WASHINGTON — The 2014 primary season, while leaving the Republicans in good shape for the fall elections against the Democrats, has done little to quiet their internal turmoil or to provide a winning formula going forward.
WASHINGTON — The 2014 primary season, while leaving the Republicans in good shape for the fall elections against the Democrats, has done little to quiet their internal turmoil or to provide a winning formula going forward.
As Republicans struggle to understand the electoral earthquake that cost House Majority Leader Eric Cantor his suburban Richmond, Virginia seat on Tuesday, the party confronts a paradox: It is dominated more by conservatives than at any time in memory and yet riven with divisions, including over issues that barely registered even two years ago.
That presents a tricky challenge to those who are seeking the 2016 GOP nomination in a presidential primary where there will be splits over immigration, trade, the government’s role in education, and foreign policy, among other topics.
Internal battles have been waged over issues as large as whether to provide a path to citizenship for people who have entered the country illegally and the Common Core standards for schools to smaller, more symbolic ones, such as whether to eliminate the Export-Import Bank. The dynamics of the issues and the coalitions around them are shifting so rapidly that what looks like a safe position today could be a lethal one by the time the Iowa caucuses roll around.
The dissonance was on display over the weekend at two events where the party’s potential 2016 contenders were out in force.
At the GOP state convention in Iowa, former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who won the 2012 caucuses, was sounding the populist theme that has been at the center of his message this year.
“Years ago, when I was growing up, the Republican Party was the country club set, it was the corporate set. It was the 1 percent,” Santorum told the gathering. “If you look at the surveys right now, those folks aren’t voting Republican anymore, ladies and gentlemen. The 1 percent are not Republicans, by and large.”
But, Santorum lamented, “our message is all about corporatism and business.”
That this is a problem would have come as a surprise in tony Park City, Utah, where 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney was holding a schmoozefest at which his biggest donors mingled with at least a half-dozen of the figures being talked about as prospective 2016 candidates.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee offered the well-heeled GOP establishment an affirmation. “This nonsense going around about how we’ve got to be apologetic about people having done well is crazy,” he said.
One thing is becoming clear: Having it both ways on anything is becoming more and more difficult in the Republican Party.
“It is going to be very hard to game that out, for a candidate to be safe on all those issues,” said Lanhee Chen, who was policy director for Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and corporate establishment favorite who had to battle a series of upstart challengers on his way to the 2012 nomination.
“They’re all going to have some explaining to do,” added former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who was an early casualty in the battle for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. “We have seen that happen every cycle before, and each time it gets a little tougher.”
The party is more consistently to the right today than it has been in modern times, certainly more than it was in Ronald Reagan’s days. The Gallup poll has about 70 percent of Republicans identifying themselves as conservative.
But arising within that broad worldview are an increasing number of policy trip wires — separating the corporate-friendly establishment branch of the party from the passionate tea party faction, the stalwart social conservatives from the ascendant libertarians.
No prospective presidential candidate fits comfortably into all of those worlds, said Matthew Dowd, who was a top strategist for George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
He cited such disparate figures as firebrand tea party champion Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, libertarian Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whom many in the establishment are yearning to see run.
“Every one of them has elements of it, but nobody has a unifying message,” Dowd said.
And just because Republicans often sound alike doesn’t mean they act alike, argues Chris Chocola, president of the fiscally conservative group Club for Growth.
“They all say the same thing,” favoring limited government and less debt, Chocola said. “The problem is, only a few of them actually do that.”