Could the end of Scott Walker’s presidential campaign mark a new beginning for Carly Fiorina? Even before Walker dropped out Monday, the two Republicans had gone through wildly different arcs.
Fiorina was the only GOP presidential aspirant to graduate from the undercard debate to the primetime event, where her strong performance helped her break into the double digits in a national poll of Republican voters for the first time. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO was in second place, according to CNN/ORC.
By contrast, Walker’s poll numbers had been collapsing for weeks. Once the national front-runner ahead of everyone else, the Wisconsin governor most recently fell to zero percent (not a typo) alongside asterisk candidates Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, behind Rick Santorum. His final descent was the product of lackluster debate performances where he could barely be bothered to use his allotted time, much less demand more.
Fiorina rose in part because she was willing to challenge Republican front-runner Donald Trump, even getting the billionaire to cravenly back down from his boorish comments about her looks. (His assurances that she has a beautiful face were as unlikely to resonate with women as his initial insults.) Walker tried to imitate Trump or, somewhat less plausibly, claim that Trump was imitating him.
When Walker finally hit back against Trump during last week’s debate, it was too little, too late. In leaving the race, he seemed embittered by the failure of traditional conservative policy stances to break through, and said it was every other low-polling candidate’s patriotic duty to suspend their campaigns in order to prevent Trump’s nomination.
“I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same (dropping out), so that the voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current front-runner,” he said.
While Fiorina’s sharp communication skills, grasp of policy details and command of national issues keep improving, Walker quickly plateaued in each of these areas. He especially struggled to explain how he would conduct foreign policy in a dangerous world, a message Fiorina has been starting to hone.
Fiorina has been accessible and open to the media. Walker’s campaign, if not the candidate himself, was uneasy even with relatively friendly media outlets.
By the time Walker terminated his presidential bid, most of his grassroots support had already melted away. His rapid rise after a well-received speech to the Iowa Freedom Summit at the beginning of the year briefly united the conservative vote. Once that vote fragmented again, he was doomed to become everyone’s second choice. His operation had gotten far too big to downsize to a barebones campaign without creating the self-fulfilling look of a loser.
That’s good news for Fiorina, a Republican with rapidly growing support in search of a campaign apparatus capable of leveraging her newfound popularity into primary and caucus wins. Walker had a good donor network and was putting together something of a ground game in the early states, particularly Iowa. Imagine what those resources could do in the service of Fiorina’s emergent campaign.
There are other candidates who remain alive who could similarly benefit from Walker’s departure. Marco Rubio has already snagged Walker’s New Hampshire state co-chairman, a defection secured before the Walker 2016 campaign’s body was even cold. Ted Cruz is an eloquent and passionate advocate of conservative principles and there may also be a second look at Rand Paul.
But the candidates who have risen the furthest in this campaign cycle are Washington outsiders, non-politicians even. Like Trump and Ben Carson, Fiorina fits the bill in a way that even a talented group of Tea Party senators doesn’t. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat calls her the “hybrid candidate.”
“She’s got the outsider’s narrative and the insider’s smoothness, the anti-politician’s rhetoric and the politician’s care in how she marshals it,” he writes. Fiorina’s status as the only woman in the Republican presidential race has made her more effective in her attacks on both Trump and fading Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Fiorina may not have Walker’s track record of taking on the worst liberals and labor unions had to offer and winning in a blue state (during her only previous run for public office, also in a blue state, she lost). But there isn’t much evidence that this is what Republican primary voters are looking for this time around, or that all those Wisconsin fights really did much to prepare Walker for the rigors of a national campaign.
If someone like Fiorina neither inherits Walker’s institutional support nor gets the extended audition conservatives gave him earlier this year, the best-positioned candidates are pre-Reagan Republicans. There’s Jeb Bush, who is literally the son of the establishment, Walker’s bête noire Trump, who like Richard Nixon combines silent majority cultural conservatism with big-government economics.
At the very least, Fiorina now has a chance to make sure Walker’s loss is her gain.
