A Republican presidential field that was once so unwieldy that debates had to be broken into undercard and main events may soon shrink from its peak of 17 prominent candidates to just three.
The writing was on the wall in mid-January. At a Republican debate in South Carolina, Donald Trump defended his fellow New Yorkers from Ted Cruz. Cruz made the case for his natural-born citizenship against Trump. Then Cruz challenged Marco Rubio on immigration. Rubio responded by attempting to cast doubt on Cruz’s steady commitment to principle.
Trump was the only TV star in the bunch, but all three candidates starred in that debate. The two freshman senators bookended the real estate billionaire and between them they secured the traditional three tickets out of Iowa. Each of them, but no one else, could be the last men standing in the Republican presidential contest.
Which man will command the national convention in Cleveland this summer? While the trio’s separation from the rest of the field is clear, the race is still in flux. A case can be made for each of them becoming the nominee, but they all face serious obstacles.
RCP Poll Average for New Hampshire Republican Primary: InsideGov
Trump’s Stumble
Let’s start with Trump. He consistently led the polls from his announcement up until right before the first meaningful votes of 2016 were cast, with few hiccups. He has dominated media coverage. What would have been campaign-killing gaffes for other candidates, at least according to historical standards, were used to maximize his exposure to an adoring public.
In fact, the timing of Trump’s presidential announcement at the height of the summer news doldrums — the escalator ride heard ’round the world — helped him build a lead too powerful for erstwhile front-runners to survive. Jeb Bush saw his support, and his once-impressive fundraising, collapse. Scott Walker wound up dropping out of the race and heading back to Wisconsin.
During the weeks before the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Republican elected officials associated with the party’s establishment wing even began saying out loud that they could live with Trump as the nominee. Even if you believe people like Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch were merely trying to rationalize their contempt for Cruz (Cruz losing Iowa would have almost certainly boosted Trump, at least in the short term), it was still a significant development.
But then Trump stumbled in ways that reinforced the initial skepticism about his viability. He skipped the final debate before the Iowa caucuses and held his own competing event because he was engaged in a dispute with host Fox News and its debate co-moderator Megyn Kelly.
Kelly and Fox aren’t what most Republican primary voters consider the liberal media. The precipitousness of Trump’s debate withdrawal underscored concerns about his temperament. One 54-year-old West Des Moines resident told the Washington Examiner, “Trump, who I was on the fence about, told me in the last few hours that it’s all about him.”
Finally, even though Trump’s rally was local and ostensibly benefited veterans, some Iowans felt snubbed. “Trump is going to pay for that,” Theodore, a Des Moines Uber driver, warned before the caucus. “We take that stuff real serious here in Iowa. We’ll remember.”
More importantly, Trump believed that he could use celebrity and media coverage to build support while keeping more conventional campaign activities — such as advertising, retail politics, get-out-the-vote field operations and internal polling — to a minimum. He did some of those things, but he mainly focused on interviews, low-budget YouTube videos and social media memes. He also held huge rallies, which the networks felt compelled to cover, to gin up enthusiasm among his supporters.
It worked in the national and early-state polls. One Washington, D.C., political publication even ran the triumphalist headline “How Trump did it” just before the primaries began. But Trump’s methods failed their first test in an actual binding vote, less because he lacked popular support than the fact he was outhustled and out-organized by more traditional campaigns.
This raised the question of how Trump, who made his status as a winner and his lead in all the polls a staple of his campaign stump speech, would handle defeat. Even with a condensed primary schedule, the race for the Republican presidential campaign is a marathon rather than a sprint.
Front-runners with any serious competition normally lose at least some states, and Trump does not like to lose. His detractors gleefully disseminated such Trump lines as his tweet quoting the old professional golfer Walter Hagen as saying, “Nobody remembers who came in second.” When did they circulate this? Right after Trump came in second in Iowa.
