Opinionator: Can Republicans Paint the White House Red?

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

Tags:

Bush, Jeb, Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Elections, Senate, Presidential Election of 2016, Republican Party, Rove, Karl, United States Politics and Government

Democrats may dream of sixteen years of dominance, but on Nov. 8, 2016 it is entirely possible that Americans will elect a Republican president. It is even possible, although less likely, that Republicans will be in full control of the federal government: the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court.

A dominant theme in contemporary political commentary on the left, the right and the center is that the Republican Party faces a grave crisis of both demographics and ideology. But despite the cacophony of fault-finding, caution is in order before we declare the Republican Party down for the count.

To explore the possibility of a Republican revival in 2016, I spoke with a number of Republican strategists including Stuart Stevens, who ran the Romney campaign in 2012, Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage, a digital consulting company, and Bill McInturff, founder of Public Opinion Strategies.

Stevens is a critic of the doom-and-gloom approach. He argues that a successful 2016 Republican presidential scenario can be credibly pieced together. Here are some of the hypotheticals that might lead to victory.

One, Hillary Clinton chooses not to run or, as was the case in 2008, falls flat in the primaries and caucuses. This would leave Democrats with second-tier candidates, none of whom can inspire the overall turnout or the specific margins enjoyed by President Obama.

Two, public discontent with Obamacare grows. Young voters, a key to recent Democratic victories, bristle over the requirement to buy insurance or pay a fine. Corporate plans cut spousal coverage. Businesses replace full-time workers with part-timers, ineligible for benefits. Health insurance premiums continue to rise faster than inflation. The discontent with the Affordable Care Act on the part of the three major unions – the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite-Here – spreads throughout the labor movement. Glitches in rolling out the massive new healthcare program increase public opposition (the regulations governing the hiring of healthcare "navigators" to help consumers enroll total an estimated 13,900 words in the Federal Register). Increasing numbers of people cannot keep either their current doctor or their healthcare plan.

Three, the stock market and corporate profits rise, but employment continues to lag; more people drop out of the workforce; the job market continues to bifurcate, with work at the high and low ends, but less and less in the middle.

Four, the Republican primary electorate does not nominate Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky and instead picks Jeb Bush or another mainstream nominee.

Ruffini puts the case for 50-50 odds in 2016 in terms of his view that Hillary Clinton is the likely nominee, noting that she carries substantial baggage. "Clinton's currently favorable political position," Ruffini wrote me,

is a function of the aftermath of the 2008 campaign, where she gained in popularity amongst Republicans as a Democratic foil to Obama, and stayed above the partisan fray as Secretary of State. In 2016, that dynamic will no longer apply.

In addition, he said,

No one wants to say that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president; she is not. But there is a demonstrable bias in recent presidential elections towards a younger candidate being able to successfully contrast stylistically against an older one. Especially if the public mood pivots back towards change in 2016, this is something Clinton will need to navigate, as it seems likely right now that the Republican candidate will personify a generational shift in the electorate. Finally, it should be remembered that we saw how Clinton performed on the campaign trail in 2008 and the results weren't good.

Ruffini's bottom line:

Clinton is a formidable candidate who can rely on historic levels of support among women and can raise hundreds of millions of dollars online even before the general election. The celebrity factor will propel her. But she won't be able to defy gravity forever.

It's relatively easy to draw up a counter-scenario in which Republican prospects in 2016 are dim. Let's say:

Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate force a government shutdown inflicting damage on the economy.
The fight for the nomination forces all Republican candidates, including those from the mainstream, to shift to the right, undermining their general election prospects;
Republican primary voters go over the edge and nominate Cruz or Paul.
Hillary Clinton runs unopposed for the nomination, raises $1 billion or more before the conventions, while Republicans battle each other with the winner broke in August 2016.

Just as importantly, the Electoral College, which throughout the years of Republican ascendancy from the late 60s into the early 90s tilted to the right, now leans to the left. This map of the United States, "The Big Blue Wall," was put together by the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies:

The Republican Party's difficulties have prompted some sympathetic analysts to call for a reversal of trickle-down economic policies. Mark Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argue that Republicans should become

visible and persistent critics of corporate welfare: the vast network of subsidies and tax breaks extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to wealthy and well-connected corporations.

Even Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to an administration that passed two tax cuts favoring the affluent, has caught the populist bug, arguing "there is too much corporate welfare and there are too many breaks that benefit the big guys and the people who've already got it." With no evident embarrassment, Rove told an Aspen Institute conference on the future of the Republican Party:

So we got a tax system that benefits the big guy over the little guy and we need to reform it and we got a government with way too much benefits that flow to the people who've got the money that keeps us from providing the resources necessary to the people who don't have money and also keeps us all paying too much in taxes, because they're running up too much of debt, because most of that corporate welfare if not all of it, is being paid for by borrowed money we don't have.

