Judging by the number of House and Senate seats, governorships, and state legislative seats it holds, the Republican party is stronger than at any point since the 1920s. Yet, going by the presidential nomination battle alone, the party is a mess. There are too many candidates, a few of whom are distracting the public with their self-aggrandizing shenanigans, spurred on by ratings-hungry cable-news networks.
There are a lot of reasons for this problem, but a big one is the nomination process itself. The current rules of the game in both parties encourage distractions and hamper efforts to unite around shared values. Put simply, the system makes it needlessly hard for the party to reach consensus.
The modern nomination system is certainly more democratic than its 19th-century forebear. Now, people choose the nominee by direct election, rather than leaving the choice to delegates chosen by state party leaders. The current rules, however, do little to encourage consensus. Instead, the nomination battle is aptly captured by the tagline for the show Survivor—“Outwit, Outlast, Outplay.” A would-be nominee does not need to garner the majority of his party’s support. He just has to win a plurality and hang around until the other candidates drop out.
The media encourage fragmentation. Journalists love the internecine battle, regardless of the damage to the party. Worse, they declare candidates “winners” of primaries even if they barely squeaked by their opponents with less than half the vote. This creates inevitable pressure on the “losers” to drop out and turns the nomination into a war of attrition.
A better process would encourage what might be called a Goldilocks solution. It would produce a nominee who does not heavily favor one side of the party over others. An emphasis on balance is useful in our system. Because we have only two major parties, each is necessarily a broad and potentially contentious coalition of factions. A major job of the nominee is to unite these groups around shared principles, in preparation for the general election campaign. It is wonderful when some segments of the party adore the nominee, but it is more important that no substantial bloc be alienated by him.
Yet our process does not facilitate consensus, as the Democrats have amply demonstrated since 1972. Their candidates have often won the nomination with less than half the primary vote (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton), while others managed to split the party merely in two (Barack Obama and Walter Mondale).
Historically, the GOP has been better at finding consensus despite rules that encourage factionalism, but not lately. John McCain won the nomination in 2008 with just 47 percent of the primary vote, and that number is inflated by the fact that he had no serious competition in the final primaries. Ditto Mitt Romney in 2012. He won 52 percent of the primary vote, but many of his victories came when he was unchallenged. He effectively wrapped up the nomination in Wisconsin—where almost 60 percent of voters supported somebody else.
Sixty years ago, the rules of the game mattered less because the Republican party was reasonably homogenous, mainly consisting of middle-class Protestants in the North and West. Though there were some discontents (who helped Barry Goldwater capture the nomination in 1964, for instance), most quarters of the party were committed to an internationalist foreign policy, grudging acceptance of the New Deal, and opposition to increased government activism. Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower were roughly in the center of this tightknit coalition, and together they won the nomination five times in six cycles.
A number of postwar trends, however, have slowly transformed the GOP, making it much more diverse: the growth of the Sunbelt, the migration of the white working class from the Democratic party, the emergence of the culture wars and a mobilized Christian right, and most recently the Tea Party. When compared with the Democrats, the Republican party still seems homogenous; the former is split between whites and nonwhites, while the latter is mostly white. But race is just one way to understand politics. When you look beyond it, you see a large and growing number of Republican factions, which—though still united on broad principles—have important geographical, socioeconomic, and even ideological differences among them.
A Goldilocks solution is looking especially elusive this cycle. At the top of the polling heap right now are four candidates with the potential to appeal to a large swath of the party while simultaneously alienating another substantial bloc of it—Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz. Meanwhile, the candidates that almost everybody in the party could at least like are struggling—because nobody is passionately in love with them. Indeed, Rick Perry was conscientiously trying to present himself as such a fusion candidate, yet his campaign imploded on the launch pad. Other potential compromise candidates are languishing in the low single digits.
Whether this will affect the party’s chances for a general election victory, it is too soon to say. But there is more to worry about than winning in November. What about governing? If a candidate has secured his party’s nomination primarily because some faction was extremely loyal to him, and then manages to win the general election, how does he go about building a governing coalition in Congress, where all quarters of the party are represented? Maybe he can capture the nomination with 40 percent of the vote, but can he govern if a large swath of his party is hesitant about him?
This is not idle speculation. If the Republican party is becoming more heterogeneous, like the Democrats, then the experience of two Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, should be worrisome. Carter came into office with huge Democratic majorities, but as a southern moderate he was out of sync with northern liberals, so virtually nothing got done. Clinton got along with his congressional party during the 103rd Congress, but the 1994 midterms swept in a new GOP majority, prompting Clinton to return to his “New Democrat” roots to build a governing coalition with Republicans on taxes, entitlements, and welfare.
It is good for the president to embody the party’s consensus, rather than the wishes of one or two factions alone, because he will have to work with a congressional caucus that is as diverse as the party itself. If the president cannot do that, if he is too tied to particular subsets of the party, he will struggle to hold his legislative coalition together. That can lead to trouble. What happens if a President Ted Cruz cannot break the gridlock because he cannot get along with the Republicans in the Senate? What if a President John Kasich cuts deals with Nancy Pelosi because House conservatives want nothing to do with him?
Republicans can take comfort in the fact that the Democratic party is more distressed than the GOP right now. But there are good reasons to be frustrated by the nomination spectacle. The party stands on the precipice of what could be its biggest majority since 1928: a historically large congressional caucus, domina-tion of the state governments, and a Republican president at the helm. But there is no guarantee that the party will pick a candidate who
can make the most of this rare opportunity. In fact, the rules make it especially hard for such a candidate to succeed. What a shame it will be if the party blows its chances because of an ill-conceived and counter-productive nominating process.
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.
