Jac Wilder VerSteeg: Trump Bump doesn’t prove Republicans are nuts

Donald Trump ahead in the polls? Republicans must be crazy!

But there is another way to look at the polls. About 80 percent of Republicans do not say Donald Trump is their top choice.

That illustrates why Republicans are not as crazy as they’re often portrayed for creating the Trump Bump. However, it also shows why the traditional nominating process remains a serious problem for them.

Trump’s “popularity” is quite easy to explain. Most sane poll respondents split their prospective votes among legitimate candidates.

Like Jeb Bush’s policies or not, he is a perfectly legitimate candidate. He’s just a governor, you say? So was Bill Clinton. It’s the same sort of thing with Marco Rubio. He’s just a one-term senator, you say? So was Barack Obama.

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling showed Trump with 19 percent, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with 17 percent, Bush with 12 percent, Ben Carson with 10 percent and Rubio with 10 percent.

Let’s stick with those top five for a minute. Walker easily holds a slot with Bush and Rubio in the “legitimate candidate” category. He is a Republican governor who prevailed in a Blue state and withstood a powerful recall attempt.

Carson, well, let’s lump him in with Trump. In this analysis, the “crazy” voters picking Trump or Carson would command 29 percent of the GOP vote. But the Walker-Bush-Rubio coalition would pull 39 percent. If a hypothetical winnowing created, say, a Trump-Walker face-off, Walker would win the GOP nod. Similarly, Bush and Rubio would beat Trump head-to-head by adding votes from sane Republicans.

What happens if you take the remainder of the poll results spread across the rest of the GOP candidate scrum? I’ll put Mike Huckabee (8 percent), Ted Cruz (4 percent), Rand Paul (4 percent), Rick Perry (1 percent) and Rick Santorum (1 percent) in the “crazy” batch. That brings that wing up to 47 percent.

But the “legitimate” side then adds Carly Fiorina (4 percent), Chris Christie (3 percent), John Kasich (3 percent) and Bobby Jindal (1 percent). That brings the legitimate/rational total up to a magic 50 percent.

Other candidates such as Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore drew minuscule support of less than 1 percent. Two percent were undecided. But surely there’s one voter in that batch to give the legitimate candidates a pure majority.

The margin is narrow, but it appears that a majority of Republicans responding to that poll are not nuts. But it remains a fact that a candidate who “concentrates the crazies” can defeat a slate saturated with legitimate candidates. Consider a contest in which GOP voters had to choose among Walker, Bush, Christie, Rubio and Trump. Who wins? Trump, because he concentrates the crazies while the others split the responsible votes. This of course matters most in winner-take-all primaries.

The “concentrating the crazies” effect forces the likes of Bush and Rubio to skew right in an attempt to pick off some of the more extreme voters. Bush has said he’s going to try to avoid that drift, which hurt Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. But it’s hard for a GOP candidate to be moderate and win primaries.

And there’s one more risk: If the nomination process eventually discards the nutso candidate, the discarded candidate always has the option to run as an independent, which Trump obviously could do. Such a move would, again, concentrate the crazies and both draw votes from the GOP ticket and force the official Republican candidate to continue to skew right.

Something similar happened in 1992 when Ross Perot, running as an independent, helped Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush. It happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader (and an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court) helped George W. Bush beat Al Gore.

The obvious solution would be a voting system that allows voters to pick a second choice who would be assigned their vote if their first choice did not win. Primaries would be a perfect place to pioneer such a system.

The majority of voters are not crazy, even if the election system is.

Just as a final note, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida GOP voters released Friday showed Bush on top with 28 percent, followed by Rubio with 16 percent, Walker 13 percent and Trump with just 11 percent. If this marks a trend, the Trump Bump is flattening.

Jac Wilder VerSteeg is a columnist for The South Florida Sun Sentinel, former deputy editorial page editor for The Palm Beach Post and former editor of Context Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.