There have been "outsiders" who have done well at the start of a presidential election, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward said Monday, but at the end of the day, voters usually look for a more experienced candidate when it comes to picking a future president.
"You've got this opportunity for people to voice their anger and their distress, [which is] all very legitimate," Woodward, now an associate editor for The Washington Post, told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of governing, people are going to say, and the polls show this, there are other people who have a much better prospect of actually performing."
He recalled that in the 1996 election, two outsiders, "Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon aide and bomb thrower, and Steve Forbes, the magazine genius," both initially did well but did not go on to win the GOP nomination.
"If you look, you know, what is Trump?" said Woodward. "He's both of those. He's the bomb thrower and he's the guy who says, 'I've got the business experience to fix things.'"
That year, Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, defeating eventual nominee Bob Dole by 1 percentage point.
"Steve Forbes was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek," said Woodward, but "That was 20 years ago, when that was important, and it was a big deal. There was this sense that everything's been turned upside down, and then look what happened in almost all of the other voting, Dole won, hands down."
According to the
latest Fox News poll, Trump is continuing to dominate with 25 percent support nationally, while retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is running second at 12 percent. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is third at 10 percent in the poll findings, which mirror other recent surveys in Iowa and nationwide.
Meanwhile,
establishment candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio are all losing traction, with Bush at 9 percent, down from 15 percent and a second-place perch in a poll conducted before the Aug. 6 first GOP debate.
Host Joe Scarborough noted that four years ago Herman Cain was leading, followed by Michele Bachmann, and both eventually dropped out, as did Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, both of whom are running again this year.
"This has been the summer of Trump," said Scarborough, who also pointed out that Trump's "political death" has already been declared three times.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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