'Frightening': GOP pollster shows how Trump's rise wasn't due to the will of voters

Donald Trump just essentially wrapped up the GOP primary competition, but that didn't always seem like a possibility. A Republican pollster explains how it happened.

Sarah Longwell, the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project and publisher of The Bulwark, said it wasn't the will of the voters that toppled a mainstream GOP that was resistant to Trumpism. In fact, it was the Republican Party's embrace of Trump that made it possible.

"Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech," Longwell wrote in a piece published in the Atlantic. "Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?"

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To answer those questions, Longwell takes a deep dive into the psyche of Trump voters.

"I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself," she wrote. "Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment."

Longwell's conclusion is that the outcome "wasn't inevitable" but that it happened nonetheless.

"The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party," the conservative wrote. "They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job."

Read the full piece here.