Trump keeps grabbing spotlight

By Jonathan Bernstein

Bloomberg View

Not only is Donald Trump’s call for banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. being widely condemned. It also is a losing campaign strategy, even if it has given him a consistent polling lead so far.

Trump thrives on media attention. Yes, many inflammatory things he has said find some support among Republican voters. But a lot of pronouncements, whether outrageous or mainstream, could find some support – and lots of candidates are willing to make them. What moved Trump to the top of the polls and keeps him there is his utter dominance of the information environment. He’s the only candidate most Republicans are hearing about.

Looking just at nightly network news, Trump has received about 33 times as much coverage as Ted Cruz has so far this year. Thus it’s more surprising that Cruz is still relatively close in the polls than that Trump leads in them.

Poll respondents rarely choose a candidate they’ve never heard of or have heard little about. So for most Republican voters, the choice they’ve been asked to make is more a referendum on Trump than a choice among several Republican contenders.

The challenge for Trump is that he’s in a Red Queen race: As time goes on, he has to do more and more to get the same amount of attention.

Back in the summer, when most Republican presidential candidates were occupied by the “invisible primary” competition for the support of major party actors, Trump’s ability to dominate the media was relatively easy: Most candidates weren’t focused on the public side of the campaign at that point.

Grabbing the spotlight

When the debates began, this started to change. Trump typically lost a little steam after each of those events because they generated publicity for the other candidates. But he has proved skilled at moving the spotlight back to himself, quickly rebounding in the polls to about 30 percent or so in Republican trial heats.

As the primaries and caucuses draw nearer, the ground is shifting. It was no surprise that an Iowa poll is showing Trump falling behind. Voters there are being exposed to a more balanced flow of information. Other candidates are running TV ads, raising their profiles, and the campaigns are contacting people directly. Thus Trump has resorted to what the Spectator’s Alex Massie called a “dead cat” ploy.

To keep the attention on him, his antics have to be wilder and wilder. Each time he goes over the top he risks losing some supporters, and solidifies the opposition of Republicans who were initially inclined to oppose him.

It’s a perfect strategy to produce early polling leads. When it comes to winning nominations, however, it’s a loser.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.