Donald Trump’s presidential campaign isn’t a distraction from the race for either party’s 2016 presidential nomination; it’s a made-for-TV pre-game show.

Despite the fact that no one with expertise in presidential elections believes Trump can win the nomination, the political media has replaced their election coverage with a Trump-watch. There is no shortage of hand wringing in the media about the damage Mr. Trump is doing to the national GOP brand or to the hope for enlightened democratic discourse, but the reality is that voters do eventually get serious about presidential nominations and when they do pollsters will have an easier time identifying actual “likely primary voters.”  Primary voters are disproportionally high information voters. The folks registering “support” for Trump in what I call the “pre-game” polls are disproportionally low information voters. For a good technical explanation of this, see this piece by Patrick Ruffini, which was referenced in a very good Nate Silver article about why Trump will eventually lose.

When actual primary voters do eventually tune in, and pollsters are able to hone in on them, Trump’s numbers will decline and the political media will pretend that this decline was caused by something Trump said or did that caused folks who had been supporting him to change their minds, thereby sustaining the media fiction that presidential elections are all about voters’ assessments of the candidates.