Sabato: Cruz Top Tier, Trump Un-Nominatable

"Everything we think we know about presidential nominations [may be] wrong."

by Rod D. Martin
August 14, 2015

Famed pundit and political scientist Larry Sabato, writing in his Crystal Ball Report, has pronounced a new Republican top tier that's outsider heavy. He also says Donald Trump is, at best, Republicans' "summer fling."

Sabato is a smart guy, but he's far from perfect. When he lists Cruz, Bush, Kasich, Rubio and Walker as the new top tier, it's significant. It certainly says a lot about Ted Cruz, whom everyone (though not I) was writing off just shortly ago.

But his bigger thesis -- that Trump is "un-nominatable" -- is just silly. It depends on "insights" like this one: "presidential nominees need widespread backing from elites in the party." They do? You mean like Barack Obama, running against a party dominated by the Clinton Machine? Or Ronald Reagan? Or Jimmy Carter?

These are certainly not perfect analogies, but they're instructive in a key way: to the limited degree that these former candidates had "widespread backing from party elites," they only got i…