David Leege, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, believes Republicans have a good shot in 2016 because their disparate and often conflicting factions "will unite around an even more elemental fear — threats to the preservation of white male rule." Leege argues in an email to the Times:

2016 could look good for Reps. They are the party of fresh faces. Dems are the party of old faces. Reps have taken advantage of Citizens United and will (illegally) do as good a job of coordinating almost limitless gifts between PACs and the candidate's campaign organization, as the Dems did in 2012 with "limited" funds.

Steve Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, is even more bullish on Republican prospects:

I think they have a better than 50-50 shot at the presidency. It is very hard for a party to win the presidency three times in a row — since WWII, only the run of Reagan-Bush. There are a lot of divisions in the G.O.P., but there is no shortage of respectable candidates.

The post-World War II historical record strongly favors a Republican victory in 2016, according to David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale. He pointed out that in five of the six "open" elections since World War II (open meaning without an incumbent candidate), the candidate representing the party holding the White House lost. In 2016, the Democratic nominee will fit that definition.

Both Mayhew and Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, contend that Republican power brokers should be able to force enough of a change in the direction of the party to be competitive. Lupia wrote in an email responding to a Times' inquiry asking him to assess the competitive strength of the parties:

Establishment Republicans have room to extend their base and their appeal. The incremental changes that we are seeing on issues such as immigration, same-sex marriage, and climate change set the stage for a person with conservative bona fides to draw support from the ideological center of the U.S. population. Slight changes in G.O.P. primary rules and more strategic use of money by establishment Republican money people will give centrists more advantages than they had in 2008 and 2012.

Along parallel lines, Mayhew wrote:

Generally speaking, out-parties adapt. They take advantage of various party-in-office erosions, they adjust to changing demographics, and they play a good game in candidate choice and issue positioning.

The issues at play in presidential campaigns are often different from those in House and Senate races. Control of the Senate could turn out to be a bigger hurdle for the Republican Party than winning the White House. Republicans have a decent chance of taking control next year, but even if they do, the party will have a tough time retaining control in 2016.

The view among non-partisan election experts on the 2014 Senate races is generally similar. Charlie Cook described the odds as

a little less than 50-50 for G.O.P. takeover. Don't know if you have seen our Senate math worksheet. Republicans have a very narrow but not uphill path to a majority. They have to almost run the table, but the states aren't tough ones.

Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of The Rothenberg Political Report, told me that he expects Republicans to pick up from 3 to 6 seats. "As you know, the Rs need to net 6 seats to take the Senate. So we characterize the Senate as 'in play'."

Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, wrote in an emailed response to a Times inquiry:

I look at it this way. Heavy odds that Republicans will pick up seats, net, in 2014. Right now, it looks like +3 or +4. They need +6 to gain control. So Democrats are early slight favorites to retain control of the Senate. All the Republicans need, though, is a medium-sized wave to take 6. They already probably have WV, SD, and MT — currently all D seats with vacating incumbents. It's 50-50 in AR for Sen. Mark Pryor (D) vs. Rep. Tom Cotton (R). Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Begich (D-AK) are slight favorites to hold their seats — but a medium wave could unseat them. That's potentially +6 for the G.O.P.

Cook, Rothenberg and Sabato are looking at the 2014 senate contests. In 2016, however, the advantage in Senate elections will shift back to the Democrats. Of the 34 Senators up for election, 24 are Republicans, included those holding seats in highly competitive states like New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The only 2016 Democratic seats in toss-up states are in Nevada and Colorado.

The ingredient missing so far in this discussion of the future of the Republican Party is the American business community. The Republican Party has been the political home of corporate America for generations.

At the moment, the Tea Party faction has become a major problem for business interests on at least three fronts. First, by blocking immigration reform, a top priority of the business lobby. Second, by calling for rejection of legislation raising the debt ceiling, the Tea Party promotes economic uncertainty, and uncertainty is itself anathema to commercial interests. Third, the radicalism of the Tea Party threatens the viability of the Republican Party, the political arm of business.

The future of the Republican Party will in large part be determined by the outcome of the internal struggle between the Tea Party faction and the pro-business establishment wing. Over the long haul, this is not a fight between equals. Prospects favor a revived pro-business, anti-regulatory Republican Party that purposefully narrowcasts — that is, carefully restricts to a select audience — its focus on divisive social and cultural issues, just as the Democratic Party, which had lost three presidential elections in a row, lowered its liberal profile in the 1990s. The compelling mandate for a national political party in the United States is not to serve as ideological advocate, but to win.