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There's a lot of loose talk in Republican politics about the battle that's supposedly raging between outsiders and the mainstream establishment. Actually, the battle's over. It's the outsiders in a romp.
Look at the poll numbers, as averaged by Real Clear Politics. They show the relentlessly growing combined strength of the four main outsider presidential primary candidates: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. Only Cruz, a Texas senator who routinely defies his party, has held elective office. Trump and Fiorina are business leaders and Carson is a retired neurosurgeon.
This month's polls show 64 percent of likely Republican primary voters favoring one of those four. Just 23 percent support one of the best-known insiders: former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey or Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
That represents a huge shift. Back in June, when Trump was just getting into the race and Cruz was little known, the four insiders were way ahead of the four outsiders, 35 percent to 23 percent.
It took until August for the tide to turn toward the anti- establishment group, with the outsiders taking a 33-percent- to-26-percent lead. A month later, support for the outsider quartet had risen to 51 percent, versus 24 percent for the insiders.
To comfort themselves, establishment Republicans like to recall the fall that followed the fleeting rise of past outsider presidential primary candidates like Pat Robertson in 1988, Steve Forbes in 2000 and Herman Cain in 2012. Top Republican office-holders, strategists and lobbyists keep saying that Cruz and Trump will suffer the same fate.
The poll numbers suggest that may be delusional. It seems clear now that grass-roots Republican voters have a deeper, and probably more durable anti-establishment feeling than in other recent elections. Things have changed since the days of Herman Cain.
Now, when one of the anti-establishment candidates slips, most of his or her support goes to another outsider. When Carson dropped recently, for example, Cruz gained.
This is reinforced by a Pew Research September survey in which 65 percent of Republicans said they wanted a candidate with "new ideas" as opposed to one with experience. That was a sharp reversal from six months earlier, when most Republicans preferred experience.
Democrats go the other way, valuing experience over new ideas by 53 percent to 39 percent.
Why the shift among Republicans? One factor may be the personal appeal of these four outside candidates. Trump, of course, was a reality-TV star.
It also probably reflects the undelivered promises many Republican candidates have made in recent elections to slash government programs and defeat a Democratic president they detest. Realism aside, the sense of betrayal among many rank- and-file Republicans is likely to be inflamed further by Republican congressional votes Friday that passed a year-end spending bill and averted a threatened government shutdown.
The liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote last week that if only Bush, Rubio, Christie and Kasich would unite behind one candidate, he could probably beat Trump or Cruz. This increasingly looks dubious.
Previously:
• 11/25/15: As the GOP candidates emerge Hillary's weaknesses will be revealed
• 11/05/15: OK, candidates: Ask the questions yourselves. Seriously
• 10/28/15: Imagine an endgame of Cruz vs. Rubio
• 10/26/15:Ted Cruz has a Ben Carson problem in Iowa
• 10/20/15: Will Paul Ryan follow James Polk's playbook?
• 10/20/15: If only Trey Gowdy could meet with Sam Ervin
• 10/13/15: Voters don't like revisiting the trials and tribulations of Clintonland --- but that doesn't mean Hillary can't win
• 09/23/15: Why Jimmy Carter couldn't win the South today
• 09/17/15: Gov. John Kasich's standout record in Ohio
• 09/03/15: Republicans chart 4 paths to stopping Trump
• 08/31/15: Here's how Biden-Warren sort of makes sense
• 08/28/15:Trump upends New Hampshire's substantive tradition
• 08/26/15:Jeb Bush is hugging the wrong president George
• 08/24/15: Underestimating Ted Cruz? That's a mistake
• 08/19/15: US holds steady in a world of economic trouble
• 08/12/15: Who will capture Iowa conservatives after Trump?
• 08/10/15: Debate fireworks that won’t make much impact
• 07/29/15: A plea for conservatives to speak from the heart
• 07/09/15: Ex-Im Bank's undeserved rap for crony capitalism
• 06/24/15: All presidential candidates should be in debates
• 06/03/15: Foreign policy traps await Republicans and Hillary
• 06/01/15: It's small stuff that wrecks presidential runs
• 02/04/15: Can Walker be president without a college degree?
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Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was formerly the executive editor of Bloomberg News, directing coverage of the Washington bureau. Hunt hosts the weekly television show "Political Capital with Al Hunt." In his four decades at the Wall Street Journal, he was a reporter, bureau chief and executive Washington editor, and wrote the weekly column "Politics & People." Hunt also directed the Journal's polls, was president of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and a board member of the Ottaway community newspapers. He was a panelist on the CNN programs "The Capital Gang" and "Novak, Hunt & Shields." He is co-author of books on U.S. elections by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution.
