How Donald Trump incited a political revolution

Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Let that sink in for a minute.

It's even semi-official: When Trump knocked rival Ted Cruz out of the race with a decisive victory in Tuesday's Indiana primary, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted his anointment of the billionaire.

Some pundits — especially those committed to the #NeverTrump movement — will downplay the significance of the political earthquake we've just lived through. They'll say it's unprecedentedly late for Trump to have reached this milestone, and that it's just a fluke that he managed to prevail at all. But they're wrong on both counts.

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Permit me a brief excursion into (recent) history.

Four years ago, the Republican Party nominated the most mainstream option on offer: Mitt Romney. But the Republican National Committee didn't declare him the presumptive nominee until April 25. That's because Romney didn't surge decisively to the head of the pack until then.

Between the Iowa Caucuses on January 3 and Louisiana's vote on March 24, Rick Santorum won 11 states. (The same number that Ted Cruz carried this time around.) Romney's popular vote totals were also comparable to Trump's. If we exclude territories and bracket out states where Mitt served as governor (Massachusetts) and those with a high population of Mormons (the candidate's religion, the members of which supported him in overwhelming numbers), we find that Romney had won a little less than 40 percent of the vote as of April 3. (This compares with a little over 35 percent for Trump.)

Only after Santorum suspended his campaign on April 10 did Romney begin to win overwhelming majorities with any consistency. It was his impressive showing in the first vote following Santorum's departure from the race — the northeastern primary on April 24 (Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island) — that led the RNC finally to pronounce Romney the presumptive nominee. Only on May 29, when Romney won the Texas primary with a resounding 69 percent, did he finally reach that year's magic number of 1,144 delegates — one week before the California primary on June 5.

This time around Trump will likely hit 1,237 on the day of the California primary — one whole week later than Romney. (Though with Cruz out of the race, it may happen even sooner.)

If this year has played out so similarly to the race from four years ago, why does it feel so profoundly different?

The answer, obviously, is that Donald Trump is (in the immortal words of Robert Kagan) "the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics." His rhetoric, his attitude, and his policy proposals are all so poisonous and unpresidential that large swaths of the pundit class have simply refused to believe that he could win.

I certainly understand why leading Republicans and members of the conservative movement — not to mention millions of genuinely alarmed Democrats and independents — would want to prevent it from happening. And it's admirable, even noble, for Republicans who cannot accept Trump as the party's standard-bearer to speak out against him, bolt the party, support a third party challenge, or even openly work to elect the Democratic nominee instead.

But that's very different than refusing to accept the reality that Trump has won for the same simple reason that Romney won in 2012 and that every candidate always wins his or her party's nomination: The electorate preferred him to the alternatives.

The problem with denying this reality is that smart and honorable Trump critics on the right will fail to grasp the nature of what we've just witnessed.

Trump's victory isn't just a personal stroke of stupendously good luck — the result of a haplessly divided field and the GOP establishment rolling over rather than exerting its will. Just as Rubio's inability to catch on wasn't a product of purely contingent bad luck. Just as Cruz's failure to consolidate the "anti-Trump vote" can't be blamed on John Kasich's refusal to suspend his campaign.

Rubio bombed because very few voters liked him and his message — and far more of them preferred Trump and his.

Cruz flopped because he's a right-wing ideologue, because he's intensely unlikable, and most of all because there is no coherent "anti-Trump vote" to consolidate — any more than the nearly four million people who cast votes for Rick Santorum four years ago were members of a nascent #NeverRomney movement. They merely preferred Santorum.

Republican voters looked out at a crowded field filled with talent — and a plurality of them decided they liked the trash-talking, know-nothing bully best of all.

Some members of the #NeverTrump crowd like to console themselves with the thought that Trump has led a "hostile takeover" of the GOP.

The truth may be even more troubling.

In a year when a left-wing insurgent in the Democratic Party has called for a political revolution, it's the Republican electorate that actually managed to pull one off.