With all the polls out about the 2016 presidential race, all of which show Hillary Clinton with a solid lead over every GOP contender, it’s important to remember that it is always hard for a party to win a third term in the White House. Always. But there’s another factor we’ve seen this week which is important to note and follow. Is the Indiana ‘religious liberty’ debacle a portent for 2016 that will make it more like the 2010 and 2012 cycles.
Remember, in 2014 the GOP had a number of things going for it. One was the historical weight of the off-year election in a two term president’s 6th year in office. Another was a senate map strongly weighted toward the GOP. There was also the heavily gerrymandered House (which is even more about the increasingly partisan divide between cities and rural areas). But that will remain in place at least through 2020.
The other really big thing was that Republicans generally didn’t say anything themselves and made everything about President Obama – a very winning strategy. That required keeping all the self-defeating and brand-damaging culture war baggage behind the curtain as much as possible. Knocking zany candidates out early was a key part of that.
But with Jeb Bush especially you can see the beginnings of something quite different with the Indiana story: mainstream GOP candidates pulled not just to the right but to the center-phobic cultural right by culture war blowups like Indiana. The open nature of the context and the aggressive presence of the likes of Ted Cruz makes it particularly challenging for general election friendly candidates like Bush to hold their own against the gravitational pull of the social conservative right. And others like Scott Walker are more used to intensely polarized politics of the greater Milwaukee region which has been key to his success in Wisconsin but I suspect will not play well at all in a general election.
