InsideSources

The sight of Donald Trump’s wife and adult children joining him on stage after winning the New Hampshire primary may have been many Americans’ first real glimpse of the billionaire’s family — but it’s not likely the last.

On social media, on cable and network news programs and on the campaign stump, the Trumps are increasingly visible surrogates for the Republican candidate, promoting his message and pushing his bid for the GOP nomination in person and on social media.

Here’s a look at how the members of the family have put their own distinctive brands on the campaign in recent weeks:

• Oldest son Donald Trump Jr. has, somewhat surprisingly, emerged as the key public advocate for the campaign. While his father is on the stage in South Carolina Saturday night for the ninth GOP debate, Trump Jr. will be in Utah to deliver the keynote address to the Western Hunting and Conservation Expo in the Salt Lake City convention center. The 38-year-old father of five seemed for years slightly uncomfortable with the celebrity that came with his famous last name, but he’s increasingly polished in front of a camera and has taken a leadership role in his father’s company (executive vice president) and in the campaign.

On the trail, he’s willing to defend his father’s most incendiary comments and his lifelong passion for hunting has made for a natural connection with gun-friendly GOP voters. He was in Iowa a month before the caucuses this year to go deer-hunting with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, and he told the press that, as a young man, “the fact that I was in a tree stand or a duck blind on many mornings probably kept me out of a lot of other trouble.”

Still, a weekend duck or deer hunt is one thing, and shooting exotic game in Africa is another (just ask the unfortunate Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil the lion last year). Both Donald Jr. and his younger brother have been criticized by wildlife advocates after photos of the Trumps holding a dead leopard surfaced from a 2011 African hunting trip. Animal rights have never been a critical issue in an American presidential race before, but 2016 has been a year for firsts.

• While her older brother has thrown himself into the new family business — politics — 34-year-old Ivanka Trump, who has carved out her own Manhattan-based fashion and jewelry empire, has picked her shots — perhaps wary of watching her own expanding luxury shoe, handbag and other lines suffer the same fate as her father’s menswear products (Macy’s cut ties with the presidential candidate last summer after his comments on Mexican immigrants). Also, it can’t be easy to be Donald Trump’s daughter when one of your best friends is Hillary Clinton’s daughter.

On Twitter, Ivanka’s brothers sound off regularly about politics, but Ivanka’s 1.8 million Twitter followers get, for the most part, a steady stream of innocuous fashion tips, career advice for women and property updates from the Trump Organization, where she, too, is an executive vice president.

Still, the mother of two, expecting her third, has made it clear she’s backing her dad. She was chosen to introduce him when he made his announcement last summer and she hit the trail with her siblings in New Hampshire, shaking hands, talking to supporters and firing up volunteers. She has also repeatedly stepped in to defend him against charges of sexism, saying he’d be “incredible for women in this country.”

• Eric Trump, like his brother and sister, is an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, but unlike most of the Trump clan, he didn’t follow dad to the University of Pennsylvania, choosing to attend Georgetown University instead. The married 32-year-old (his wife, Ivanka’s husband and Donald Jr.’s wife are all regulars on the campaign trail as well) had a moment in the spotlight this week when it fell to him to defend his father’s endorsement of waterboarding — and beyond, if need be — as an appropriate means of interrogation of terrorist suspects.

“You see these terrorists that are flying planes into buildings, you see our cities getting shot up in California, you see Paris getting shot up, and then somebody complains when a terrorist gets waterboarded, which quite frankly is no different than what happens on college campuses in frat houses everyday,” Trump son No. 2 said in an appearance on Fox.

On the business side, Eric has his specialty, too, taking the Trump brand into the growing wine market with his ownership of Virginia’s largest vineyard, named, of course, Trump Wineries.

• “I support my husband 100 percent,” Melania Trump told Barbara Walters in October, attributing her then-infrequent campaign appearances to the need to raise the couple’s 9-year-old son Barron.

