Everybody knows there is no real leader in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. But ask voters an open-ended question — who do you want to be the nominee? — and the range of answers can be breathtaking.
That’s what I did in an unplanned and totally unscientific way on my Twitter feed Tuesday afternoon. On Monday evening, I posted a piece about Mike Huckabee’s preparations for another run for the nomination in 2016. Twitter reaction to Huckabee was almost entirely negative; nobody, or at least nobody reading my tweets on a Tuesday afternoon, seemed to like the idea of the former Arkansas governor making another race.
So I opened the discussion up to anyone who wanted to support any GOP presidential candidate. Who do you like? The results of the ridiculously imprecise effort — it was basically a straw poll of one writer’s Twitter feed, with a staggeringly high margin of error — is that 338 total votes were split among a total of 28 potential candidates.
The winner was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, with 78 votes. In second place was Sen. Ted Cruz, with 54 votes. Third was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, with 40 votes. Rick Perry had 21; Rand Paul had 20; Rick Santorum had 18; Mitt Romney also had 18; Marco Rubio had 14; Mike Pence had 12; Ben Carson had 10; and everyone else was in single digits. (In the rules that I made up on the spot, voters were allowed to name more than one candidate they’d be happy to support; most named just one or two.)
There were some surprises. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie received zero — yes, zero — votes. Jeb Bush received four — the same number as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and five fewer than New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez’s nine. Paul Ryan, the party’s vice presidential nominee last time around, had six, one more than Sarah Palin’s five. There were stray votes for Allen West, Trey Gowdy, Jeff Sessions, and Mark Levin. Here is the whole list:
Rather than a long-term choice of a leader, some readers were simply sending in their favorite Republican politician of the moment (although I am assuming the guy who voted for Eric Cantor and Louis Goehmert was just being mischievous.) But the bottom line of this unserious exercise is that the GOP field is seriously fractured. Yes, there are some favorites. But a new candidate could come out of anywhere.
