The Stormy Present

Time flies when you're having fun. It's been two months since the first Republican presidential debate. How do things now stand for the party upon whose success next year rest all of our hopes for constitutional government at home and a manageable world abroad?

The one constant over these past two months is, amusingly, the inconstant Donald Trump. He was the Republican frontrunner on August 6, the day of the Cleveland debate, with the support in polls of just under a quarter of GOP primary voters. And that's where he stands now. Even this apparent constancy masks motion, however, for Trump hit a high-water mark of about 30 percent in mid-September before receding to his still-impressive 23 percent today.

Everyone else has been in motion of a more directional sort. Jeb Bush, second at 13 percent two months ago, is now fifth at 8 percent. Scott Walker, third on that day in August and the only other candidate in double digits at 10 percent, is now out of the race. Mike Huckabee has slid from fourth place at 7 percent to a virtual tie with other also-rans, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul, at 3 percent.

But downward mobility for some has meant upward mobility for others. Ben Carson has gone from fifth place with 6 percent to a strong second at 17 percent. Carly Fiorina, who was too low in the polls to qualify for the main stage in Cleveland, has surged to third at 10 percent, tied with Marco Rubio, who two months ago was at just half that level. The devilish Ted Cruz was sixth then and is sixth now at 6 percent (I'll leave it to others to discourse on why the fates have assigned him a kind of 666 status in the race).

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has in the last two months lost almost a quarter of her support, going from 55 percent to 42 percent; Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have advanced from 20 to 25 percent and 13 to 19 percent, respectively. In short, no one has any very good idea what's going to happen. But there is one notable fact: Contrary to the fervent predictions and ardent hopes of the D.C. political class, there is no evidence outsider sentiment is ebbing. The three Republicans who've never held elective office had a total of just under a third of the vote two months ago; they now have the support of half of primary voters.

Pundits and consultants nonetheless tend to assume that normalcy will reassert itself. Perhaps it will. But why really should it? Consider the House Republicans, who have deposed one speaker and just seen his putative successor flame out. Is the spectacle on Capitol Hill likely to convince GOP primary voters that you need to hold or to have held elective office in order to govern effectively? Are the debt limit and budget showdowns coming up in November and December apt to persuade GOP primary voters that they should have more respect for conventional political credentials?

And among Democrats, will Hillary Clinton's amazing flip-flop on the Asian trade agreement help her reassure the left wing of her party that she's listening to them? Or will it simply leave her betwixt and between, with Joe Biden (or John Kerry, if Biden doesn't run) getting the support of moderate Democrats and Obama loyalists, while Sanders retains the allegiance of the progressive wing? Hillary used to look like Walter Mondale in 1984, a weak frontrunner who'd probably hold on. She now looks like Edmund Muskie in 1972, a once "inevitable" frontrunner who first waffled and then simply collapsed.

It seems safe to predict there will be more major surprises over the next months. Or maybe the surprise will be that there aren't any more surprises. But what would a nonsurprise future look like at this point? If you extrapolate from current support and current trends, you can easily write a scenario for both parties in which the races aren't resolved until the conventions. No, one instinctively says, that couldn't happen. Or could it?

We're in a different political universe from the one most of us have gotten used to. At such a moment, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion." So we must, and so, one trusts, we shall. .

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William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard, which, together with Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz, he founded in 1995. Kristol regularly appears on Fox News Sunday and on the Fox News Channel.