Since then, the 45-year-old Slovenian-born wife of the 69-year-old billionaire (his third) has become a more familiar sidekick on the trail, joining Trump before crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The former architecture student has cited Betty Ford and Jackie Kennedy as role models for the job of presidential spouse, but it’s clear the uninhibited supermodel would break the mold when it comes to the conventions of first lady — she’s posed nude, bragged about the couple’s sex life and as recently as a year ago was posting bikini shots on her Twitter account. (Interestingly, first wife Ivana, 66, and second wife Marla Maples, 52, have both said nice things about their mutual ex).

• Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s 22-year-old daughter by second wife Maples, grew up in Los Angeles and has dabbled in a music career. But, like two of her older siblings, she followed her father to the University of Pennsylvania and is said to be looking to law school after. Despite the distance and gap in age, she and her older sister have said they are close, with Tiffany serving as a bridesmaid at Ivanka’s 2009 wedding and Ivanka scoring an internship at Vogue for little sister.

The four adult Trump children laughingly told Barbara Walters that Ivanka is their father’s favorite, but the New York real estate tycoon has publicly doted on his youngest daughter as well, bragging to People Magazine in 2014 about the college student’s grades: “She’s got all A’s at Penn, so we’re proud of her.”  Like her siblings, she campaigned in New Hampshire, and has talked about her support in interviews.

• Trump’s youngest son, 9-year-old Barron, his only child with wife No. 3 Melania, is shielded from much of the sort of press attention that routinely follows the other Trump children (he has a Twitter account that has yet to post a tweet), but his mother says he is his father’s son.

In an interview with Parenting.com, she described Barron as “independent and opinionated and knows exactly what he wants. Sometimes I call him little Donald.”

She said her husband is a a good father, but wasn’t exactly the most hands-on when Barron was a baby. “He didn’t change diapers and I am completely fine with that. It is not important to me. It’s all about what works for you,” she said.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump continues to lambaste what he sees as the corrupt influence of money in politics. But many campaign finance reform advocates, including conservatives, are ambivalent about his rhetoric that’s short on solutions to systemic problems.

Rallying Wednesday night at Clemson University in Pendleton, South Carolina, Trump said super PACs pouring money into the White House race are “crooked as hell” and “out of control.”

“I’m self-funding my campaign, so I can’t be bought,” the billionaire business mogul told the crowd.

In truth, nearly 34 percent of Trump’s campaign funding by the end of last year came from contributions, according to the fact-checking website PolitiFact. But the mogul did finance a whopping 66 percent of his effort, touting his avoidance of “special interest money” in his New Hampshire primary victory speech Tuesday.

“These are special interests, folks. These are lobbyists. These are people that don’t necessarily love our country. They don’t have the best interests of our country at heart,” Trump said. “When you see the kind of deals made in our country, they’re made for their benefit. We have to stop it. For your benefit, we’re going to make the deals for the American people.”

This pitch — that Americans should elect the independently wealthy Trump who isn’t beholden to political donors — doesn’t sit well with many campaign finance reform advocates. Larry Noble, the general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, noted that Trump hasn’t proposed any specific changes to the current system. He’s worried about how the mogul wants billionaires like investor Carl Icahn to be his advisers and appointees in the White House.

“At the end of the day, the question is who you’re going to listen to and who you’re going to get advice from, regardless of the reason you’re taking that advice,” Noble said in an interview. “If what he does is go to the same people who are making the political contributions, even if they haven’t made political contributions to him, we’re in the same problem.”

Another advocate with concerns was University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter, who penned “The Conservative Case for Campaign-Finance Reform” in the New York Times last week. In an email to InsideSources, he said “there is nothing fair about a system where the only candidates who are not dependent upon special interest money are self-funded billionaires. That is not the system of representative democracy contemplated by our founders.”

Painter, who was an associate White House counsel for ethics under President George W. Bush, added that the country “is in a precarious situation when angry voters respond to apparent dysfunction and disenfranchisement by rejecting mainstream candidates and gravitating to extremes.”

