Good car salesmen understand that the odds of making a sale plummet if the potential buyer leaves the lot “to think about it.” Much of the dialogue engineered by the salesman during a visit to the dealership is designed to make the customer comfortable and confident that they are making a smart purchase. The fact that they are on the lot in the first place shows that they want to buy a car. Their choice of lots shows that they are open to buying the cars sold on that lot. With all this in mind, the salesman tries to literally frame the purchasing decision process for the buyer. When a customer leaves the lot, even a customer claiming to still be interested, the salesman’s framing of the purchase no longer monopolizes the customer’s calculus. Once the customer becomes open to the pitches of other salesmen on other lots, it’s a crap shoot.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is, in some ways, like a salesman’s pitch to a prospective car buyer who has come in to the dealership. He is all about making his target demographic comfortable and confident, and keeping them on the lot until they sign on the dotted line. But here’s the thing, salesmanship is not sufficient for getting elected President of the United States. Indeed, the Framers of the Constitution designed the presidential selection process to guarantee that salesmanship (or more precisely its evil twin demagoguery) would not be enough. The two major political parties designed their nomination processes to be similarly resistant to mere “salesmanship” as well.

Donald Trump remains very unlikely to win for a number of reasons, one of which is the reality that there simply aren’t enough voters on Trump’s lot. Right now, Trump has at best one-in-three GOP primary voters kicking the tires and enjoying their time on the lot. Trump’s supporters (i.e. his target demo) are mostly angry, white people without college educations. They are laughing and being stroked and feeling really good about the salesman, and more importantly about themselves.

Trump’s pitch is buoyed by the fact that the GOP has been priming these very kinds of voters for decades to distrust all of the whipping posts of Trump’s campaign, such as the media, experts, scientists, academics, liberals, organized labor leaders, civil rights activists, immigrants, and most of all…politicians. Trump’s naked attacks on the political, intellectual, and even moral authority of these stock villains is designed to comfort (and he hopes mobilize) those in his target demo.

Trump has picked a fertile niche in the GOP marketplace, but he’s hitched his wagon to a very unreliable horse, namely horserace polls. Touting his poll numbers accounts for an amazingly large portion of his pitch. If your pitch is “I’m the best because I’m winning HUGE,” and you don’t actually win HUGE when the official scores start being tallied, things tend to go south pretty quick.

Thanks to the mutually beneficial relationship between the salesman and the commercial media at present, the calculus of these angry, white people is effectively being monopolized by Trump. But “The Donald” can’t ride this winning streak to the Oval Office because he can’t attract enough buyers to the lot, and because he can’t close enough deals before his present customers start leaving the lot “to think about it.” Once the primaries begin and the gap between his poll numbers and his numbers at the polls that count becomes part of the media narrative, Trump’s pitch will start to lose both its appeal and its near-monopoly on the attention of GOP voters.