Is This Election Strange, or the New Normal?

If there’s one thing every single person can agree on in politics—Republican or Democrat, liberal, moderate, or conservative—it’s that this is a weird election. Even Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters (and it’s also obvious that this wouldn’t be such a weird election without Trump in the mix) admit freely how crazy it is. The differences of opinion only come in when debating why it’s just so strange.

The real question becomes, Is this an aberration? Is 2016 truly destined to go down in the history books as the most monumental of crazy elections, on the largest stage imaginable? Or is this year merely beginning a trend, with Trump as the primary catalyst, that will lead to future candidates also calling their political opponents ugly, low-energy, stupid, and anything else that pops into their head at any given moment. Will it lead to the old political rulebook being torn up, burned, and buried forever, to be replaced with a brave new world in politics?

The answer to that question lies in whether or not the Trump movement and Trump political brand will outlive Trump’s candidacy itself, and the answer to that question is probably not. National politicians have a long history of believing that they can leverage their personal popularity into a sustained populist movement, and such politicians from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama have been proven wrong. Nearly every other rule has been shredded this election, but as of yet there is no reason to believe Trump can extend his newfound movement beyond himself.

A few state-level results from the primaries back up this assertion. Senate candidates in Florida and Colorado, who attempted to replicate the Trump model of insulting opponents without Trump’s high name recognition, were badly defeated. And in North Carolina, Rep. Renee Ellmers—one of the few candidates Trump endorsed in a primary—lost badly, losing by over twenty points. Sad!

I continue to believe that only Trump could have pulled off what he has this past year, and that any other candidate who had said and done the exact same things would have plummeted in the polls and quickly dropped out. Trump’s name recognition, combined with a unique ability to get away with far more than any candidate would generally have a right to, and a political climate ripe for just such a candidate, forced an exceptional occurrence. There will (likely) never be another Donald Trump, and without Trump this election would go from bizarre to simply maddening.