“We need to fix our campaign finance system,” he said, “but in the meantime voters in both parties need to make responsible choices with what we have. Mr. Trump is not one of those choices.”

Despite their criticisms, however, Noble and Painter agreed that Trump is tapping into frustration with money in politics as a growing bipartisan concern. “Whether you are a conservative Republican who believes in fiscal responsibility and doesn’t believe in corporate welfare or whether you are a progressive who believes in universal healthcare, you are becoming aware that the problems stem from influence of large contributors,” Noble said.

That’s certainly the assumption of Take Back Our Republic, a right-leaning campaign finance reform group launched in January by conservative political consultant John Pudner. He told InsideSources that money and politics has “moved to a top-of-mind voting issue, which it had never been until very recently.”

In fact, many Republicans have avoided the topic all together, rejecting reform as a First Amendment violation of political speech through spending. Pudner said that will change, and “you’re already seeing the beginnings of the crack in the dam.”

In New Hampshire’s closely watched Senate race, the Republican incumbent is calling on her Democratic challenger to sign a pledge limiting outside spending in their campaign. According to WMUR, Sen. Kelly Ayotte wants Gov. Maggie Hassan to agree “that a candidate who benefits from a third party ad donate 50 percent of the ad’s total cost to a charity of the other candidate’s choice.”

This pledge was used previously by former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican ally of Ayotte’s who ran for Senate in New Hampshire unsuccessfully in 2014.

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A lot has happened since InsideSources checked last month with bookies in Ireland and the United Kingdom on the odds given the individual American presidential candidates. But despite Ted Cruz’s stunning win in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and Hillary Clinton’s big loss Tuesday in New Hampshire, the odds haven’t budged much.

Donald Trump’s New Hampshire win on Tuesday improved the GOP front-runner’s status as the odds-on presidential favorite among the Republicans — from 10-to-3 last month to 7-to-2 on Wednesday. The New York billionaire was a 33-to-1 long-shot when the campaign began last year, but even with his impressive victory Tuesday in New Hampshire, he’s still not the odds-on favorite to win it all.

That candidate to beat, according to the bookmakers at William Hill, remains Hillary Clinton, who saw her odds improve slightly — despite losing big on Tuesday to Sanders. On Wednesday she was a 4-to-5 favorite to win it all, up from 8-to-11 on Jan. 21.

But while Clinton has the best odds, gamblers are putting the most money on Trump, a William Hill spokesman told InsideSources Wednesday.

“Trumpmania has broken out amongst political punters and he is by some distance the best-backed candidate in the race,” spokesman Graham Sharpe said.

After Clinton and Trump, William Hill sets the odds for the field at 7-to-1 for Sanders, 8-to-1 for Marco Rubio, 14-to-1 for Cruz, 16-to-1 for Jeb Bush, 20-to-1 for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (mulling a late entry into the race), 33-to-1 for John Kasich, 50-to-1 for Joe Biden and 200-to-1 for Ben Carson. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, is a 500-to-1 long-shot.

Clinton also remains the leader on the Irish betting site PaddyPower, where she’s improved from 5-to-6 to 10-to-11.

Trump is second, holding steady at 7 to 2, followed by Sanders at 7-to-1.

American casinos don’t take bets on U.S. presidential elections, but gambling operations in the U.K., Canada and around the globe traditionally handicap the race.

Critics and even some allies in recent days have criticized Donald Trump’s increasing use of profanity on the stump, but language experts contend the constant cursing isn’t hurting the billionaire with much of the American public — instead, it’s more likely a key part of his appeal.

Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University and author of “Slang: The People’s Poetry,” told InsideSources Trump’s unfiltered speech is reflective of the way Americans talk today, not 20 or 30 years ago.

“I don’t know whether it’s deliberate or natural for him, but it is a sort of linguistic populism … a way to speak to a population that feels connected to the candidate because the candidate uses his or her language, the language of the people.”

