ROGER KIMBALL: Trump Fans vs. Trump Supporters: Which Group Are Polls Really Counting?
It doesn’t matter that many of Donald Trump’s positions are ridiculous, incoherent, or both. They tap into a current of emotion composed partly of anger, partly of impatience, and partly of fear. People are angry at the inability or unwillingness of their elected officials to bring about the changes they were sent to Washington to accomplish. They are fearful, rightly, about the destruction wrought by seven years of Barack Obama on this country: the degradation of our military, the low esteem in which the rest of the world holds America, the regulatory burden that has stymied our economy, pustules of Islamic terrorism which Obama refuses even to name. These and other results of Obama’s disastrous reign have instilled great anger and great fear in large swathes of the American public.
It’s not acknowledged, not yet, by the folks who think that The New York Times or MSNBC or CNN are sources of news rather than outposts of the DNC press office, but it is nevertheless a palpable fact about America circa 2016.
The question for Trump is whether his many fans are convertible into reliable supporters. The polls measure the former. I am not at all sure that they are a reliable guide to the latter. And that is one reason that I suspect that Ted Cruz’s recent bump in the polls is more significant that Donald Trump is quite willing to admit. He half-admitted it last night, it is true, when he allowed that he had gone birther on Ted Cruz only because Cruz had suddenly been doing “a little better” in the polls.
Are Trump’s “many fans are convertible into reliable supporters?” We’ll know soon enough. But it’s entirely possible that by bringing the full fire of the New York media (read: outposts of the DNC press office) down upon his head, Ted Cruz’s “New York Values” line might just resonate enough to allow him to end-run Trump, and to carry him through the early primaries. Or not — in any case, as far as who is left with a viable shot in the primaries, to borrow from a Photoshop I did for Roger Simon around Thanksgiving…
