This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on Feb. 18, 2016 For the re­cord, I have nev­er said, writ­ten, or thought that Don­ald Trump would win the Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­a­tion. Like pretty much every­one else, I didn’t see him catch­ing on, go­ing as high as he did, or re­main­ing at the top as long as he did, and it nev­er seemed plaus­ible that he would ac­tu­ally win a ma­jor­ity of the del­eg­ates at the Re­pub­lic­an Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion this sum­mer. I un­der­stood that there were clearly a lot of really angry, ali­en­ated, con­ser­vat­ive, and Re­pub­lic­an voters who saw something in what Trump was say­ing and how he was say­ing it. They seemed bent on “send­ing a mes­sage” to Wash­ing­ton, to ca­reer politi­cians, and to the GOP es­tab­lish­ment. But once they got past the “send­ing a mes­sage” phase and in­to the “se­lect­ing a pres­id­ent” phase, I be­lieved they would seek a more plaus­ible vehicle for their rage. My hunch was that Ted Cruz was go­ing to be that vehicle, no mat­ter what the es­tab­lish­ment thought. Trump had been av­er­aging about 35 per­cent in

More from the Cook Political Report

Amy
First Person
Cook Politcal Logo