In just one speech on Thursday in New Hampshire, the Republican presidential front runner told cheering supporters that he would “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State, that “Afghanistan is going to hell,” and that, on trade with China and Mexico, he would “kick their asses.”

As the billionaire developer finished with a silent F-bomb (another profanity he’s shown no qualms about using in the past), the crowd chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The profane language on the stump has drawn fire from more traditional GOP candidates in the field, including Jeb Bush, the son on one president and brother of another.

“I don’t think a president would have ever shouted profanities in a speech in front of thousands of people with kids in the crowd,” Bush said. “He does it all the time.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich chided Trump: “You shouldn’t use that kind of language. My wife told me one time, when I became governor, she said you’re the father of Ohio, act like it.”

Even Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who calls Trump a friend, said the blue language is inappropriate: “Advice to Trump: Using profanity on campaign trail is not presidential. Most use it, including me, but we are not running for [president],” O’Reilly tweeted Friday.

But linguists who study the way Americans curse say that in a culture more saturated than ever with blunt language — from Martin Scorcese films to HBO series to pop music lyrics and uncensored tweets — Trump isn’t breaking new ground. He’s simply reflecting a new norm.

Jesse Sheidlower, author of “The F Word,” said cultural definitions of what is or is not taboo shift — sometimes dramatically — over time.

“The traditional offensive vocabulary of sexual and scatological language is much more common now, in both a pop cultural context and in a general context,” the former president of the American Dialect Society told InsideSources.

“The kinds of things that we take offense at, those have also changed. Sexual and scatological terms are really not a big deal now. Certain religious terms … like ‘God damn’ or ‘hell,’ which 200 years ago would have been extremely offensive, now bother fewer people. At the same time, the use of any sort of racial or ethnic term would be considered much, much worse than it ever was.”

Indiana University’s Adams, whose latest book, “In Praise of Profanity,” is to be published later this year, said the acknowledgement of profanity in American culture is healthy.

“That honesty about the relationship between language and culture is probably good.”

“There’s always been plenty of profanity in politics, we’ve known that. We know that Harry S. Truman was a salty talker. That lowered him in some people’s estimation, but what happens now is that we can hear more of that profanity than we used to.”

Adams cites Dick Cheney telling Patrick Leahy after a 2004 argument in the Capitol to “Fuck yourself,” and Vice President Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff aside, “This is a big fucking deal,” when President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, as examples of politicians using profanity behind the scenes to communicate in straight-forward, unambiguous language.

Like Cheney and Biden, Trump is using the language of average Americans, Adams said. What’s different is Trump is doing so publicly.

“I think frankly that in some ways that’s good because what we’re doing is ‘de-vulgarizing’ the language, he said. “While it’s natural to think of language levels in relation to class, I’m a little uncomfortable with pejorative senses of vulgar and the connections that people draw, say, between low socioeconomic status and profanity or race and profanity.

“I think it’d be great if we just got class out of the linguistic picture. In part, that’s what’s been happening. People have no longer been using profanity as a means of marking social low from social high. There’s a type of democratizing that goes on.”

Pop culture, Adams said, hasn’t changed the way Americans talk, it’s just doing a more honest job of capturing real speech.

“Inevitably, HBO had to be the network of television profanity because people weren’t going to allow televisual representations of life any longer without profanity in it. Because profanity is part of life.”

Adams said it’s a mistake to dismiss political profanity as nothing more than angry rhetoric.

“Another part of the message for Trump is that, ‘I can talk to you this way, we have a relationship in which I can drop all the barriers and talk to you this way.’ I know this sounds really counter-intuitive, but we use profanity to create bonds and sometimes even intimacy. So a politician can trade on that mixed message.”

The professor, 54, adds that it’s clear there’s a gender bias when it comes to swearing — meaning that what works for Trump might not work, say, for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front runner. Trumpwas was criticized last year when he said Clinton, in her 2008 bid for the nomination, “got schlonged,” creating a verb from a Yiddish slang word for penis.

