First apologies for the headline. Got carried away with the alliterative allure, I guess.

I have managed to lose one very expensive chocolate bar to a friend who is not a political professional through my cocksure belief in the imminent fall of the Donald. That was last August and I my losses could have been infinitely greater but thankfully my friend is not a gambling man and wanted to keep it a friendly bet. Good thing, as I was prepared to wager any amount he was willing to put up that, come August 31, Trump would be flailing away in the basement of the polls.

Just about every election year someone trots out psychological research on the real reasons voters vote the way they do and what they look for in the presidential candidates they end up supporting. Well, it’s time to trot them out again because they explain in part the Donald phenomenon. The first study is one initially conducted in 1986 by Donald Kinder which showed that there are four basic qualities that voters use to evaluate presidential candidates: perceived leadership, competence, integrity and empathy.

Other research since then has found that as a general rule leadership is the strongest trait in Republican nominees. That is, they tend to be perceived higher on the leadership parameter than democrats, meaning that trait seems to be the most important to Republican voters. Democrats tend to go with–you guessed it–empathy.

So what makes a candidate be perceived as a leader? Well, leading for one thing. It is not just an out of control ego that prompts Trump to continually tout his high poll numbers. It turns out, for Republicans, it’s pretty smart messaging, particularly when you have no other candidate running that has been on a national ballot before, which Republicans love. Leading can become a self-perpetuating and self-regenerating phenomenon.

The other study sometimes cited during this season has to do with snap judgment on candidates’ images. Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov showed that winning candidates could be predicted with 66% to 73% accuracy by showing adult study participants pictures of candidates for only one second and having them rate each as to perceived competence. He repeated the study reducing the exposure time to milliseconds and got the same result. Then he did a follow-up study with children and got no significantly different outcome.

So do this experiment: think about the images people would form of the GOP candidates through just the briefest look at their face. If you’re like me, you come up with something like this:

Cruz: smarmy undertaker
Rubio: callow eagle scout
Bush: pasty-faced academic wimp
Kasich:  high school football team student manager
Christie: overeater, gets food on his face, doesn’t use a napkin
Carson: nice guy
Trump: self-assured, in charge

But maybe that’s just me.  What do you think?