Trump’s Rise Highlights a Flawed Field

By NATE SILVER
NYT

When thinking about the candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination, we can divide them into basically three groups.

First are candidates in a group I’d call the Fairfax Five, Fairfax being the name of a wealthy Washington suburb in Northern Virginia. These are the candidates who have the seal of approval of the Republican establishment thinkers in Washington. More specifically, they’re the candidates endorsed by George F. Will in his March 5 column:

There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

These candidates are playing it by the book, hiring staff and developing campaign infrastructures. They get more attention in the mainstream media than in the blogosphere. They are perceived as being electable and holding some reasonable appeal to independent voters — although I think Haley Barbour, with his track record as a lobbyist and a history of having made what are perceived to be racially insensitive remarks — is a questionable case.

The counterpart to the Fairfax Five are the Factional Five. They are unpopular with independent voters and, instead, are competing mostly for Tea Party voters and other conservatives that vote within the Republican primary. They tend to be good at drawing attention to themselves, especially on blogs and cable television shows. These candidates are Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump and Ron Paul.

(More here.)