“Think about the swearing that goes on in the boardroom and the locker room and how you build solidarity with other people,” Adams said. “I think girls are excluded because they’re not speaking the same language sometimes.”

That double-standard and Trump’s willingness to “call ’em like he sees ’em” creates a potential advantage, Adams said. “I would argue that in many cases, there is no other way to say what you mean than by using profanity.”

Bullfeathers, says Madonna Hanna, a retired Bremerton, Washington, teacher who spent years admonishing her high schoolers to “Dare Not to Swear.” Hanna, 62, stills works as a “civility consultant,” lecturing corporate audiences on the anti-profanity campaign that brought national attention to her classroom a decade ago.

Hanna said she cringes every time she hears Trump’s foul language.

“I know darn well, as well as you do … we’ve had a breakdown. We have a couple of generations of kids who think that it is OK to swear,” Hanna said — and profane language on the campaign trail just makes it more difficult for parents and teachers to teach children basic good manners.

“Donald Trump is a grown man, but he should not be using profanity in a public forum. It’s not correct. What he says in the boardroom, what kind of language he wants to use around his own folks to motivate them, to do what he needs to get done, that’s one thing,” she told InsideSources. “But when you use profanity like that and it’s going out on CNN and everywhere, in that instance he is not being a good role model for young people.”

Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate was scored by many pundits as a draw or a narrow win for Hillary Clinton. But online, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders held a big lead over the former first lady in positive Google search traffic throughout the televised event.

Even a cursory glance at Google Trends data during Thursday night’s debate shows Sanders peaking over Clinton, in multiple instances throughout the night by 50 percent or more, for almost the entire debate.

Google Trends graphs — which show the total searches for a term relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time — for both Clinton and Sanders show Sanders beating Clinton at 100 to 38 as the debate was getting underway just after 9 p.m. EST, when the contest began.

Over the next two hours, Sanders generally hovered between 50 and 60, compared to Clinton’s average of between 11 and 30. The former secretary of State peaked at 69 to Sanders’ 57 little over halfway through the night, but the Vermont senator more than doubled Clinton for most of the night.

Fifty-eight percent of candidate search interest in New Hampshire overall was in Sanders, while the remaining 42 percent went to Clinton.

Real-time search interest in 2016 Democratic presidential candidates from days before the Iowa caucuses to Friday peaked on Feb. 1 at 100 for Sanders and 57 for Clinton. Nationwide interest in the New Hampshire primary over the last week was mainly focused from Burlington, Vermont across Lake Champlain to Plattsburg, NY at 100, Des Moines to Ames Iowa at 87 and Boston to Manchester, New Hampshire at 79.

The questions viewers asked Google also appeared to lean more positively in Sanders case:

1. Where will Bernie Sanders be speaking?
2. Why Bernie Sanders?
3. Who would be Bernie Sanders’ VP?
4. How to donate to Bernie Sanders
5. Where can I see Bernie Sanders in NH?

The top and bottom questions imply interest in hearing Sanders speak, particularly in the Granite State — the site of the next primary — while the fourth shows interest in individually donating to Sanders’ campaign. The Vermont senator raised $20 million in January, out-raising Clinton by $5 million.

Clinton’s top five questions were focused on her personally, including her age, net worth, and viability as a candidate:

1. How old is Hillary Clinton?
2. Who can beat Hillary?
3. Where is Hillary Clinton today?
4. Will Hillary win?
5. How much is Hillary Clinton worth?

On the issues, Google users asked about Clinton and Sanders’ positions on immigration chiefly, gun control second, education and exclusively drugs on the Sanders side, with criminal justice reform being a core issue of the Sanders campaign. On the Clinton side users asked exclusively about “defeating ISIS,” a likely result of Clinton’s State Department experience.

