Outsider candidates show staying power in presidential race

DES MOINES - It came to be known as the 'Summer of Trump.”

But how long would it last, political observers wondered, this dalliance between presidential candidate Donald Trump, the bombastic billionaire from New York who never before had run for public office, and Republican voters fed up with politicians in the nation's capital?

Support for Trump burned through the hot summer months as Republican voters expressed their distaste for the Washington, D.C., establishment. The question was whether that sentiment would last or whether GOP voters eventually would settle on a more traditional candidate, like any of the number of governors and senators seeking the presidency.

Trump no longer leads the polls in Iowa, but he has been supplanted by another so-called outsider candidate with no previous political experience: former neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

November has arrived, and the caucuses - the first step in nominating candidates for president - are a mere three months away.

And Carson and Trump still lead the expansive GOP field.

Defying expectations

The outsider effect seems here to stay.

'I definitely think this has lasted longer than most people expected,” said Christopher Budzisz, a political science professor at Loras College and director of the Loras Poll. 'It does make you wonder if this isn't a sign that there is some real discontentment going on within the party. So I do think it's gone on longer than I and other people would have expected.”

Four polls in Iowa in the past week showed Carson leading Trump between 8 and 14 percentage points, and in each poll, the duo combined to grab 47 percent to 50 percent of the respondents' choices.

'Given you go from Trump being the front-runner to Dr. Carson, that really doesn't change that narrative,” Budzisz said. 'There's still roughly half of Iowa caucus voters who are putting their support behind two people who have never run for office before.”

Will they win?

The rise of Carson and Trump have left traditional candidates such as U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush duking it out in the second tier, roughly 10 percentage points behind the front-runners.

Now that they have lasted this long atop the polls, both in Iowa and nationally, do Carson and Trump have real staying power? Could one of them become the first candidate with no previous experience in elected office to win the Iowa caucuses?

'The difficult thing to piece out right now is how many of those (Republican voters) are just angry with Washington and so they want that expressed, then once they feel that it's expressed they'll move on to more serious candidates,” said Kedron Bardwell, chairman of Simpson College's political science department. 'Or is this something that even when they get to the ballot box and think, ‘Well, would I really want that guy to be president?' Are they going to hedge, or are they going to back off? Or are they going to stick with the outsider?”

‘Long Ways to go'

Experts caution much could happen in the three months until the caucuses.

It is common for Republican voters who attend campaign events to say that they have not yet chosen a candidate but they have a short list they are considering.

'It's still a long ways to go,” said Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. 'As I remember, four years ago, sometime between mid-October and our caucuses, there were at least four different poll leaders, and I don't think any one of them was (Rick) Santorum, and he ended up winning.”

Bardwell said he would not bet against an outsider candidate winning the GOP caucuses, but he thinks Carson is more likely than Trump.

But he also thinks Iowa Republicans eventually will favor a candidate with some experience in elected office.

'I think it will probably simmer down,” Bardwell said. 'The reason I would say that is just looking at history. It's not that we haven't had some unconventional candidates do well in Iowa, but they don't win. In the end, most of the time people go with someone more conventional.”