Every presidential election is just like all the other ones until it’s not. The many people who predicted Donald Trump would flame out in the Republican primary aren’t idiots; mostly their predictions were based on past primaries. Many people are now predicting Trump will be destroyed in the general election. This is based on reams of voter surveys and demographic data from past elections. But what if everyone is repeating the same mistake?

In August, Nate Silver predicted Donald Trump was doomed to be a blip, just like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann in 2012, or perhaps Mike Huckabee in 2008. Almost exactly four years earlier, Republicans were passing around a slideshow noting that no president had been reelected when the consumer confidence index was below 75, and it was at 55.7. (It rose to a mere 72.2 a few days before President Barack Obama was reelected.) Until Obama, no Democrat from outside the South had been elected president since 1960. There are countless examples of rock-solid election laws that suddenly crumbled.

Since just after the 2012 election, political punditry has been almost Calvinist in its certainty about 2016: The electorate was predestined to have a particular demographic makeup, and each demographic group would turn out and vote a particular way, and the math added up to Republicans being toast. It wouldn’t matter much whether the GOP candidate was Chris Christie or Scott Walker or Jeb Bush, because voters’ views of the parties were set.

But what if the candidacy of Donald Trump is so weird and new and different that it can actually change all that? Last summer, one of the few people who bet big on Trump winning the GOP nomination and the election was a British Scientologist. Of course a Scientologist would understand the power of celebrity in America—the church has long used movie stars to get people to do something even harder than switch parties: switch religions. John Mappin, who bet almost $10,000 on Trump and could win $100,000 come November, explained, “His rise marks a paradigm shift in media, really ... What I could see was that the pundits in America hadn’t woken up to that.” Mappin continued, “People say, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, he’s a reality TV show star.’ But hang on, he’s an icon. He can use his power as an icon to attract attention. We’ve moved into a new media age, which is the age of icon control. And somebody with a Twitter account has effectively more power, perhaps unjustly, than somebody who perhaps has been sincerely working their whole life doing something really, really good.”

What’s the evidence Democratic voters will be more immune to the power of celebrity than Republican voters? Perhaps the strongest such evidence is the phenomenon of negative partisanship—increasingly, people vote against the party they hate instead of for the party they like. Last summer, political scientists at Emory University published a paper showing that while people are more likely to call themselves independent, they are also more likely to vote straight ticket. In a June post at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Emory’s Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster explained: