As he extends his lead in the Republican presidential race, billionaire businessman Donald Trump keeps bucking his party establishment and confounding predictions of his imminent downfall. His success has come not just from being an outsider but also from being fiercely anti-establishment, railing against the government and the institutions that he hopes to lead. It's a freewheeling style made possible by Mr. Trump's loose ties to political ideology. "He's not bound by ideology in a traditional sense," said David W. Rohde, a political science professor at Duke University. Mr. Trump is not a tea party constitutionalist or a pro-business Republican or a small-government conservative. He is strictly pro-Trump. "Trump's presentation is that everybody in government is incompetent or evil and if we just give the power to him he will make things just fine," said Mr. Rohde. "It's the presentation of those ideas is what leads to his success. It is coupling those views with a lot of anger and ridicule that a segment of the Republican Party finds appealing. "Now a whole lot of people find it not appealing," he added. Mr. Trump climbed to 27 percent at the top of a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, up from 24 percent in the same survey last month. Mr. Trump bested the competition with a variety of Republicans, including voters who described themselves as tea party, extremely conservative and moderate or liberal. He also won among men and women who vote Republican, according to the poll.
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