Every political analyst, every political observer, every politician is absolutely sure that Donald Trump is not going to be the Republican nominee for president in 2016. And we’re all absolutely sure that Donald Trump is not going to be sworn in as president on January 20, 2017. Could we all be wrong?

So far, every poll seems to only be giving him more strength. Who would have thought even a month ago that as we enter the first GOP debate of the presidential election that Donald Trump, The Donald Trump, would be the leader in every single national poll and gaining strength in all the early primary and caucus states? Time and time again, in just a few weeks, his candidacy seems to have survived what we professional political observers all think are obviously fatal gaffes and flubs. Could this be the rare instance when politics is actually about to go haywire?

If you threw a ball up in the air and it didn’t come down, what would you think? Maybe it landed on the roof or got stuck in a tree. You would not think that the law of gravity had been repealed.

So if you’re trying to figure out why Donald Trump has so far left the political class in a state of stunned disbelief, it might be wise not to abandon every assumption about politics, but to ask a different question: When and why do voters behave in ways that seem to break the rules? When are bedrock assumptions about campaigns rendered at least temporarily inoperative? In this context, poll numbers taken months before an election don’t count; while they can measure a public mood, the choice of a candidate is something like a customer in a store trying on hats. The more telling question is: When do voters actually cast their ballots in ways that upend core premises?

One answer, based not on guesses about what might happen, but on what has happened in America’s political past, is that when disaffected voters discover a power that they did not realize they had, highly unanticipated consequences may follow.

For instance, if you were choosing a state that would abandon the two major parties and elect as governor a one-time professional wrestler, Minnesota might not be high on your list. It’s among our most literate states; its voter turnout is always at or near the top. But in fact, Minnesota has a historical appetite for alternatives. The Farmer-Labor Party elected governors, senators and House members back in the ’20s and ’30s (it merged with the Democratic Party in 1944).

Moreover, in Jesse “The Body” Ventura, voters saw something more than the flamboyant showman who proclaimed, “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat!” He’d been a talk show host with a gift for asking smart, probing questions, and mayor of a fair-sized town (Brooklyn Park was the sixth biggest city in the state).

That recognition was enough to put his poll numbers above 20 percent as the fall election began—and those poll numbers had two critical consequences. First, it gained him entry into the gubernatorial debates, which put him on an equal footing with his major party rivals. Second, it all but guaranteed that under the state’s campaign finance laws, Ventura would receive significant funds after the election—which in turn enabled his campaign to borrow hundreds of thousand of dollars for a highly effective advertising campaign. The ads featured Ventura in the pose of Rodin’s “The Thinker” sculpture, and a plea for voters not to vote for “politics as usual.”

Since voters had the chance to see Ventura as a viable candidate, the normal falloff for a third-party candidate did not happen; instead, he won a narrow victory over St. Paul Mayor (and future Senator) Norm Coleman and Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III. Enough voters decided: “Hey! We can do this!” to shock the political establishment.

“Frankly,” said Chris Gilbert, chairman of the political science department at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, “we the analysts and the media, we regarded Ventura as a cute curiosity.” And, in a comment that resonates powerfully with today’s Trump phenomenon, consider what 28-year-old aircraft mechanic Greg Uken told the New York Times about why he was voting for Ventura: “I don’t put up with a lot of stuff, and neither does he.”

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In California, voters had had a long history of using the ballot to enact laws and even constitutional amendments, on their own—a legacy of early 20th century progressives like Gov. Hiram Johnson. They were comfortable using that power to turn disaffection into action: repealing the state’s Fair Housing ordinance in 1964; imposing sharp limits on property and other taxes in 1978; venting their anger about crime by removing three Supreme Court Justices in 1986. But for more than a century, they had never recalled a sitting politician at the ballot box, even though there had been 117 efforts to do just that.

In 2003, it looked as if yet another effort might fail, despite the fact that discontent was at a high boil. The energy crisis, triggered in good measure by the machinations of Enron, had sent electricity costs through the roof; a proposed hike on vehicle licenses was a serious hit in a state with more cars than people. The political “pay to play” culture had almost cost Gov. Gray Davis reelection a year earlier. (He’d won in part because he got to cherry pick his politically inept opponent.) But the requirements for a recall election were daunting; supporters had to collect well over a million signatures to ensure meeting the threshold.

Then, in May, Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the richest members of Congress and someone who harbored gubernatorial ambitions of his own, decided to put his own money—$1.7 million of it—behind the recall effort. With paid TV and radio ads and an army of paid signature gatherers, the recall election was slated for October. For voters aggrieved by economic woes, and fed up with the political movers and shakers, a weapon they barely knew existed had been placed in their hands. By overwhelming numbers, they voted Davis out and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger—a candidate who symbolized in every conceivable way the rejection of the political class.

Here again are significant precursors to the Trump furor. Had Schwarzenegger never held public office? Look at what the career politicians had done. (He had in fact chaired the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and was active in a variety of philanthropies.) Is he a political neophyte? He’s married to a Kennedy, for heaven’s sake. Did he speak with an accent and use catchphrases from his movies? At least we know what he’s talking about, and he’s not using evasive, namby-pamby political talk. Had he harassed women in his past? Well, isn’t his wife standing by him? In essence, the recall tool had added a crucial element to the words made famous in Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network”: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore, and now I can actually do something about it!”

For those now supporting Trump—and they are a minority of a minority as of now—his nascent campaign seems to be acting as the Ventura campaign and the California recall did: providing a mechanism to turn a fever of disaffection into action. And from that sense of possibility, the chance to redefine what political plausibility means, comes an overt, enthusiastic rejection of the “norms” of politics. Does he flaunt his wealth? Then he doesn’t have to suck up to rich, powerful influence-buyers. Does he hurl insults left, right and center? Like the Minnesotan said about Jesse Ventura, “I don’t put up with a lot of stuff, and neither does he.” In fact, most of us have to put with a lot of stuff—from bosses, bureaucrats, family—which makes Trump an object of admiration, for his ability to tell pretty much everyone to go to hell. Does he blatantly contradict his past views? Hell, every politician lies, or tells us what they think we want to hear. He’s smart enough not to take all that stuff seriously. If all of his fellow candidates disowned him, if established conservative voices tried to read him out of the movement, as William F. Buckley did to the John Birch Society, it would only be proof that they are resistant to an honest outsider. If a modern-day equivalent of Joseph Welch asked Trump, as Welch did of Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” Trump would likely respond, “I don’t need any lectures from a stuffed shirt wrinkled old geezer!” And his backers would cheer him on.

That’s why fellow billionaire and TV reality star Mark Cuban was dead on when he said: “I don’t care what his actual positions are. … I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years.”

The gambler in me still says that Trump falls to earth—maybe with a crash by virtue of his own hand (or mouth) or with a slow fade to the margins. All I mean to do here is to note that there are times in politics when the Black Swan shows up; when a highly unlikely, highly improbable event shatters years worth of assumptions; when voters see—and then grasp—an audacious possibility. Before offering up any certainties about what might happen to Trump, it might be useful to use a tool that Trump himself has never employed: humility.

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