Yesterday, Nate Silver urged the commentariat to "Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls." He observed, in particularly admirable prose, that "pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair." He then counter-noted that "I can see where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent chance is substantially too high."
If by "freaking out" Silver means palsied fear, just who is he reading? I, for one, keep exhausting my supply of confetti. And as I understand it, America's Fleet Streets are running low on champagne. That's no freaking fearful sucking sound you're hearing, or blood-red dread you are reading; it is, rather, unmitigated media ecstasy. But perhaps I'm misreading Silver; perhaps by "freaking out" he means only the spotless ecstasy we feel.
As for his "substantially too high" estimation? Here we're in unmistakable disagreement. Trump's "20 percent chance" seems, to me, about right — if not a bit too low. Silver objects that Trump's 25-to-30 percent support isn't enough to capture the nomination; that his "favorability ratings are middling among Republicans"; that Trumpeteer turnout is in question; and that "the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet." These are reasonable protests against Trumpian bullishness.
I would ask, however — What of winner-take-all primary states? What of the fragmentation of the Republican vote — assuming it holds — in which 30 percent in a winner-take-all state is as good as 95? What of the promise of chronic fragmentation, given that so many ultimate losers possess life-sustaining super PACs? And what of the GOP establishment's justified fear that the sine-qua-non brutalization of Trump might well result only in a ruinous third-party bid?
This last predicament explains — maybe more so than the establishment's fear of "get[ting] mowed down by [a Trump] counterassault," as Dana Milbank muses this morning — why, "with few and intermittent exceptions, rival candidates, party leaders and GOP lawmakers decline to call him out."
They decline for the same painful reason I might now decline, were I so unfortunate as to be a Republican presidential candidate: Mr. Trump has them by the balls, because the GOP's scrotal sack — known medically as "the base" — is just wild about Donaldian cretinism. And the wildness factor translates to (or should I say, following Silver, "inches" toward) at least a 20 percent chance of a rather magnificent Trumpian boner.