Must-Read: Ezra Klein: For elites, politics is driven by ideology. For voters, it’s not: "Party trumps ideology. Republicanism... for most voters... is based more on group attachments and resentments than it is on ideology...
...These were the voters Trump understood and political elites didn’t, and he understood them because he is one of them: His group allegiances were tribal even as his ideology was flexible. Trump was far better than Florida Man (1) or Florida Man (2) or Ted Cruz at expressing his distaste for Democrats, for immigrants, for Black Lives Matter protesters, for condescending cosmopolitans, for President Obama. That Rubio and Bush and Cruz were better at expressing their fealty to conservative ideology didn’t much matter. Henry Adams once wrote that “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds,” and Trump was masterful at organizing those hatreds.
Trump was easy for political professionals to underestimate because they are ideologues who are surrounded by ideologues, and so they naturally came to see a coherent ideology as a prerequisite for a successful politician. And there was, and is, truth to that: Most politicians really are highly ideological, and they use their power over the party’s machinery to beat back or convert those who would seek to lead their party without joining in their ideological crusade. But Trump, because of his celebrity, his money, and his media savvy, was able to campaign without party support. And that let him show that you don’t need to be a consistent conservative to appeal to Republican voters, because most of them aren’t consistent conservatives either—there’s much more to politics than ideology, even if political professionals likes to pretend otherwise...
