The GOP Needs a Champion in 2016 - Does One Exist?

One thing that is striking about today's Republican Party - besides it's raging racism and homophobia - is its ability to remain utterly out of touch with objective reality.  Given the insanity of the GOP base, perhaps this phenomenon should not come as any surprise.  As the preliminary projections on the 2016 presidential race, Republicans in the House of Representatives maintained in office by carefully gerrymandered districts have a particular lack of objective reality since they do not have to run in statewide elections where the safety net of gerrymandering does not exist and where even efforts to disenfranchise minorities and young voters cannot guaranty an election victory.  In a piece in Politico, Larry Sabato looks at the situation facing the GOP.  Here are highlights:

We are already at the point in this prematurely unfolding 2016 presidential campaign when a glance down the list of prospective candidates can cause most observers to wince. As that seductive and sultry crooner Peggy Lee once sang, “Is that all there is?”

At the U.Va. Crystal Ball, we currently have 11 Republicans and nine Democrats as probable or possible presidential contenders. The Democrats have fewer and more tentative contenders because of the paralyzing gravitational pull of “Planet Hillary . . .

The Republicans have a sharply different problem. They have plenty of wannabes but no obvious general election winner. It’s not that we can’t construct scenarios by which this or that GOP nominee will capture the White House three years hence. Rather, it is that no one on the present list seems able to convincingly combat the growing demographic edge that produces a Democratic lead in the Electoral College.

Republicans probably won’t believe this assertion once they do reasonably well in this November’s low-turnout, red state-skewed midterm election; they’ll fool themselves again, just as they did after their 2010 midterm triumph, when the most frequently heard GOP comment was, “Even my dog could beat President Obama in 2012.”

Maybe Obama will be so unpopular by 2016, or the economy bad enough, that the Democratic nominee simply can’t win. But if the general election turns out to be closely competitive, as most open-seat contests for the White House are, who among the Republicans can redraw an Electoral College map that’s strongly in the Democrats’ favor?

Many Republicans privately worry that there isn’t anybody, but if forced to choose a champion, they will argue it is Jeb Bush. The Bush family’s extensive network of operatives and contributors will certainly be a giant assist to his nomination, and Jeb’s ties to segments of the Hispanic population, plus past success in critical Florida, give him a plausible general election strategy. But Jeb Bush was last on a Sunshine State ballot in 2002, and it’s not difficult to see him trapped in the web of his brother’s very mixed legacy.

 

Tea Party Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas probably can’t do much better than Bush with Hispanics, despite their ethnic heritage, and because of their far-right positioning they may do far worse with other swing groups.

Gov. Chris Christie’s White House hopes could be a bridge too far. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has a shaky libertarian-lite coalition that rhetorically reaches from Edward Snowden to Monica Lewinsky, but may be subject to catastrophic collapse due to internal stresses and contradictions. Then there’s Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; they would offer the GOP a melancholy reprise of the Goldwater landslide defeat of 1964.

Is there no one who can break the stranglehold Democrats have on 70-90 percent of various demographic minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian-Americans, and gays and lesbians) and 55-60 percent of women and the young (age 18-29)? These groups, some swelling in size, practically hand a presidential election to Democrats as long as the party’s candidate can secure a mere 38-40 percent of the white vote.

The natural GOP impulse could be to put a minority or a woman on the ticket, so that gender or ethnic identity can pull enough votes to transform electoral reality. The theory is probably flawed. All by itself, a token representative of diversity—especially in the second slot on the ticket—won’t have the juice to undo decades of partisan polarization among women and minorities.

But what about another approach—finding a nominee who doesn’t just superficially demonstrate diversity but has taken a substantive, career-threatening position in standing up for diversity? . . . . Enter Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. Portman attracted national attention in 2013 when he announced that his son, Will, an undergraduate student at Yale, was gay. Portman declared his support not just for his son but also for same-sex marriage. This happened before the key Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and showed real family values, not the phony ones invoked by many politicians.

Before Portman’s dramatic announcement, I often heard political observers on both sides of the aisle name him as one of the most qualified and able presidential candidates the GOP could muster. . . . Colleagues on both sides of the aisle like Portman, who is low-key and willing to listen, if not agree, with others’ strongly held points of view. Cheap shots and grandstanding press conferences are not in his repertoire.  He’s serious, credible and smart. So why isn’t there more Portman chatter?

There is an easy answer to Sabato's question: the GOP base.  No matter how good of a candidate Portman might be, it is likely impossible that he could win the nomination given the stranglehold the Christofascists and their incestuous cousins of the Tea Party have on the GOP grass roots and the nominating process.