A Party on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Right up
until Saturday night, it appeared that the race for the Republican
nomination was about to rationalize itself along the lines that many
people, myself included, had expected for a while. Marco Rubio, coming
off his strong third in Iowa, had bounced up into the mid-teens in a
bunch of New Hampshire polls. This bounce suggested that he was poised
to be — as in Iowa — the candidate of late deciders, leaving him with at
least the strong second place finish that he needed to put Jeb Bush and
Chris Christie on life support, and possibly more if Donald Trump
dramatically underperformed his polls. The party establishment, such as
it is, was showing signs of deciding
on Rubio, the rest of the field was being winnowed, and a Trump-Ted
Cruz-Rubio three-way race — assuming no Trump collapse — seemed like it
could be upon us within weeks.
But then came the
debate, which went just fine for Rubio if you excised the five or ten
awful minutes when Chris Christie baited and bullied him into a strange,
painful, Miliband-esque
repetition of his (not all that great to begin with) talking points.
Sadly no political technologist has yet pioneered that kind of
retroactive excision, so Rubio is going into the final forty-eight hours
in New Hampshire with a bad debate moment that plays directly into his
foes’ main line of attack — that he’s a callow scripted smoothie —
hanging over his head. Which, in turn, raises the odds that someone else
might be the candidate of late deciders … and after a debate in which
nobody laid a glove on him, that someone else could very well be John Kasich,
who has the distinction of being the establishment Republican least
equipped for a long drawn-out post-New Hampshire primary campaign.
At which point we
would be in truly chaotic territory, in which the Republican Party’s
ideological center, such as it is, would have great difficulty holding. A Rubio-Cruz-Trump race, as I’ve pointed out before,
would already be the most ideologically consequential primary battle
the G.O.P. has featured in decades if not generations. But at least it
would be a relatively orderly battle, in which most of the party
leadership would end up behind the Florida senator, rather than turning
the knives on one another. If Rubio can’t consolidate things, though —
if he falls into a tie with Jeb, let’s say, while Kasich is alone in
second place — then we’re in a situation where Jeb might stick around
till Florida and Kasich till Ohio, both on March 15th, an eternity away.
Meanwhile Trump would have an actual win under his belt and Cruz would
have running room in the SEC primary, meaning that the delegate leaders a
month from would be all-but-guaranteed to be a candidate running on increasingly Bernie Sanders-ish rhetoric and a candidate feared by G.O.P. elites (on reasonable grounds) as the Barry Goldwater of 2016.
I do not believe, to
quadruple (or whatever) down on my not-Trump predictions, that in this
scenario the party leadership would eventually resign itself to the
Donald, and especially not given the way he’s running now.
But if Rubio drops back into the pack and Kasich emerges as the clear
New Hampshire winner on the moderate/establishment flank, setting up a
Trump-Cruz battle for South Carolina, then we might be starting to
approach a universe with only two genuinely plausible scenarios: Either
a contested convention with Trump as some kind of kingmaker, or yes, Republican nominee Ted Cruz.
I’m not going to say that I saw this coming, since I really did expect a Rubio consolidation before now. But here’s a post
I wrote from long ago, in the age before Trump, that did stress the
contingency of the “party decides” mechanism in primary campaigns, and
the lurking possibility that sometimes “the establishment fractures,
fails, loses.” That argument seems prescient now, a day before the first
primary — and so does this post,
from September, on what Trump might mean, which concluded by noting
that while “the Republican Party isn’t going anywhere … what the
Republican Party is actually going to be, come the presidential campaign
of 2024, is a very open question.”
Except that instead of “come 2024,” I might now be inclined to say, “come this fall’s campaign” instead.
Over to you, New Hampshire.
end quote from:
| New York Times (blog) | - |
Right
up until Saturday night, it appeared that the race for the Republican
nomination was about to rationalize itself along the lines that many
people, myself included, had expected for a while.
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