At this point in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was the front-runner for the GOP nomination | #212 - March 26, 2023
Every primary is different from the training set
Happy Monday, everyone. This is a short dispatch from vacation.
Last week, I wrote about how opposition to Trump is a classic coordination problem. There are too many self-interested actors vying for the GOP nomination that they cannot effectively coordinate to stop their least desirable outcome from coming true: collectively losing to Donald Trump when one might beat him one-on-one (read below).
In the week since I wrote this, the prospect of a single candidate defeating Trump has declined. The average of polls, according to the Times’ chief political analyst Nate Cohn, shows Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most formidable appointment to date, slipping nearly 10 points in head-to-head polls from early January to February through March:
The precise reasons for the decline are unknown, empirically speaking. Pollsters cannot effectively resample the same people to ask why they have changed their minds — if, in fact, they have (more on that in the last bullet point below). Some reasonable hypotheses …
