Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Seriously, Trump Won't Win

Even if the Republican front-runner maintains his current popularity, another candidate will surpass him.

October 19, 2015 at 8:17 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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It's no surprise that more and more Republicans who initially dismissed Donald Trump are starting to believe he has a good chance of winning after all. National Review has an item today on how people like Ed Rollins (Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign manager) and Steve Schmidt (John McCain's campaign manager in 2008) are taking Trump seriously. Washington Examiner’s Byron York reports that strategist Alex Castellanos has changed his mind about Trump having no chance, and now believes "the odds of Trump's success have increased and been validated in the past few weeks."

It’s true that Trump continues to maintain a comfortable lead in national polling – about 10 percentage points ahead of Ben Carson, and another 10 or more over the rest of the field. He’s probably still on top in Iowa, too, although Carson is close there.