For 2016, GOP will need to determine what it stands for
Republican House Speaker John Boehner came to the first congressional district for a second time Thursday night to headline a rally for State Sen. Lee Zeldin in his tight, multimillion-dollar battle with six-term Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop. Credit: Newsday / Thomas A. Ferrara
The 2014 election is in the books, or at least in the Wikipedia entries. And just as the last trick-or-treat of Halloween must be followed by Christmas-ornament sales and tinny renditions of "Jingle Bell Rock," so must the election tallies lead immediately into analysis of the 2016 presidential race. The big question is how the national Republican Party will capitalize on its shellacking of Democrats. That's tough to answer because there's no such thing as a national Republican Party. There are, instead, at least four separate ideologies doing business under the Republican Party's very big tent.
An average of national polls by the website RealClearPolitics shows Hillary Clinton with 63.4 percent of support from likely Democratic primary voters. Not exactly nipping at her heels (and to be fair, allegations that he's an ardent heel-nipper have not been proven) is Vice President Joe Biden, with 11.4 percent. No one else has any support to speak of.
The average of national polls of Republicans shows Sen. Rand Paul leading with 11.8 percent. Former Gov. Jeb Bush has 11.6, former Gov. Mike Huckabee 11.3, Gov. Chris Christie 10.6, Rep. Paul Ryan 10, Gov. Rick Perry 7.8, Sen. Marco Rubio 7, and Sen. Ted Cruz 6.6. But it's not just that Republicans have many candidates. The issue is the Republican Party has a lot of ideas, hopes, dreams, plans and beliefs, many of them contradictory.
Even if Clinton didn't have the overwhelming support of Democrats, her ideas would, because the Democratic Party isn't nearly as ideologically split as the GOP. She and President Barack Obama had to scrape around to find stuff to argue about in 2008. The only question was whether we wanted an aging white woman who believed in a massive expansion of government health care, higher tax rates on the rich, immigration reform and more federal spending on education and infrastructure, or a younger black man who believed in . . . the same stuff. At the beginning of the 2008 Democratic race, there were 10 people seeking the presidential nomination (Remember Chris Dodd? Mike Gravel?) and few significant disagreements between them.
No, the issue isn't that Republicans have many candidates who can attract support, and no one who can monopolize it. It's that those candidates and their followers disagree on so much. This is an organization that includes the dovish, immigrant-loving libertarian Rand Paul; the "old guard," pro-Common Core, fluent-in-Spanish Bush; the socially permissive and behaviorally explosive Yankee Christie; and the socially puritanical Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum. It is not a coherent political party. It's more like an annual block party where the attendees aren't all friends and some folks inevitably fold up their lawn chairs and huff off. Add in the bookish Ryan, the pamphletish Perry and the furiously anti-immigration-reform son-of-a-Cuban immigrant Cruz, and you have, well, confusion.
This doesn't matter much in House and Senate races, because candidates only have to sway voters in their home districts or states, where it's often their personal brand of Republican politics that is popular. But in a presidential election, it's hard to bring all the factions together for one candidate.
Yet, this diversity could be a strength in the presidential election. Democrats are hell on thinkers who aren't in lockstep with the program. The GOP now seems to welcome many disparate ideas, even if they haven't done as well with different skin tones and accents.
What the GOP must figure out is how to get all of its factions to support the same candidate for president. Democratic candidates don't have to worry about this, because, deep down, they're mostly all the same anyway.
