Jonah asks, “If Trump’s success is all about these Very Important Issues, why aren’t those issues working for anyone else?” The Wall Street Journal, looking at the failure of some mini-Trumps in primaries, calls his nomination “an accident of circumstance in this odd election year.”

I think we are justified in concluding that Trump’s distinctive positions on policy issues are not sufficiently powerful to carry Republican primary candidates to victory where the other circumstances that helped him do not obtain. Trumpism without his celebrity and a fractured field won’t win everywhere. But some of Trump’s issues helped. In particular, his reputation as the hardliner of the field on immigration gave him a significant boost. I’ve argued that point before, and Clifford Young makes a statistical case that attitudes toward immigration were the most important driver of support for Trump.

And even if Trump’s issues didn’t cause him to win, Republicans should still reflect on the fact that his failure to echo the standard Republican economic agenda on trade, entitlements, and so forth did not stop him from being the nominee. But there is an impulse among a lot of conservatives to find reasons not to allow such thoughts to unsettle them. Thus you have another Journal explanation for Trump’s victory: He benefited from “the luck that his main opponent in the decisive Indiana primary was the much-disliked Mr. Cruz.” And how did Cruz become Trump’s main opponent? In part it was because Senator Rubio lost his home state to Trump decisively. Rubio isn’t “much disliked” among Florida Republicans, as his primary win this week shows.

That doesn’t prove that Trump’s appeal had an ideological component. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that it did, and that conservatives will have to reckon with that fact.