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The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election

Handicapping the Insane Republican Presidential Race

​With Trump's escalator ride into the 2016 presidential campaign, the GOP race has officially spun off its axis.
Photo by Gage Skidmore

With Donald Trump's escalator ride into the presidential race this week, the Republican 2016 primary has now officially spun off its axis, hurtling out of orbit into some weird reality television show universe, where any truth is magnified to clownish absurdity. On some level, modern politics has always been a little like this—but if 2012 was Jersey Shore, innocuous in its meaningless, this year's race is more like peak Real World—a messy house filled with insane, hysterical people where the stakes are unclear, and also ominously high.

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Trump, of course, is Trump: Ostensibly a real-estate magnate and television personality, he is, in 2015, more like a deranged rich uncle who keeps showing up at your house unannounced and taking about how much he hates it. With no tangible base of support or political career to speak of, the Donald hired actors to fill the crowd at his campaign launch Tuesday, and then proceeded to suggest that undocumented Mexican immigrants were largely rapists. None of that changes the fact that he is also, no joke, running for president of the United States.

It's tempting to dismiss this as a footnote—an easily brushed-aside piece of political trivia that you'll have a hard time explaining to your children. The Democratic National Committee basically did as much in a snarky statement welcoming the "much-needed seriousness that has previously been lacking from the GOP field." But Trump's campaign announcement comes at a weird time in the GOP's 2016 race, making him just a little bit more difficult to ignore.

Currently, Trump is polling at around 3.6 percent, accordingto the RealClearPolitics average, putting him at No. 9 among a possible 15 Republican candidates competing for the nomination. To be fair, 3.6 percent isn't very far from nothing—but it's also only seven points behind Jeb Bush, the party's presumptive frontrunner.

This doesn't mean that Trump has a chance. To be very clear, Donald Trump will not be president. But it does mean that the Republican field is so messy, so filled with loud and petty politicking and candidates who can't convince anyone of their value, that, as comical as it sounds, Trump has about the same amount of support as many of the candidates his party sees as legit. Which doesn't say so much about Trump as it does about the other candidates.

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At the moment, Republicans essentially have seven guys polling at almost identical rates nationwide. Bush leads, with about 11 percent, and Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz trail close behind. Unbelievably, Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon, led a national poll last week, despite having offered no compelling evidence to date that he even knows what the president does.

Because those seven dudes are running about even, what would normally appear to be the second tier—people like Trump, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Chris Christie, who will all decidedly not be president—are running only a few points behind. To give you a point of reference, at this time during the 2008 primary cycle, Barack Obama trailed Hillary by 12 points. Jeb Bush isn't even polling at 12 percent.

It's particularly interesting that Jeb! — who should've been the big man on campus, the alpha male, the thoroughbred of this maniac horse race —just can't get ahead of the game. That same Monmouth poll that put Carson at the top of the field found that voters are souring on Bush. The conservative fringe hates him, and even Republican moderates, his expected ace in the hole, are bored as hell by his campaign. The RINO Establishment, meanwhile, is openly skeptical of the youngest Bush scion. "When he said at the outset of his run that he'd be willing to lose the primary to win the general, it seemed a poetic (not to mention nonsensical) exaggeration," the National Review's Rich Lowry remarked, "but occasionally it's appeared to be his actual plan."

Bush's father and brother were presidents: that does not make Bush exciting, but rather a known quantity. No matter how many explanation points he puts at the end of his name, Jeb! will still be a drip in the public eye, and that's not the right look for this madhouse primary.

Consider the competition: Paul, for example, has spent the week writing screeds about blowing up the tax code; Cruz can't get through a speech without saying something completely insane—even Walker has the Koch brothers, the deep-pocketed kingmakers who make Mr. Burns look like Bill and Melinda Gates. Rubio, meanwhile, is a ball of fun: young, charismatic, and worthy of New York Times' hit pieces about his driving record. And Rush Limbaugh's frenzied defense of Carson guarantees that the good doctor will inspire some frothy-mouthed support for the foreseeable future.

The rest of the 2016 wannabes, like Trump, will continue to be mostly charming distractions, spare bodies packing the clown car—nobody remembers Morry Taylor, after all, and nobody's going to remember Trump after he bows out to host an Iowa special of The Apprentice. But in the absence of any serious contest, Trump and his sidekicks—the Carly Fiorinas and Rick Santorums and Rick Perrys—have become the main event, the blaring laugh track to the 2016 Republican race that will only make it harder for someone to actually win this thing.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.