OUTSIDER PRESIDENTIAL STRATEGIES

Outsiders are taking advantage of the cleavage between the GOP party elite/donor class and the party base.

The cleavage stems from:

the party adopts positions which are consistent, across the board, with its basic (donor class) principles

the party then measures party members adherence to those positions by polling their support of them

the party then proceeds on the basis that, on average, party member/voters support those positions

party voters, however, are not averages; i.e., theyre not consistent in the positions they hold - - e.g., a GOP voter may be all for expanding Medicare (which the donor class opposes), but totally against free trade (which the donor class supports), yet still say that they support the partys platform or, in general, positions

Outsiders are basing their policy positions on the actual positions that many GOP voters hold. In this sense, they are not really taking positions all over the map (as MSNBC said), but in fact actually are mapping their positions very closely to the map. Its the GOP party moguls and the GOP donor class who are, in fact, all over the map, in that their positions cleave more closely to donor-class positions than to actual party base positions.