Trump was gracious in his first concession speech, but soon began firing off angry messages on Twitter accusing Cruz of cheating and dirty tricks, demanding that the results be nullified. Conservative commentator Steve Deace, a Cruz supporter, called him a 69-year-old man “who tweets like he’s got Bieber fever.” Trump has engaged in such bluster before, but usually from a position of strength. Here he was going after Cruz as a runner-up, a vanquished rival.
All this came as Trump’s primary opponents suddenly began treating him as a normal candidate and subjecting him to scathing attacks. And while establishment Republican money largely sat on the sidelines out of fear that Cruz may somehow benefit from an anti-Trump onslaught, unencumbered conservative movement activists and publications began subjecting the leading Republican candidate to withering scrutiny.
Ted Cruz’s model is closer to Bush 2004: Accept that in a polarized America, the true swing vote is very small. Focus instead on turning out conservatives. (AP Photo)
Trump’s favorability ratings took a tumble even among Republicans. He barely broke even in this category in some pre-Iowa polls. Gallup found that 60 percent nationally held an unfavorable view of him, suggesting he would be a weak general election candidate and that he might even have a ceiling of around 35 percent of the vote in the Republican primaries.
The good news for Trump is that with Cruz and Rubio still very much alive and likely to keep attacking each other, plurality support could easily be enough to win many, perhaps most, states. He has barely begun leveraging his substantial personal fortune on behalf of his campaign, or to use ads to define his opponents. He is flexible enough in his positions to pivot away from anything that proves unpopular, wedded only to a strong stand on immigration. And if Trump can get back to his winning ways, he might be able to use what George H.W. Bush memorably called the “Big Mo,” momentum, to carry him through a shortened primary season.
Crubio
Trump is an island unto himself, but Cruz and Rubio are tied inextricably together. In some circles, Cruz is even more controversial than Trump. The Texas senator has been a perpetual thorn in the side of his party’s leaders. He receives mostly hostile coverage from the mainstream media and even has his critics in the conservative press, especially after the government shutdown over defunding Obamacare.
Cruz needed Iowa because his numbers were not good enough in other pivotal states to survive defeat. He won Iowa. Now he will begin a push through the Republican primaries in the South, culminating in a Super Tuesday run he hopes will set him on a path to the nomination. But the Republican establishment will push back.
Rubio’s strong third place showing in Iowa was like a bolt from beyond for Cruz’s establishment critics. The Florida senator, like Cruz, votes well over 90 percent of the time with the major Beltway conservative groups. Like Cruz, he won his Senate seat over the establishment’s objections with Tea Party support, beating a Republican so liberal he soon left the party and ran for office first as an independent, then as a Democrat.
“I think he’s even a vegetarian now,” Rubio frequently jokes on the stump of his previously establishment-backed foe Charlie Crist. The value of Rubio is that unlike some of the other alternatives who have taken moderate stands on issues besides immigration, the Floridian is broadly popular within the conservative movement and can tell a story of his arrival in Washington that is the same as other successful conservative primary challengers.
Yes, Rubio is vulnerable on immigration and the 2013 Gang of Eight deal. That is a greater liability in this primary campaign than the percentage of voters who tell exit pollsters immigration is their top issue indicates. Rubio’s conservative credentials can also be criticized on libertarian grounds, something Cruz has positioned himself to do. (Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, which ended before New Hampshire, illustrates the limits of that avenue.)
Marco Rubio promises to grow the conservative movement, turning out Republican base voters while trying to increase the party’s share among Latinos and women. (AP Photo)
But Rubio cannot so readily be attacked on the Wall Street bailout, Common Core, accepting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion or being related to one president who dramatically increased federal spending and another who raised taxes. He has experience talking to evangelicals, not reassuring Northeastern moderates that he isn’t too conservative on abortion or gun control. He stands to inherit establishment support, but it won’t be as easy to get to his right.
But don’t count Cruz out of the race. He is running a tightly disciplined, data-driven campaign. He has more natural advantages in the South than Rubio. He’s already won the first major contest where a majority of the voters were evangelicals. And he did it while retaining greater appeal among non-evangelicals than any Christian Right-backed candidate since George W. Bush in 2000. And he has nearly twice as much cash on hand as Rubio, the next best-funded non-Trump candidate.
