Does the GOP need a FrankenCandidate?By LARRY J. SABATO
July 14, 2014
Did you ever see the documentary A Perfect Candidate? It was about Oliver North’s 1994 challenge to U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, a Democrat from Virginia. Despite the title, North turned out to be less than perfect; he lost to a scandal-wounded but resilient Robb despite a Republican tidal wave.
There will never be a perfect candidate, unless brilliant genetic engineers assisted by Watson the computer decide to undertake the task in the distant future. Until then, parties are left with flawed human beings, those bundles of virtues and vices that get proctoscopic treatment during long campaigns.
As long as she runs, Hillary Clinton appears to check most of the boxes that Democratic activists require, and one of her advantages is that her strengths and weaknesses are unusually well known. It’s hard to believe that voters will learn anything big about Hillary in 2016 that they don’t already know or suspect.
Not so for the potential nominees of the Grand Old Party. Republicans lack not only a frontrunner but also politicians who could thread every needle thrust forward by the party’s interest groups while still remaining electable in November.
For a moment, though, let’s drop the naysaying. Suppose the Republicans could construct an ideal contender for 2016—someone who could actually win without repealing the essential components of the GOP platform. What would the candidate look like?
POLITICO cartoonist Matt Wuerker, with some brainstorming (but not artistic) help from myself and the U.Va. Center for Politics’ Crystal Ball team, has cleverly assembled some of the possible “body parts” for the ideal Republican competitor. You can be the judge, but the internal contradictions of ideology and personality would likely rip apart this friendly Frankenstein fairly quickly. No party can have everything, a White House nominee cannot be all things to all people and choices must be made.
The Republican eventually crowned in Cleveland is bound to be pro-free markets, pro-life on abortion and critical of Obamacare, high taxes, big spending and massive debt, to mention just a handful of issues. Political parties, with a few historical exceptions (such as William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and George McGovern in 1972 for the Democrats and Barry Goldwater in 1964 for the Republicans), prefer evolution to revolution.
Yet even some hidebound conservative Republicans understand that their party needs to change or else conceivably go the way of the Whigs. Losing 80 percent of the nonwhite vote, at least 60 percent of young people, and around two-thirds of single women, as the GOP White House nominee now does normally, appears to be a formula for consistent defeat, especially when demographic changes favor disproportionate growth in most of the voter categories where Republicans have the least appeal. So is there a reasonable evolutionary path for the GOP that could produce a Cleveland Concordat—a platform with sufficient red meat to turn out hungry conservatives but enough tasty fruit, vegetables and dessert for persuadable moderates?
You know the next line: It won’t be easy. Conservatives will insist that no real change is needed since a hard-right nominee will generate record turnout among the true-believing base (as though the same nominee won’t generate high turnout among the Democratic faithful who fear the hard right). Other Republicans will say a congenial Reaganesque nominee is all that’s required to charm voters into amnesia about the party’s rough edges. Maybe, but there’s really been no Reagan since Reagan.
Even assuming the GOP nominee will have the requisite charisma, surely the party would have to present a somewhat different face. So what would a Republican winner have to say and do? Here’s a partial menu from which to pick and choose.
Act on changing demographics: Republican leaders have been urging this since the party’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” report from March 2013. Without a reasonable immigration plan to run on, the nominee will have a hard time improving much on Mitt Romney’s awful 2012 percentages among Hispanics (27 percent) and Asian-Americans (26 percent). Substance matters more than image, but diversifying the GOP ticket can’t hurt. The era of two white males per ticket ended with Romney-Ryan. Assuming Republicans have something to sell to minorities—not just symbolic identity politics but issue positions that appeal to targeted groups—the ticket must campaign aggressively in those communities. Otherwise, key states that used to be solid pieces of winning GOP electoral maps—such as Colorado and Florida—become harder to win.
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