The Trump Percent

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. – Monica Vondrake never watched him on "The Apprentice." She finds him arrogant and even foolish.

Yet here she is, seated in the back row of a performing arts center smack in the middle of a weekday, awaiting the arrival of the unlikeliest of Republican White House front-runners.

When she prods her pre-K-age son sitting next to her about who they want for president, he squeals without hesitation, almost lifting himself out of his chair: "Donald Trump!"

The onset of autumn marks a significant moment at the fulcrum of Trump's 2016 campaign. While he still tops GOP primary polling and is monopolizing daily media coverage, an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey this week showed his national lead has dwindled to a single percentage point. This, of course, triggered another breathless round of hypothesizing and guesstimating about whether Trump had finally peaked, and whether this was the sign his highfalutin act had finally run its course.

Waiting for the spectacular Trump collapse has turned out to be a longer game than the conventional wisdom predicted. The Trump Percent – an idiom for the maximum number of Republicans the billionaire real estate mogul will ultimately attract to his restless coalition – looks like a more durable number as each day passes. He's still pulling more than 20 percent of the GOP vote, a small dip from when he crossed into the 30 percent range at the beginning of last month.

"What is Trump's ceiling in a Republican primary today? I would answer 28 to 32 percent," calculates Mark Block, the campaign manager for Herman Cain's 2012 insurgent presidential bid. "Obviously the question going forward will be how many undecideds or voters that are with other candidates will come over to Trump as the field gets smaller."

Figuring out that number is becoming an increasingly urgent calculus for rival campaigns, top-flight donors and party leadership as Trump's staying power heading into a new month continues to spark a quiet buzz of anxiety and hand-wringing.

Interviews with over a dozen voters in the early nominating state of South Carolina indicate Trump's support is unlikely to evaporate overnight because of one particular off-color insult, a lagging debate performance or an excoriating attack ad.

And there's a batch of overarching characteristics uniting Trump's brigade, revealed throughout the interviews.

Trump supporters are sympathetic to business interests and appreciate his financial acumen. They like that he's self-funding his endeavor with his own fortune and think it inoculates him from political pressure and corruption. They render his ability to recruit top talent to surround himself with as impeachable, and therefore permit him leeway on offering a dearth of policy specifics.

And they are hankering for a bare-knuckle fighter.

This is why Vondrake – who isn't necessarily fond of Trump's antics, likes Ben Carson and was sad when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker dropped out of the race – calls herself a "full-on" supporter of a man who was previously most famous for shouting "You're fired!" on national television.

"He says the right things as far as business, being a business owner, looking at this as a business," she says. "He's not giving you the popular information. He's giving you the information as to what he would do. That's why Donald Trump has the edge because he's willing to go in the newer direction. I think his ideas are different, instead of just going with the expected."

Richard Hippey, who works as a defense contractor in North Charleston and owns a 127-acre horse ranch, notes there's only a relative handful of billionaires in the world, and Trump is one of them.

"You think they know something the rest of us don't?" he says.

Hippey views Trump as a role model in the realm of business.

"More importantly, he's not a juris doctorate that is a master of the English language. He's going to tell us exactly the way it is, without all that legalese," he says. "We're tired of political correctness. It's not my generation. And I think the younger generation that founded ... political correctness are about fed up with it too. They want to hear the truth."

What's more, Hippey sees the rest of the Republican field as tangled up in social issues and culture wars that are irrelevant to most people's daily lives. Trump may be knocked for a lack of substance, but Hippey sees his laserlike focus on the country's economic plight as a positive attribute.

"They keep talking about stuff, as businesspeople, we don't care about. I don't care about abortion. You're a human being, you have a right to make your own choice. Why's it even on the floor for discussion? I think it shouldn't be. Let's move on to something more important," he says.

Rep. Mark Sanford – a South Carolina Republican and former Palmetto State governor who was gearing up for a 2012 presidential run himself until personal scandal rocked his career – marveled at the crowd filling up the ballroom to see Trump in North Charleston during the lunch hour.

"There are a lot of new faces that you wouldn't normally see in political crowds," he says, conveying that those faces don't belong to Republican Party regulars who normally attend rubber-chicken Lincoln Day dinners and early morning county women's club breakfasts.

Hippey himself was a Ross Perot voter in 1992.

"Perot had the same ideology, and coincidentally they're both self-made billionaires," he says, drawing a favorable comparison to Trump.

Marc Knapp does heavy underground water, sewer and electrical utility work for a company he owns in Charleston. As a local activist who frequently attends city council meetings to be a thorn in the side of the established leadership, he relishes the way Trump is fighting the entire system.

"I like the fire. I like the way he stands up to the press – nothing personal," he says, bursting into a laugh while glancing at this reporter. "I like the way he just takes the press and beats them about the head, especially when they make stuff up."

But even above Trump's constant taunts and assaults is that he appears independent.

"I like the fact that he's not bought and paid for. That probably is the most important thing about him," Knapp says. "He's not gonna fade. People want people from outside."

Lillian Lamonato, who attended Trump's recent question-and-answer session in Columbia with GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, echoes Knapp's sentiment.

"I like him because he's funding his own campaign," she says. "I know that a lot of the candidates cannot fund it like he could. They are obligated in a sense."

Lamonato demurs when asked whether Trump's acts of chest-thumping self-promotion will eventually wear voters out.

"None of us feel it's an act. That's who he is. This is how he explains things," she says. "And I like the fight in him. I like it when he comes back at them. Oh, yes – that's a way a fighter is."

The Republican Party's opinion of Trump is indicative of the divide that still splits the institutional class tasked with maintaining order from the renegade faction attempting to crash the gates. The NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found just a 5-point difference in Trump's plausibility rating among GOP voters: 47 percent could see themselves supporting Trump, while 52 percent could not.

"He's broken every mold there is to break. It's sort of a stream of consciousness which is fascinating to watch as a political phenomenon," Sanford says while watching the crowd pour out of the North Charleston event, before a woman donning a Trump sticker interrupts him.

She conveys she liked Trump when she saw him earlier this year at The Citadel, but soured on his braggadocio on this day.

"I don't care about hearing that on the TV all the time about 'how great I am, how great I am, how great I am.' I want to hear about the world problems and things. When he [talked] about China and Boeing I got interested. Then he goes back to him and the polls and nobody else is as great as he is. I don't want to hear that," she gripes.

The encounter leads one to believe that Trump's routine could grow stale, especially as the primary contests draw closer and voters become more sober about their decision.

But there's a flip side to this, too – even those who aren't supporters of Trump often respect what he's done.

"Trump is amusing. He would at least be able to understand our government and run our economy," says Deborah Streetman, president of the Charleston County Republican Women and a Carly Fiorina supporter. "I don't care for him personally and his attitude – I think he's rather sophomoric in his personal insults – but I think everyone has to admit that he is a brilliant businessman."