Donald Trump's grip on the Republican race has endured over the better part of the last year, confounding the party elite and seemingly tossing aside preconceived notions of what it takes to win the nomination.

The only problem with that conclusion? Nobody has voted yet. But caucus-goers in Iowa on Monday and primary voters in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 will put months of polling and speculation, not to mention years of conventional political theory, to the test over the next two weeks.


In their seminal 2008 book "The Party Decides," political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller argue, in part, that American political parties are broad coalitions of politicians, activists and interest groups that are strong enough and functional enough to coalesce around a candidate that represents their best interests. The conclusion is right there in the title: In the end, the party decides. And influential political bloggers like Nate Silver and Nate Cohn cited the book as gospel.

Then along came Trump.

Political scientists consulted for this article weren't ready to chuck out the book just yet. But they acknowledged that in 2016, its core tenets were about to be tested like never before — and many of them had different explanations for why Trump has gotten this far despite being the ultimate party outsider.

Co-author Karol, while dismissing outright the notion that Trump's romp to the top of the polls has disproved their hypothesis, said that the theory could get tweaked and "more complicated" if they write a new edition. If there were any failings, he suggested, it was in the GOP's failure to live up to its billing as a strong party.

"I think [Republican] party elite is flummoxed by him because he's so outside the party's experience," Karol, a professor at the University of Maryland, said. "I think they're kind of at a loss; they've never had to have a Plan B before."

As for a recent review of the book by Silver on FiveThirtyEight headlined "The Republican Party May Be Failing" — in which the polling guru defended the book from its growing ranks of skeptics — Karol called it "a reasonable description so far. I would say they have failed."

Silver's argument, in essence: The bumper-sticker "caricature" of "The Party Decides" is that "the establishment always prevails," when in reality the authors' definition of a political party is something much broader than its elite core. But Silver also allowed that a win for Trump "would either imply that the book’s hypothesis was wrong all along — or that the current Republican Party is weak and dysfunctional and perhaps in the midst of a realignment."

There's also the possibility that Trump is simply sui generis — a unique figure who defies all attempts at categorization. If that's true, Karol argued, an entire theory should not necessarily be thrown out because of one disagreeable instance.

"It is too soon to say for sure," agreed co-author Cohen, a professor at James Madison University, "considering our book's most important premises are not about who is going to do well in the invisible primary, for example, [or] who is going to lead the polls before Iowa, but who is going to end up being the nominee." Even so, he added, the Republican race bears special notice for a "lack of coordination around a broadly acceptable candidate especially in order to stop Trump or even a [Ted] Cruz."

That acceptable candidate was supposed to be Jeb Bush, who declared his candidacy the day before Trump's last June. But Bush, who had the backing of the GOP's deep-pocketed donors and much of its professional class in Washington, D.C., "has not proven to be a very good candidate thus far and therefore has struggled to galvanize elite support," Cohen remarked.

Bush in many ways was the anti-Trump: He racked up big endorsement after big endorsement in the campaign's early months, a factor "The Party Decides" called "the most important cause of candidate success in the state primaries and caucuses." (In presidential primaries, endorsements have been among the best predictors of which candidates will succeed and which will fail. So we’re keeping track," Silver's website also notes. ) Trump, by contrast, hasn't notched a single major endorsement — and yet here we are, with Trump at 28 percent and Bush at 2 percent in the Des Moines Register's final Iowa poll.

Maybe this election just isn't like all the others, some political scientists argued.

"In the last few cycles, we saw candidates divide the electorate along a social conservative dimension — strong conservatives & Tea Party voters on one side (with Evangelicals possibly in there, too) and the more moderate part of the party. This year seems to be different," noted Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA. Trump has appealed to slices of those voters in the electorate who have "high levels of racial anxiety, high levels of fear of immigrants, and high levels of skepticism about women who make claims of harassment or mistreatment (this is all within the party). This is a different dimension — a different way to divide the pie if you will — than we’ve seen in recent primaries," she said.

But the feelings elicited by Trump's campaign do not signify a "fundamental shift," Vavreck said, remarking, "Trump just came along and was willing to prime these dimensions instead of the more traditional ones."

"Most candidates have been unwilling to use attitudes about race, women, and non-white groups so explicitly to get elected, but Trump saw a pathway there and was willing to take it," she said.

Political science does have the tools to explain Trump, argued John Sides, a professor at George Washington University who co-founded the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog.

Republicans are facing "what we call in social science a collective action problem," said Sides, who co-wrote with Vavreck a well-regarded book on the 2012 election. "I don't think most Republicans think Trump would be their strongest nominee. But few Republicans seem willing to spend the time and effort to attack him," he said, seemingly at a loss to explain why.

The exceptions, like David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner and the National Review, he added, are "mainly intellectual agents within the party. What we haven't seen is the politico wing attack him en masse."

That is certainly true: While sporadic efforts have been made to portray Trump as erratic or insufficiently conservative to be the Republican nominee, no broadly organized and well-heeled elite campaign has emerged to destroy him, though that's what many — including Silver — expected to happen. For months, GOP power-brokers simply assumed his support would evaporate as voters tuned in and began demanding serious solutions to their problems.

What's more, as Sides suggested in a blog post back in July, Trump's polling numbers were supposed to fade as he drew media scrutiny and fire from his opponents. "This scrutiny tends to produce much less favorable coverage and, for many candidates, a permanent decline in the candidate’s poll numbers. In the primary, this is often fatal for that candidate’s campaign," he wrote. Instead, Trump kept rising even as the coverage got tougher.

In his own accounting for Trump, Karol stressed that the businessman-turned-showman-turned-candidate is a rarity, an enduring figure of American public life over the last several decades, with the massive name recognition to go along with his tabloid and reality-show fame.

"I tend to think the process was always vulnerable to someone like Trump," Karol said, referring to the primary system that emerged in the early 1970s. "It's possible that late in the game there will be consolidation about someone other than Trump and Cruz."

Or maybe, he added, "it's too late."

"'The Party Decides' isn’t wrong, not quite yet," Silver wrote last week. "If Marco Rubio winds up the Republican nominee after all, the theory will come out looking pretty good. And if it’s Jeb Bush, somehow, the party’s powers will seem miraculous."