While the Republican base is more motivated than ever to win back Congress in 2014 and the White House in 2016, there is no clear frontrunner in the race for president, according to the latest poll from Quinnipiac University.
“We’re a little less than three years away from the primary starting. It is very early,” Peter Brown, Assistant Director as the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said at a press conference Wednesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “The one take away from this worth considering is that there is no frontrunner. That like some other elections or other parties, the Republicans have no clear leader. That’s different and, perhaps, interesting that it’s been in the past.”
In the poll, Florida Senator Marco Rubio led the pack of potential GOP nominees with 19 percent, closely followed by 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul with 17 percent and 15 percent, respectively.
Quinnipiac surveyed 1,711 registered voters, including 712 Republicans, between March 26-April 1. The study had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent among all respondents and 3.7 percent among Republicans.
Rubio and Paul have both been in the spotlight of late. Rubio gave this year’s Republican response to the State of the Union address – which led to the infamous “water bottle gate” incident, while Paul took to the Senate floor last month with a 13-hour talking filibuster about the use of drones on American soil. Both were also well received at CPAC last month, as Paul and Rubio came in first and second, respectively, in this year’s straw poll.
Unfortunately, history is not on their side, as the American people typically prefer to see a governor elected to the presidency over a member of Congress. Quinnipiac’s poll confirmed that finding, as respondents said that they preferred a governor over a member of Congress as the presidential nominee by nearly three-to-one.
The GOP has only ever nominated one House member in history – Abraham Lincoln – and of the six Senators who secured the nomination, the last one to win the presidency was Warren G. Harding in 1920.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fared best with Republicans among the chief executives included in the poll with 14 percent, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush with 10 percent.
What the Republican Party needs is a new Ronald Reagan or a Republican version of Bill Clinton, Brown told Red Alert Politics.
“It’s clearly a conservative party. The problems for the Republicans are they have to have a message that appeals to people who may not think they’re conservative,” Brown said. “One of Bill Clinton’s great strengths, one of Ronald Reagan’s great strengths was that people projected their views on them, and, in fact, he was able to unite their respective parties.”
Is Rubio the party’s savior, will Paul still keep Americans standing with him or will another Republican emerge as the de factor party leader between now and 2016? While we can’t exactly predict the future, the next few years will definitely proved to be interesting for the GOP.