An NBC News/Wall Street/Marist poll conducted after Clinton’s narrow victory in Iowa this week gave Sanders the support of 58 percent of likely Democratic voters, and Hillary Clinton 38 percent. According to a Quinnipiac University national poll released Friday Clinton is hovering at 44 percent, just above Sanders 42 percent.

Though Sanders maintains the Democratic lead in New Hampshire, the Vermont senator only leades search traffic in four out of 10 counties in the Granite State, with Republican candidate Donald Trump leading in the remaining six.

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One of the most interesting issues in the run-up to Monday’s Iowa caucuses was the paradox facing Donald Trump: How, exactly, does a candidacy built on repeated assertions of supremacy and unshakable assumptions of victory respond to a loss?

It’s early, but it was clear on a morning-after Tuesday that Team Trump is still nursing an electoral hangover from Monday night’s defeat at the hands of Sen. Ted Cruz.

Trump went silent for 15 hours on Twitter before returning with a subdued message for his nearly 6 million followers that echoed a surprisingly gracious concession speech to the Texas Republican the night before.

My experience in Iowa was a great one. I started out with all of the experts saying I couldn’t do well there and ended up in 2nd place. Nice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2016

A few tweets later, though, and the billionaire developer was firing fastballs again, taking shots at the press.

The media has not covered my long-shot great finish in Iowa fairly. Brought in record voters and got second highest vote total in history! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2016

Some of Trump’s friends and supporters seemed a little shell-shocked. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was still silent by midday on Twitter and Facebook, as was San Francisco talk show host Michael Savage. Unlike its host’s Twitter feed, the “Savage Nation” account was peppered with updates on the race. But the show’s focus was on allegations of foul play.

OUTRAGE! Dr. Ben Carson BLASTS Cruz Camp’s DIRTY TRICKS: “Never a More Tainted Victory!” (VIDEO): SCANDAL– Dr…. https://t.co/n39T0fmlNS

— SavageNation (@SavageNation) February 2, 2016

Radio talker Alex Jones, who has had Trump as a regular guest on his “InfoWars” program, downplayed Monday night’s results. “It’s what they expected — a narrow loss,” he told the The Daily Beast. “Then he goes on to dominate New Hampshire and other states. He was advised not to campaign there,” Jones said, referring to Iowa. “That’s what’s going on. The evangelicals — some of them just couldn’t vote for Trump.”

On “Morning Joe,” potential Trump running-mate Joe Scarbrough marveled over Cruz’s get-out-the-vote effort. “Ted Cruz was light years ahead of the field in terms of his turnout model,” the former Republican congressman said on the MSNBC program.

One of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter, was an exception, relentlessly needling Trump rivals Cruz and Rubio through Monday night and into Tuesday.

Trump is the leading GOP vote-getter tonight, among natural-born-American candidates. — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) February 2, 2016.

In an election cycle that’s already been one of the most unpredictable in American political history, conventional wisdom took it on the chin again Monday. Here’s six things the political class had wrong about Iowa:

1. Big Turnout Helps Donald Trump

According to the experts, big crowds and long lines meant Trump’s new, non-traditional Republicans — and maybe some crossover Democrats — were showing up to caucus for the billionaire. Even Ted Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe thought big numbers would mean a big night for Trump. As it turned out, the GOP turnout was huge —  ABC News estimated more than 180,000, compared to the 2012 record of 121,354. But the voter surge seemed to help Monday’s winner, Cruz and third-place finisher Marco Rubio more than No 2 Trump.

2. Trump Won’t Be Able to Handle Losing

Flanked on stage Monday night by his wife and adult children who took on more high-profile roles in the campaign in recent days, Trump was subdued, obviously, as befits a poll-spouting frontrunner who underperformed miserably. But even Democrat Paul Begala, commenting on CNN, said Trump showed humility in conceding to Cruz, in a speech that Begala called “great.” There were no snarky late-night tweets from @realDonaldTrump, and the New York developer assured Iowans he was “honored” to finish second and would be back: “I think I might come here and buy a farm. I love it!.”

