With just over a month until the Iowa caucuses, the Republican nomination field is taking clearer form. Of the original 17 candidates, only 4 can be said to remain in top contention: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson.
What to make of these candidates, and what does their preeminence tell us about the Republican party as it heads into the presidential election year?
Of the top four, only Carson is following a well-worn path. While his personal story is unique, his appeal is traditional. The early date of the Iowa caucuses has long meant that candidates with a strong connection to evangelical Christians endeavor to use Iowa as a springboard to the nomination. Pat Robertson in 1988, Alan Keyes in 1996, Gary Bauer in 2000, Mike Huckabee in 2008, and Rick Santorum in 2012 all tried this strategy. Carson is trying it too.
The remaining candidates look remarkably different from what we have seen in the past. The one most closely resembling a traditional Republican nominee is Jeb Bush, who started in first place, but now languishes at just 4 percent in national polls. The real contenders—Trump, Cruz, and Rubio—can be thought of as three variants of Tea Party candidate.
The term “Tea Party” was grossly overused in its heyday, but it hasn’t quite outlived its usefulness. The Tea Party was a challenge to business-as-usual politics—especially Republican business as usual in Washington. The Trump, Cruz, and Rubio candidacies can be said to represent different aspects of the movement, and each brings upsides and downsides for voters to consider.
In his disgust with the powers that be, Trump is attuned to the cultural and economic anxieties of the working class. It is supremely ironic that this billionaire real estate mogul who inherited a fortune and has long worked the insider pathways of power should be the avatar of this unrest. Nevertheless, his plain-talking, brash style and unapologetic disregard for political correctness have endeared him to voters who think their country has been hijacked by sneering elites. His economic populism, especially regarding immigration and trade, makes him attractive to the kinds of people who backed Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. Most of these voters have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1972 and congressional elections since 1994, but their relationship with the party elite has always been tense.
The upside of Trump is that he could scramble the political calculus. On paper, he is formidable: He is a successful businessman who wants to put America first, who does not mouth certain Republican economic shibboleths, and who cannot be bought by special interests. This is a recipe for a broad, populist coalition. Like all populist candidates in American history, however, with the notable exception of Andrew Jackson, Trump is executing his strategy in a manner that has all the makings of a disaster. While his diehard supporters no doubt enjoy his brash style and have no problem with his winging it, the middle of the country is already turned off.
Asked at last week’s debate how he would modernize the nuclear triad (the bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines that can deliver America’s nuclear weapons), Trump responded with fluff: “[W]e have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame,” etc. Considering that Trump has been running for president for six months, his answer was inexcusably ignorant. Twice in the postwar era, a major party has nominated a candidate voters did not trust to handle the nuclear arsenal. In both instances—1964 and 1972—the results were disastrous for the candidate in question.
Cruz and Rubio offer a more balanced array of upsides and downsides. Both came to the Senate as outsider candidates who surprised their state establishments to win the Republican nomination. In 2012 Cruz soundly defeated Texas lieutenant governor David Dewhurst in the primary runoff, 57-43, after narrowly losing the first round, 34-45. Two years earlier, Rubio, former speaker of the Florida house, snatched the GOP nomination for Senate from incumbent Republican governor Charlie Crist, who actually left the party to run against Rubio as an independent. Crist’s unprincipled maneuver didn’t help him a whit; Rubio trounced him in the general election.
Cruz and Rubio have been reliable conservative votes in the Senate. Heritage Action for America gives Rubio a 94 percent rating on its 16 key votes and Cruz 100 percent. Similarly, the DW Nominate system of ideological ranking, designed by Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of New York University, places both Rubio and Cruz on the far right of the Senate.
Yet there are notable differences between the two, and it is here that Republicans confront significant trade-offs. While he has been a reliable conservative vote overall, Rubio has tried to work within the normal channels of the Senate. He was a key behind-the-scenes player in getting Obamacare’s insurer bailout repealed, he cosponsored a sweeping tax reform proposal with Mike Lee, and of course he spearheaded a bipartisan effort on immigration with New York Democrat Charles Schumer. Insofar as Rubio is considered an “establishment” Republican, this is probably why. He would be more conservative than any GOP nominee since Ronald Reagan, but in the Senate he has typically been collegial and occasionally bipartisan.
Cruz has gone in the opposite direction. He has taken a combative posture in the Senate, even calling out Republican leader Mitch McConnell for allegedly lying to him. This has alienated much of the GOP caucus. Relations are so bad that Cruz often struggles to get members to consent to him on minor procedural votes, a courtesy commonly extended to everybody. But if this adversarial posture has won him few friends in the Senate cloakroom, it has made him a darling of talk radio listeners and Fox News viewers.
If we assume that both Cruz and Rubio would behave as president as they did in the Senate, this gives Republicans a basis for comparison. The upside to Rubio is that he clearly knows how to work with Congress and has the potential to move the legislature in a conservative direction. Indeed, he was a policy entrepreneur on the Obamacare insurer bailout, pushing Congress to do something it might not otherwise have done. The downside of this approach is that he might get rolled, either by go-along-to-get-along Republicans or, worse, by liberal Democrats. Something like this seems to have happened with the Rubio-Schumer deal on immigration reform: Rubio miscalculated and put his name on a bill that was too liberal for most of his Republican colleagues.
With Cruz, the upside is that most of the country, Republicans included, hates Congress, and a president who takes an adversarial approach to the legislature might be just what the doctor ordered. On the campaign trail, Cruz has argued that the two parties behave like a cartel within the legislature. This is true. If one looks behind the heated partisan rhetoric, one sees broad bipartisan agreement on what may be called interest-group liberalism: the use of big government to pay off the pressure groups that work the system most aggressively. The best hope for cleaning out the rot is a president who is committed to such reform, and Cruz might be able to embarrass Congress into mending its ways.
The downside is that Congress is a stubborn, recalcitrant institution. This is especially true of the Senate, whose members are noted for their unbounded self-regard. Cruz might be right to castigate them, but will his former colleagues be willing to work with him on reform if he continues to denounce them? If they are not willing, a Cruz presidency might amount to four years of gridlock and a continuation of the ugly internecine battles that have beset the GOP during the Obama years.
Ideally, conservatives should hope for a blend of these qualities. The perfect candidate would be gracious and charitable to his colleagues, like Rubio, but firm in his commitment to reform, like Cruz. Alas, the real world disappoints us.
On the other hand, it is rarely as bad as we fear it might be. And conservatives should count themselves lucky this cycle. The establishment types, the go-along-to-get-along Republicans who have dominated the party’s nomination for most of its history, are not at the top of the heap this time. Instead, we have the prospect of a genuine break from the past.
Nominating Trump would be unadulterated folly, but Cruz and Rubio are viable candidates who deserve careful consideration. They bring real strengths to the table and would signal a notable change in the party’s approach to governance.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
