How does he do
it?
Or, to synthesize
conservative commentators seemingly everywhere, how can a man with multiple marriages,
bankruptcies, and casinos, variant positions on seminal issues, and the broadest possible
variety of insults—including calling a former Republican President a liar—possibly
be the next Republican nominee for President?
It has them gobstruck. Michael Gerson might have framed it best last
week, when, before South Carolina, he led with, “At first, in the summer of 2015, it seemed like a joke. Then a
novelty. Then a bubble that must surely burst. Then a spectacle, overshadowing
all the earnestness and experience of the Republican presidential field.”
It has left those
of us in the center and on the left a little stunned as well. “President Trump?”
It could
happen. How is fascinating—because if
anyone seriously thought one year ago that a Donald Trump-like candidate could
get this far, they didn’t make exactly make themselves known. The more I watch Trump, the more I see the
whole act, the more convinced I am that The Donald is winning by applying smart
business principles. Success may come in many ways, but one of the surest is identifying
an underserved market and dominating it.
That, in a nutshell, is what Trump is doing.
Imagine that you
own a buggy-whip shop. You make a decent
living out of it, but with nine other competitors in your market, there
seems to be no way to break out. You
have a handsome store, you have 24 varieties of buggy-whips, you’ve added free
delivery and personal shoppers, but, after all that, you are still just making
a decent living. One day, while sorting through invoices, you happen to notice
that while just about all 24 varieties of buggy-whips sell decently, if you add up all the ones with shades of red, they represent a good 35% of your sales.
An idea is born.
You call an architect, and over a single weekend convert your beautiful retail
space into a plush salon of red. No more
heather, or taupe, or black, brown, no more blue—just reds. Crimson, raspberry, rust, orange, burgundy, even
hot pink.
It’s a hit. What you found out was that many others
shared your secret passion, and they flock to your store. You add book readings, red coffee cups, even
an all-red wine tasting once a month.
You have built a community. Your
competitors are getting killed, because while they might be getting 1/9th
of your dingy old gray-black-brown-blue business, they are losing most of their
reds to you. Your sales double, and
double again, your profitability higher still, because you don’t have to waste
space with slower-moving items.
That’s what Rupert
Murdoch did with Fox News. He looked out
at the dull media landscape, with major networks sending bland eminences out
there to sell dull (liberal and dull) shades of buggy-whips, and realize he
didn’t need to compete for every percent of market share with the same products
everyone else was selling. Rather, he
could have complete market dominance in one area—and who cared about the
viewers who wanted a traditional product?
Tune in to Fox with the right mind-set, and you can go weeks on end being
educated and entertained and enabled with friends who tell you that there’s
nothing in the world like red, and you are a special person for realizing it,
and that people who want to wear other colors are the ones with the
problems. Reds stick together.
This Murdochian
lesson was absorbed by the master salesman, who incorporated it into his own
brand. Donald Trump doesn’t want
everyone—in fact, he makes a point of saying some folk are just not welcome in
his store. That makes his product even
more appealing to his core customers, who really don’t want to hang out with the
people on the wrong side of the red rope anyway.
Trump’s brilliance,
however, has not been confined to just exploiting an exclusive market
niche. He has four other
advantages. The first is obvious—he’s
Donald Trump, and gets an enormous amount of free publicity just as a result of
his fame. The second is structural—a
multiplayer race is gold to him in a winner-take-most-or-all primary
environment. It’s like owning the
buggy-whip shop selling all the red—his competitors are still getting
customers, but with reduced traffic their overhead is now eating all their
profits. In South Carolina, Trump, with
33% of the vote, spread it out so well he got every single delegate to the
Convention, even though Cruz and Rubio, combined, had substantially more “sales.”
Republicans have
comforted themselves with Trump’s “low ceiling” but they have also run up against
another part of Trump’s secret sauce. No
one is really sure what that “low ceiling” consists of. The Trump coalition is like nothing that
makes sense using contemporary metrics. In
the beginning, when Trump was thought of as a loud-mouthed rich guy indulging himself,
they guessed he might broaden their coalition, then fade from
view in time for them to pocket those new voters while reassuring those he offended
that the GOP big tent was quite big. So, institutionally,
they took a hands-off approach and let the media (including Fox) have at him. Cruz, in particular, assumed that Trump’s
people would warm to his appeal once Donald had had his fun, and was
particularly nice to him.
Again, Trump
confounded people with his staying power, leaving all his opponents with a
terrible problem—they need to get Donald one-on-one (or, at least, one-on-two)
to reduce that seemingly irreducible 30-odd percent he has. That has meant that all the crabs in the pot have
had to go after each other, leaving Donald to watch. I saw a stunning number—only about two
percent of the more than $200 Million campaign ad dollars were spent in
negative ads against Trump himself—something that makes absolutely no sense,
given that he’s the frontrunner.
The problem is
now time as well as money. We have three
non-Trump candidates left (besides Carson)—Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich. Each one of the three thinks they can take
Trump one-on-one.
Unfortunately
for them, there won’t be mano-a-mano any time soon. Cruz isn’t going anywhere—he owes nothing to
the Establishment, and while he should have done better in South Carolina, there
are a lot of southern states Super Tuesday.
Rubio should pick up a huge amount of cash now that Jeb is out—but some
of Jeb’s voters may be more inclined to move to Kasich, who is closer in
temperament to Jeb and didn’t “betray” him.
Since that could split the “moderate” vote, there are a lot of people
really leaning on Kasich—and Kasich is out of money. But Kasich is a legitimately different voice
with his own lane to run in, and could take Midwestern states if he can hold on. That’s why they have floated a "Kasich falls on his sword/ Rubio/Kasich super-team”
rumor.
Of course, it’s
only February, and the sheer weight of Trump’s undisciplined language may
finally take him down. Or, he could just
keep going and going, and it could take him down in the general election.
Or, crimson
buggy whips could become a national craze, and the Lincoln Bedroom may get gold
bathroom hardware and be renamed the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Suite.”
Scary? It does
make a lot of people see red. Or get blue.
I’ll give Michael
Gerson a last word on who could be the next Republican nominee:
“Trumpism is an
existential threat to conservatism.”
Sly Fox, that
Donald.
Michael
Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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