, the Democratic presidential nomination contest was, shall we say, contested in the ugliest way.  Or, what looked ugly until Donald Trump redefined "ugly."  Eugene McCarthy won a bunch of primaries, but that wasn't how you got the nomination at the time.  The rules of a nomination at the time were that delegates to the Convention were basically just party muckety-mucks, and they could do whatever they wanted.  Those primaries were just silly, little symbolic events.  The muckety-mucks nominated Hubert Humphrey.  The issue was that the Democratic Party was divided over many issues, including the Vietnam War.  Humphrey was Johnson's VP, and the anti-war activists opposed him because of that association.  They preferred not-that-McCarthy-please-stop-confusing-me-with-him.  So, when the muckety-mucks nominated Humphrey, despite McCarthy's primary victories, the 1968 Democratic Convention devolved into actual, literal riots, and I hate people who misuse the word, "literal."  Humphrey then got his ass handed to him by a guy who once looked corrupt until Trump redefinded "corrupt," and the Democratic Party formed the McGovern-Fraser Commission to develop a new set of rules to avoid that kind of mess in the future.

The McGovern-Fraser Commission required states to appoint delegates selected by primaries and caucuses, and I'll skip over the later creation of superdelegates, because I'm keeping this as concise as possible, and I'm terrible at that, "as you know," to use a phrase that has been polluted by a president who can't pass the Turing Test.  And every time I use that phrase, "it's a disgrace."

Anyway, moving on.

In 1972, the Democrats (with the Republicans following suit) began selecting delegates through primaries and caucuses, which meant taking the nominating power away from the muckety-mucks, who had nominated Humphrey.  That changed the types of candidates who could be nominated.

The result?  In 1976, the Democrats nominated someone they never would have nominated under the prior rules.  Jimmy Carter.  My grad school advisor, Nelson W. Polsby, wrote one of his better books-- Consequences of Party Reform-- about the McGovern-Fraser Commission, how that led to Carter, Carter's governing problems, and how that led to changes in the structure of the political parties.  Good book.  Once you take the power away from the muckety-mucks and give it to the unwashed masses, that changes things.

The... unwashed... masses...

They do things differently.

So, what happened with that lousy book, The Party Decides?  Essentially, the authors of that terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad book argued that by the 2000s, the muckety-mucks were back in the driver's seat.  Through money and endorsements, they had reasserted control of the nominating process, and they could tell the unwashed masses what to do, and whom to nominate.

I was one of the skeptics, all along.  I never believed that model.

And then, 2016 came along.  To be sure, I didn't think Trump would get the nomination, at first.  Why?  Dude ain't even close to a real conservative.  He wasn't even a real Republican, and he was so obviously, grossly unqualified.  The last time someone without any political experience had gotten a nomination, it had been Eisenhower, who, ya' know, beat Hitler.  The first image of Captain America was a comic book cover on which he was punching Hitler.  Eisenhower actually crushed that motherfucker, wiped the Third Reich from the face of the Earth, and made him do the deed himself.

I.  Like.  Ike.

Trump, on the other hand, fired Meatloaf.  OK, sure, Meatloaf sucks, but... bit of a discrepancy there.

Anyway, silly me.  As cynical as I was, and as low an opinion as I had of the voters, my opinion was never that low.  Now, I know better.  I will never again assume any competence, intelligence, or decency.  Not epsilon.  Zero.

Anyway, that was my reasoning.

The rest of my colleagues?  They were in the thrall of The Party Decides.  They treated it as gospel truth.  Trump wasn't getting endorsements, so he couldn't win!  Proof!  We have proof!  So, that was political science, back in the 2016 nomination contest.

I wised up before my colleagues, and started The Unmutual Political Blog.  I started the series, "Trump to Political Science: Drop Dead."  The point was to go through various political science models, especially The Party Decides, and demonstrate that Trump's success throughout the contest was demonstrating that my colleagues all had egg on their faces.

And it's actually funnier than that.  I pitched some posts to moderated political science blogs about it, and they all turned me down!  They didn't want to hear about Trump winning!  He was toast for sure!  So, how dare I write that those vaunted models were sucking?!

Anyway, so that's how I started blogging-- by writing that, "hey, y'all, Trump might win that nomination, and political science models are failing, and nobody will let me publish this elsewhere."  And in response to the failures of conventional models, I suggested that we needed to return to Nelson W. Polsby, and Consequences of Party Reform.

The McGovern-Fraser Reforms changed the rules, and that changed the kind of candidate who could win.

An outsider.  Someone without national experience, who didn't know what he was doing.  Hated by Washington insiders of even his own party.  A political incompetent.

So... 

Back in 2016, I was arguing that Trump was going to be another Carter.  Um...  Uh...

The Unmutual Political Blog is no more.  You can't go back and see all of the posts in which I made Carter prognostications.  Yet, I am a firm believer in intellectual honesty.  Also, nobody is reading this damned thing, so I can use it for my own purposes.  There is no point lying to one's self, and I prefer to check my own analytic methods.

Trump looks like he is about to lose amid a collapsed economy.  Many of the leaders of his own party in Congress have hated him all along, and he has never known how to negotiate with them, being an outsider.  And yet, he has commanded a personalty cult-level of loyalty among partisans within the electorate, and the extremist wing of his party within Congress.  I got a lot wrong with that Carter prediction, and I got a few things right.

I want to spend some posts looking back, and thinking about the Carter comparison as we look towards election day.  Day(?).  Day.

I have been meaning to do this for a long time.  Let's do this.  Your key reference here:  Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform.