Something unprecedented is going to happen in the Republican presidential race next year. That’s not a prediction of a specific outcome, but a statement of fact about the options available.
The modern Republican primary process has never produced a nominee like Donald Trump, or for that matter Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina. When I wrote my Washington Examiner magazine piece outlining how several GOP candidates could win the nomination and beat the eventual Democratic nominee, I didn’t even include a path to victory for any of these three. I did include the recently departed Scott Walker. (For what it’s worth, I also had Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ candidate.)
Republicans haven’t nominated a businessman with little political experience since 1940, when the party turned to Wendell Willkie. You can stretch to draw comparisons between Willkie and Trump. Willkie had a history of supporting Democrats. He channeled some of the frustrations of the anti-New Deal right, but was to its left on many substantive policy issues and actually supported many of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansions of government.
But Willkie, who wasn’t as high-ranking an executive as either Trump or Fiorina, was a product of the old smoke-filled room, not the more democratic process by which nominees are chosen today. If a political neophyte wins the Republican nomination, it will be the result of popular support very much against the will of the party establishment. (Although I suspect the establishment could quickly reconcile itself to a Fiorina nomination, as much of the conservative movement already has, as opposed to a win by Trump or Carson.)
Trump can be compared to populist candidates who have run and lost before, but if he were the Republican nominee it really would be something new under the sun. The same could be said for Carson or Fiorina, who would also make history as the party’s first African-American or the first female nominee, respectively.
Alternatively, Republicans could still turn to one of the more conventional politicians in the race. The establishment candidate, who usually wins the nomination, is still alive. If Jeb Bush never takes off, there remain at least two alternatives for the establishment mantle (John Kasich and Chris Christie) and at least one candidate who could straddle the conservative-establishment line (Marco Rubio).
That would be a familiar alternative. But at this point, it would still require something unusual. Bush and Rubio are mostly polling in the mid-to-high single digits (CNN/ORC has the former Florida governor at 9 percent and the senator at 11 percent). Christie and Kasich are in the low single digits.
A typical Republican nominee is usually ahead of where Rubio is at his highest point, much less his 7.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. And that’s nationally. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where there will actually be binding primaries and caucuses, Rubio is doing worse.
I single Rubio out not because he is doing especially poorly, but because by some metrics he’s doing the best of the politicians still in the race. Bush is doing a bit worse nationally, a little better in some early states. You can find a few random polls where John McCain fell into the single digits before winning the nomination in 2008, but those look like outliers. Even at his campaign’s 2007 low point, he was usually in the double digits and not infrequently in the high teens or better.
Candidates polling as low as Christie and Kasich are right now have made it all the way to second place (Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, even George H.W. Bush in 1980) but never first. Nobody polling as low as the politicians still in the GOP race has ever won the Republican nomination during the modern primary process. So while it would be normal for someone of that background to win, in this field it would still require somebody to do something that hasn’t really been done before.
Could the next Republican nominee be someone not currently in the race? Maybe someone who enters the primaries at the last practical minute, or perhaps someone chosen at a brokered convention — an event political journalists speculate about every four years but which never ends up happening. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are only two of the most obvious names that could emerge.
This is far from the likeliest scenario. But if the field remains large and the vote fragmented going into the primaries, it gains some plausibility. Super PACs didn’t save Walker or Rick Perry, but they could keep some campaigns alive longer than the old rules dictate. It worked, for a while, for Santorum and Newt Gingrich in 2012. Throw in a front-runner for whom the party leadership has little enthusiasm (Trump) and a well-funded but exceptionally weak establishment candidate (Bush) and is it really so far-fetched compared to the other previously discussed possibilities?
An old Ronald Reagan hand complained to me that candidates like Walker and Perry are too quick to quit (perhaps because Republican donors are too fickle). In 1976, Reagan persevered well past the point where candidates like Tim Pawlenty dropped out, turned his flailing campaign around in North Carolina, came just short of winning at the convention and set himself up as the front-runner in 1980.
Could that be done today? Santorum wound up coming in second in 2012 and John McCain won in 2008 by staying in the race long after the conventional wisdom might have suggested they drop out. Romney won in 2012 by essentially waiting out a carousel of unconventional candidates and poorly organized has-beens. Bush hopes to do the same this time.
Anybody who tells you they know exactly what’s going to happen in 2016 is just guessing. But we can pretty definitively say it is going to be something we’re not used to seeing.