3. Polls: Not Perfect, But Generally Reliable

Not in Iowa, not on Monday. Not only were the polls horribly off in predicting the GOP winner, most also missed the momentum shift that was taking place in both the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders race and the Cruz-Trump tilt. Cruz was not plummeting. Clinton was not opening up a lead. Concession prize for pollsters: Marco Rubio was gaining momentum, but even there, surveys underestimated his surge. The Real Clear Politics average had the Florida senator at just under 17 percent in Iowa. Rubio actually finished the night at 23 percent — nipping at Trump’s heels.

4. If You Don’t Back Ethanol, You Don’t Win Iowa

Just a week or so ago, Cruz’s opposition to Iowa’s federal ethanol subsidies was being cited as the biggest reason for his drop in the polls. The state’s Republican Gov. Terry Branstad warned voters “it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support” the Texas senator, and Trump told crowds that Cruz “will destroy your ethanol business 100 percent.” With about half of the state’s corn crop going into ethanol production, questioning the subsidies has traditionally been the third rail of Iowa politics. But Cruz’s strategy wasn’t based on ethanol. It was based on evangelicals.

5. Evangelicals Willing to Settle This Time

Over and over in the days leading up to Monday’s vote, pundits explained Trump’s lead in the polls among Iowa Republicans as a sign that, this year, the “values voters” were willing to settle. Turns out evangelicals, who in years past have faithfully rewarded candidates who put faith front and center in their campaigns — Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 — still want one of their own in the White House. God matters in the Hawkeye State, and no one cites more Bible verses or offers up more ‘hallelujahs’ than Cruz, who referenced Psalm 30:5 in his lengthy victory speech, telling cheering supporters frustrated by eight years of the Obama administration that, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

6. The GOP Is a Party of Old White Men

For one night, at least, the Republican Party looked more diverse than the Democrats, where two retirement-age career politicians, Sanders and Clinton, were deadlocked atop the Iowa results. By contrast, three-fifths of the state’s Republicans lined up behind a black surgeon — Ben Carson, who finished with 9 percent — and one or the other of the two young Cuban-Americans in the race, the 45-year-old Cruz who won with 28 percent, or the 44-year-old Rubio, who garnered 23 percent. Both men are sons of first-generation immigrants.

To be fair, there were a couple of things the conventional wisdom got right.

1. Don’t Skip the Debate

Some on Team Trump were quick to call the billionaire’s last-minute decision to skip the final Republican debate before Monday’s caucuses another brilliant, unconventional move that would pay off for the candidate. More experienced observers warned that Iowans take their “first-in-the-nation” status seriously and predicted voters might punish Trump. In hindsight, certainly looks like the Trump stunt backfired.

2. Organization Matters

Again, Iowans are serious about their caucus. It’s complicated, time-consuming and expensive. Candidates who put in the effort, as Cruz did (he’s been visiting and criss-crossing Iowa for three years), tend to do better. Candidates who don’t, or who find themselves with less experience at building an Iowa operation, like Trump? Not so much.

Donald Trump has been called many things in his life — a brilliant businessman, an American success story, a narcissistic megalomaniac representing the worst of wealth-worshiping and celebrity culture.

When it comes to political ideology, though, the Republican presidential front-runner is a wordsmith’s dilemma.

Days before the Iowa Caucus begins the 2016 election in earnest, political writers and rival candidates are still fumbling for language to describe Trump’s brand of politics — a mix of ideas that defies conventional categorizations like conservative or liberal, libertarian or moderate. It’s a phenomenon that could provoke an identity crisis for the Republican Party, which has cast itself as the political home of the conservative movement since President Ronald Reagan.

For his part, Trump has called himself a conservative. Appearing on CBS News this past Sunday, he defined the term as “a person that wants to conserve, a person that wants to, in a financial sense, balance budgets, a person that feels strongly about the military.”

