Donald Trump seems an alternately shrewd and garrulous buffoon. And you can search high and low to explain his recent polling rise, including perhaps conceding that he’s touched some nerve of resentment among some group of possible Republican primary voters.
But it’s all a lot simpler for a prominent political scientist: He’s just getting tons of media attention.
“The answer is simple: Trump is surging in the polls because the news media has consistently focused on him since he announced his candidacy on June 16,” writes John Sides, a George Washington University academic who oversees a smart and entertaining site, “The Monkey Cage,” which runs in the Washington Post.
Sides and Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA and co-author of his, are assessing the quantity and tone of press coverage of candidates in the early stage of the 2016 presidential campaign.
They’ve even constructed a graph showing how much coverage he — and the other GOP candidates so far — received both prior to and after their formal candidacy announcements.
In sum, they find two things, one typical, the other not.
First, Trump’s announcement got a whole lot more attention from the media than those of the other candidates. Sides and Vavreck don’t venture a guess as to why but you can surely suggest that his celebrity was central (and those nasty comments about Mexicans didn’t hurt).
But also notable is how the usual post-announcement rise and quick dip experienced by all candidates haven’t played out for him.
Thus, the typical post-announcement decline is so far not in characteristic evidence.
“He has consistently attracted 20-30 percent of the news coverage of these candidates. Only Jeb Bush comes close. In the month since Trump’s announcement, Trump has received 21 percent of the news coverage. [former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has received 20 percent.”
But people continue to be bombarded with Trump coverage, most recently concerned his over-the-top qualms about whether Sen. John McCain is a true hero.
So when they are asked by pollsters about the candidates, Trump happens to be top of mind due to his being in the news.
But will the same media that giveth now taketh away, Sides wonders?
Will he feel “the full scrutiny of the press” and thus confront the negative ramifications of merely trafficking in controversy?
That tends to be what happen and you probably wouldn’t lose money wagering on that prospect.