What if the party decided not to decide?

As political scientists and data journalists start to admit that we didn’t predict Donald Trump (or Bernie Sanders), it’s time for some out-there theories! I’ve been hanging on to this one for a while, and I hasten to add that at least one of my fellow Mischiefs of Faction writers has already told me it’s wrong. So don’t blame them for my nuttiness. But I’m going to flesh it out here anyway, because if a self-described socialist and a reality TV star can make credible presidential bids, then I think political science bloggers can write up our nutty ideas from time to time.

My basic hypothesis is that the Republican Party network failed to coordinate to stop Trump or promote another nominee not because they couldn’t do it, but because they decided to let things unfold rather than try to control events. There’s a stronger conspiracy version of this theory, which suggests that elites might have used the channels by which they usually coordinate on a nominee to deliberately eschew coordination. The weaker version, which is the one I’m more comfortable embracing, suggests that this time party elites just didn’t bother.

Before I jump into the ways in which this idea, like all good conspiracy theories, is consistent with a cherry-picked set of facts, let me present the puzzle as I see it. Based on the extent to which I think The Party Decides has the story right, it’s never been clear to me why party elites didn’t coordinate on a Rubio candidacy sometime between June and September.

Perhaps there was lingering loyalty to Jeb Bush despite his candidacy’s failure to take off — but that may be coming to an end now. Scott Walker’s trouble with off-the-cuff answers made it fairly clear that he wasn’t the right candidate for 2016, Rand Paul is too much of a wild card, and clearly no one likes Ted Cruz. John Kasich and Chris Christie both have some interesting qualities, but nothing that makes it obvious why they would prevent coordination around Marco Rubio. Or the party could have coordinated around them instead, although that seems pretty unlikely — Kasich has too low a profile, and Christie has too many liabilities in the “Obama hug” vein.

One of the key features of this invisible primary season has been the slowness of elite endorsements. Without clear “camps” or formidable challenges to a Rubio candidacy, why didn’t that happen?

One possibility is that the relevant actors sensed they couldn’t control the process, and so they didn’t try. By late summer, the unexpected impact of the Sanders candidacy on the Democratic side was in evidence. It’s not that hard to imagine that Republican elites might want to avoid what’s going on there: party elites coalescing around an “establishment favorite,” while some polls and iconoclastic ideological activists go astray.

The Republicans’ own history also casts doubt on the effectiveness of the party coordination process, at least where it comes to picking a candidate who is electable. In the past two elections, the party has converged on an establishment-approved candidate: campaign finance maverick and tax cut curmudgeon John McCain, and health care reformin’, hedge fund managin’ former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Both lost to Barack Obama, even after choosing telegenic movement conservatives as running mates to stave off issues with “the base.” Even George W. Bush, whose nomination beautifully exemplified the invisible primary, actually lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000.

I don’t know what happens in closed-door meetings among party elites of different kinds, but if we assume them to be strategic, it’s not totally ridiculous to imagine that they would consider changing tactics. And in contrast, while the Tea Party has caused some headaches for Republicans, the 2010 and 2014 midterms, characterized by outsider primary victors like David Brat, have brought big wins.

It’s also worth considering the incentives of policy demanders in the Republican coalition. A big theme in the past six years has been the “party of no”: When it comes to salient regulatory policy issues — health care, gun control, banking, the environment — the general preference among conservatives is to have minimal policy and to maintain the status quo (with the big exception of repealing Obamacare, which the House has been pretty clear on).

Pro-life policy demanders prefer moving away from the status quo, but they may find it’s more useful to concentrate their efforts on the courts and the state legislatures, and any Republican president is likely to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices. So beyond the issue of abortion, do the policy demanders in the Republican coalition really care about a president with political experience and good legislative skills? Maybe not.

Finally, Trump is kind of a paradoxically perfect disjunctive presidential candidate. In the political time theory, the disjunctive phase is typically characterized by two problems: The different factions in the party can no longer be reconciled, and the priorities of powerful voices within the party can no longer be reconciled with the national mood and its policy imperatives.

The latter dilemma leaves disjunctive presidents with terrible policy decisions: They have to either abandon the principles they’ve inherited from their parties or ignore the most pressing national problems. The former — irreconcilable party splits — also lends itself to the selection of “outsider” presidential candidates who look like they can transcend internal factions and fix what’s wrong with the dominant regime.

This is how we get disjunctive leaders like Franklin Pierce, who had long since returned to being a lawyer in New Hampshire and stayed out of the developing sectional crisis of the 1840s, and little-known Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. The technocratic impulse also lends itself to engineering types like Carter and his Depression-era counterpart Herbert Hoover.

Trump fits this model pretty well: His business experience makes a weird kind of sense as the 21st-century Republican version of engineering, as it at least symbolically exemplifies management and getting stuff done. He’s not part of any enduring faction within the party (is there an understatement of the year award for bloggers?). And because of his lack of deep affiliation, he can credibly (in the context of a Republican primary, anyway) promise to fix what’s wrong with the Republican regime by gutting what’s not working, by ditching the rotten fixtures of the old establishment.

What makes this great for party leaders is that while Trump makes these fundamentally disjunctive claims, they can lap up publicity while disavowing all that is problematic about him. This is especially crucial when it comes to race and immigration, areas where the two features of disjunction are especially apparent. These issues deeply divide the Republican Party, and we see this again and again with immigration in particular — perhaps the answer to the question posed earlier about Rubio. Immigration in particular puts a key slice of the party faithful in conflict with the national agenda — nationally, support for immigration reform tends to be high and bipartisan.

Instead of facing, admitting, or resolving these incredibly touchy issues, the Trump candidacy allows Republican leaders to disavow a rogue candidate and his raw statements, in speeches and op-eds and on the cover of National Review. What the Trump candidacy has done is allow the Republican Party to be publicly, openly, at odds with itself. At other points in time, this would be bad. In the disjunctive stage it’s not a bad place to land, at least going into the primaries. It’s cover, not exposure, for the core disjunctive dilemmas.

The mechanisms behind a party that’s decided not to decide are unclear. But that’s not terribly different from an approach where we assume that parties do coordinate. The Party Decides, like many works in political science, assumes that party actors operate rationally, seeking to bring themselves further toward their goals. Maybe the lesson this year isn’t about their inability to do so, but about the limits of our imagination as to what those goals might be.