Daniel Larison makes a good observation about why serious students of politics, columnists, bloggers, and educated party donors may underestimate certain types of candidates and their appeal:
A good rule of thumb: if you are an informed, educated and serious person, whatever is most hateful to you is probably what the general public will prefer. This is especially true in electoral politics, where being informed, educated and serious often blinds you to what drives and motivates 90% of the electorate. To the extent that these folks become aware of these things at all, it is usually to dismissively declare them evidence of the irrational in politics. But irrationality has always existed and will always exist in any human political order, and expecting anything else, as I often have done, is a great error. Limiting the role of irrationality in politics, while desirable, is hardly possible in a mass democratic regime with an historically illiterate and media-saturated majority. The main flaw in most of the critiques aimed specifically at Huckabee, populists, restrictionists, etc. in recent months and years is the assumption by those making these critiques that they represent the more rational position, rather than one that is equally or more irrational.
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