That’s why comparing Cruz’s Iowa victory to Rick Santorum’s or Mike Huckabee’s makes as little sense as Bill Clinton dismissing Barack Obama’s 2008 South Carolina win because Jesse Jackson won there before. Yes, Jackson and Obama were both black candidates who overwhelmingly carried the African-American vote. Yes, Cruz, Santorum and Huckabee are all social conservatives who won convincingly among evangelicals. But in both cases, the comparison ends there.
When Cruz says on the stump that Huckabee and Santorum left Iowa as penniless candidates after they won, he isn’t taking a shot at them. They slapped together a ramshackle organization for the caucuses and tried to parlay a win into enough money to keep their campaigns going. Cruz already had the money and organization to go the distance. He just needed validation from the voters and a little momentum.
Gallup found that 60 percent nationally held an unfavorable view of Donald Trump, suggesting he would be a weak general election candidate. (AP Photo)
Too much of the party’s professional class, however, Cruz feels like trying to run Santorum or Huckabee in the general election. Rubio is the kind of general election candidate Republican strategists and donors would design in a laboratory. That’s an undeniable advantage for Rubio.
Rubio nevertheless has his problems, too. First, he has to fight a multi-front war to get out in front of the Republican race. Cruz has dispatched most of his more populist conservative rivals and is ready for a three-way race with Rubio and Trump. Rubio is still competing in the establishment lane with Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich, whom Cruz can safely ignore.
So far, Rubio has been able to retain his Tea Party credibility by pointing to the vast sums of money Bush and other establishment figures have spent trying to tear him down. But he probably cannot win the nomination without consolidating establishment support, at which point his high Heritage Action scores can’t save him from being defined as the establishment candidate. It is a double-edge sword.
“Anger is not a plan,” Rubio exhorts crowds on the trail. He needs to say that because he doesn’t tap into the base’s angry mood as well as Trump or Cruz do. Rubio’s optimism is a major selling point among his supporters, but many Republicans are looking for a fighter. Trump and Cruz fit that bill, which is why Rubio’s tone has taken on more of an edge in recent debates. Most conservatives like Rubio. But the ones who don’t like him really dislike him.
Rubio can score only so many moral victories of the sort he won with a good third place in Iowa. At some point, second and third-place showings, no matter how strong, cease to be surprising. He needs to finish first somewhere — somewhere early. Rubio has the highest ceiling, but also the most difficult launch.
Trump stumbled in ways that reinforced the initial skepticism about his viability. He skipped the final debate before the Iowa caucuses and held his own competing event because he was engaged in a dispute with host Fox News and its debate co-moderator Megyn Kelly. (AP Photo)
Just as they all have different theoretical paths to the nomination, the three differ on how they would approach the general election. Rubio promises to grow the conservative movement, turning out Republican base voters while trying to increase the party’s share among Latinos and women. His pitch is closest to what the Republican National Committee envisioned in its autopsy after Mitt Romney was defeated in 2012.
Cruz’s model is closer to Bush 2004: Accept that in a polarized America, the true swing vote is very small. Focus instead on turning out conservatives. Don’t give any part of the old “Reagan coalition” any reason to stay home. Use data to target supporters relentlessly. The 1990s are over and Romney won independents while losing the election. Be prepared instead to prevail, however narrowly, in a closely contested fight.
Whether it is a thought-out plan or an accident, Trump’s campaign would appear to require high turnout among working-class whites who either stayed home when Romney was the nominee, based on the controversial theory of the “missing white voter,” or who still usually vote for Democrats. Over-perform with minorities drawn to Trump’s celebrity and bravado. Count on high name recognition. Add all this to the normal Republican vote and shake well.
One candidate is relying on gut and intuition, the other on data and still another on the elite Republican view on how to win in a more diverse America. So it may be until the Republican National Convention.
