Good try, but sadly not that good ... what i said 2 days ago was
"I always felt that Trump would do better than just about all the analysts who get paid good money to know these things were saying. I never considered his candidacy a 'joke' or 'side show' but I didn't really see how he was going to advance much beyond 25% which was my guess as to how much latent nastiness lay in the GOP. It was in early December that I began to realise he might be going to win the nomination, and its only in the last 10 days (subject to the vote being proven) that I'm coming round to the idea that he's going to win the whole shooting match"
I don't see any inconsistency. I've pretty well repeated the same figure and acknowledged that's what I thought.
I've gone on to lay out a time line for you as to how my view has altered. It's not difficult to understand. In fact I don't think I could have made it much clearer.
What I also said in early July was;
"I suspect he could do quite well, as he's going to plug into that aggressive conservative streak that a significant minority of American's have."
(a full month before this 'make up your mind' quote from early August 2015 that you've rather desperately had to dredge for)
But "do quite well" is a world away from winning, which is why I've never claimed to have been calling him the winner back in the summer. To be perfectly honest, I don't recall anyone predicting anything other than a farce back in the summer (he was 50/1 then). My "do quite well" was probably 'nearest the flag' if you want to play silly point scoring. The right wing candidates accounted for about 40% of the GOP at the time. My estimate 20-25% is an acknowledgement that I thought Trump would win the race within a race, but that was as far as he could go. Think of it as a victory for the latent nasties over the evangelical barmies
So to repeat it again, it was only in early December that I started to realise he was heading for the nomination, and only in the last 10 days that I've started to think he could go all the way, with the rider of course that we need to see some evidence that the vote is genuine and not just protesters (I stress the rider for now)
What I think has happened, (and I haven't really seen anything in the mainstream political commentaries that have picked up on this) is that in the space of 6 months he's actually made all the other Republican candidates unelectable by virute of insulting all their target demographics from a GOP platform. Sure the party have tried to distance themselves from him (even banning him from one debate that only saw his popularity rise for doing so). The problem the party have though is that they've been unable to divorce themselves from their association with Trump, and so the sense that his attitudes are embedded within the GOP has lodged. So all those strategies that the likes of Bush, Rubio, Christie et al have been cultivating for 4 years have been wiped out by Trump's bullying bombast. I think this is probably the result of the laws of unforeseen consequence however rather than any smart strategic move on Trump's part.
Its a double whammy though
The second hit comes from the fact that he's bringing marginalised Democrats, non-aligned, and apathetic can't be arsed's, into the Republican camp. These are the lower income, poorly educated, white, males, amongst whom his message is resonating. You might like to think of them as the 'taken for granted Democrats' - think Scotland and Labour combined with the phenomenon we know as the working class Tory if you want a loose paralell.
This has two devastaing impacts. Non of the Republicans had really planned to address this group, non are geared up for doing so, and non are on message. Trump gets first mover advantage on them. The ship has sailed. It has another consequence. Hillary Clinton has always been a bit flakey with this group herself. He's potentially taking votes off her, from a quarter that only he amongst Republicans can reach.
If he secured the nomination, then I've always said "all bets are off" because I'm particularly sensitive to the unpredictability that a major world event could throw into the mix should we encounter one between then and November. As I came to realise he could win the nomination, I started to to realise he could win the White House, but would need to rely this sort of thing happening to do so. I'm less sure he does now. I think he might win it through an attritional campaign of bullying, bragging, and belittliing. As I also noted, he appears to possess that most deadly of weapons, the ability to land blows on opponents once he starts to personalise a campaign. So far everyone he's targetted has ended up diminished. I wouldn't under estimate the importance of this, nor would I under estimate the probability that a lot of American's would like to see Hillary Clinton subjected to this type of attack and suffer under it
As ever with Trump though, there is the capacity for a spectacular piece of stupidity, or a fatal skeleton to come rattling out of the closet. We just don't know. Doubters will then be able to say "told you so" but right now they can't be confident that it'll happen. Even it did though, today he stands at even money for the nomination, and 7/2 for the Presidency. You could probably argue that he's already surpassed expectations and made a mockery of all those who confidentally predicted that America would universally reject him. Every time he does something that would sink a normal campaign, he seems to get a poll bounce. The normal rules just don't seem to apply to him
