Jim Newell has a good discussion here of why New Hampshire, which has sort of been in decline as a president-picker ever since Bill Clinton lost it and then won the presidency in 1992, could really end up being pivotal this year. The Iowa Republican party is very, very right-wing and more than a little weird. So it kind of makes sense that Cruz or Trump will win it. But it also kinda doesn’t matter since Iowa has a terrible history of picking presidents. Barack Obama is really the exception that proves the rule in recent history.
The problem is that if either of those two wins Iowa and then one or the other wins New Hampshire you start getting into an increasingly strained set of arguments for our anyone else ends up the nominee. As Jim puts it, “Rubio and Bush are each, by necessity, relying on the middle to back end of the primary calendar. We’re talking about big winner-take-all states up for grabs beginning March 15: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, et cetera.”
There are a lot of arguments out there to the effect that a Rubio or even a Bush can just hang tough until you get to the winner-take-all contests in March and after. But Jim’s reference to ‘necessity’ is key because that just flies in the face of everything we know about presidential contests basically since forever. It reminds me a bit of Rudy Giuliani’s plan to blow off the early states and stake his fate to Florida. The problem is that campaign psychology just does not work that way. If you’re getting killed in all the early states you won’t survive for the big states in the late Spring. That just doesn’t and won’t happen.
Now, one might argue that this year is fundamentally different. You could get through late January and into early March with a frontrunner that party leaders and a substantial number of Republicans voters don’t want as their nominee. If that happens, it could give a Rubio or a Bush a lot more staying power into the spring. But I tend to doubt it will work that way.
We’re already seeing signs of Republicans warming to the idea of a Trump nomination and presidency. You may have seen this Quinnipiac poll which showed that fully 50% of registered voters would be “embarrassed” by a Trump presidency. But only 20% of Republicans feel that way. That’s still quite a lot. But it’s not that many. And the number – as judged by analogous questions – seems to be falling. I think if Trump and/or Cruz dominate the first handful of contests, one of them will be the nominee. Whatever the ‘establishment’, which really barely exists in any coherent fashion, thinks about it now … well, that will change. People of all stripes have a great ability to decide that what they cannot prevent is in fact awesome. I would go as far as to say that the big thing to watch right now, the big event, isn’t so much Trump and Cruz’s poll numbers and whether they’ll hold up as the increasing signs that the Republican party is beginning the process of embracing that outcome.