Facing questions about his history of New York liberalism, the business mogul compared himself to Reagan — another celebrity-turned-politician — noting that the former president “was a fairly liberal Democrat, and he evolved over years and he became more and more conservative.”

At the same time, Trump appeared to acknowledge distance that remains between him and the mainstream conservative movement. “I have evolved on many issues. And there are some issues, I’m very much the same,” he said. “I was — which is a little bit different than a normal conservative — but I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq.”

Of course, Trump’s stance on Iraq isn’t what worries conservatives. There’s deep distrust, particularly among supporters of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, that the mogul’s “evolution” on various issues isn’t sincere. In endorsing Cruz last week, conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck said of Trump,  “It defies all logic to change as much as he has in 18 months unless he had a pivot point.”

So has the mogul really gone from supporting late-term abortion to believing in an abortion ban? Does he actually oppose government-funded healthcare? As recently as September, Trump told CBS that “the government’s gonna pay for” an Obamacare replacement if he’s president, and “everybody’s got to be covered.” He added, “This is an un-Republican thing for me to say.”

The truth is, Trump has said a lot of un-Republican (read: un-conservative) things over the years. Conservative Review laid out how he supported the 2008 auto bailout, President Barack Obama’s government stimulus, caps on pay for corporate executives and eminent domain powers allowing government to seize private property. He also opposed changes to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

“I protect the senior citizens,” he told NBC News in 2011. “They are lifeblood, as far as I’m concerned.”

Taking stock of this record, some commentators are pitching the idea of Trump as a political centrist, albeit an unusual one.

“Trump is a certain kind of moderate Republican,” conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat told Vox. “[I]f you strip out the rhetoric around race and religion in his immigration stuff, and you strip out the ludicrous tax plan, you have a guy who’s running against Republican orthodoxy on everything from entitlements to — in his rhetoric at least — taxes, trade and so on.”

Douthat said smart Republicans recognize that Trump is ideologically malleable and ready to say anything to get elected: “He’s not going to be campaigning on conservative principles in August if, in order to beat Hillary, he needed to turn out a different set of the electorate.”

Other political analysts have reached for unorthodox terminology to describe Trump. Conservative radio host Mark Levin went with “agrarian national populism,” comparing the mogul to President Richard Nixon.

“[T]he Constitution is not about populism,” Levin said. “It’s not about pluralism. It’s about liberty.”

Aside from “liberal,” the other major term that’s been thrown around related to Trump — or at least his policies — is “fascist.” Talk of fascism came in particular after Trump said he “would certainly implement” a government database registering and tracking Muslims in the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley called this pronouncement a “fascist appeal.”

Even if they don’t agree on language, political observers are essentially unanimous that Trump represents something new and unexpected in American politics. Next week, if he starts winning caucuses and primaries, they may truly be at a loss for words.

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There’s been much made of the similarities between presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

They’ve both got New York accents — “yooge!” — they’re both campaigning as populists, and they’re both political insurgents giving the Washington establishment heartburn.

Tuesday reminded voters of another commonality between the Republican business mogul and the Democratic socialist: both speak to Americans’ economic anxiety about China as a rising global superpower.

To be sure, Trump’s villainizing of China is more explicit — he’s not known for his subtly. The mogul says the country is taking American jobs and “killing us on trade,” so he’d impose a huge tariff on goods coming from the nation. As this Huffington Post mashup demonstrates, China-bashing is a routine part of his message, to the point of being comical.

But Sanders also understands that the Chinese threat to U.S. workers is no laughing matter. Speaking to steelworkers in Des Moines, Iowa, Tuesday, he stressed his opposition to international trade agreements deemed detrimental to American labor, including Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China.

“The steelworkers did not write these trade agreements,” he told the union hall.

Sanders added that if corporations want Americans to buy their products, they should start manufacturing them in the United States.

“Can you a be a great country when everything you buy is made in China?” he asked.

Many Trump supporters, especially among the white working class, are asking the same thing.

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