With the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination heating up, prepare for commentators to spout lots of conventional nonsense.
“The Iowa caucuses just aren’t friendly to establishment Republicans,” wrote The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake in an article disputing the notion that Jeb Bush is currently the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, at least in Iowa.
Bush may not be the front-runner in Iowa, but is it true that the Iowa caucuses are usually unfriendly to “establishment” candidates? It’s only true if you overlook 1980 when George H.W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses. And 1988 when Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush came in first and second, respectively. And 1996 when Bob Dole won the Iowa caucuses. And 2000 when George W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses. And 2012 when Mitt Romney basically tied for first in the Iowa caucuses with Rick Santorum, though history will record that Santorum actually edged out Romney by 34 votes when all the votes were finally counted. (Interestingly, Ron Paul ultimately won the lion’s share of Iowa’s delegates despite coming in third in the vote count due to, well, the insanity of the way the Iowa caucuses are set up and the passion of Paul’s supporters.)
If the word “establishment” has meaning, candidates with the last names Bush, Dole and Romney certainly qualify. They all seemed to do pretty well in the Iowa caucuses. Maybe it’s more difficult for them there. But at the end of the day, the establishment seems as often as not to do quite well in the first-in-the-nation presidential electoral contest.
The Washington Examiner’s David M. Drucker, one of the best political reporters in the business, recently talked to GOP chairmen in nine Iowa counties. Among his takeaways from those conversations was labels like “tea party” and “establishment” just don’t really matter all that much in the state.
“That doesn’t mean caucus-goers won’t be influenced by a candidate’s level of experience or positions on the issues they care about most,” Drucker wrote, after noting unseasoned political candidates like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina have impressed Iowa activists. “But leadership and ideology, as defined by their approaches to key issues, matter much more to this crowd than whether they’re labeled ‘Establishment’ or ‘Tea Party.’ Mitt Romney’s near-victory in the 2012 GOP caucus is cited as example No. 1. Showing up early and often to court voters doesn’t hurt, either.”
Then there is the notion that Jeb Bush as Republican front-runner is a media creation.
“What interests me now is watching Jeb Bush,” NBC’s Chuck Todd declared on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I have a Washington Post clip here. It says, ‘Jeb Bush has become the GOP front-runner for 2016 — so now what?’ And I’m sitting here going, since when do we have a front-runner who doesn’t lead in any polls?”
Polls this far out don’t mean a whole lot. But when Todd said this on Sunday, there weren’t just “any” polls which showed Bush in the lead, but many. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Bush leads all potential 2016 contenders nationally now that Mitt Romney has said he is not running, with his closest competitor Chris Christie seven percentage points behind him in the average.
Granted, most of these polls are pretty old. But the most recent national poll that’s included in the average — a Fox News poll from the end of January — has Bush leading his nearest competitors, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul, by two percentage points.
Bush also leads in the most recent poll of South Carolina from late January by Gravis Marketing, besting Huckabee and Scott Walker by seven percentage points. In Florida polling of the Republican primary, Bush holds a commanding lead, topping second place Marco Rubio by 17 percentage points in a January Quinnipiac poll.
A new poll of New Hampshire was released Wednesday showing Scott Walker in the lead in the Granite State, with Bush in a distant second, but when Todd claimed Bush wasn’t leading in any polls, Bush actually led in the RealClearPolitics polling average of New Hampshire surveys that didn’t include Mitt Romney. True, most of those polls were from last year, but still: Bush led in most of them and was on top when you averaged them. In fact, he still is on top when you average them, despite the latest poll placing him in second.
Again, front-runner status probably doesn’t mean all too much at this point — just ask President Rudy Giuliani. But if you had to choose one candidate as the front-runner now that Romney has taken his name out of consideration, Jeb Bush isn’t a bad choice. Contra Todd, he leads in most of the polls and is reportedly tallying up big numbers fundraising across the nation.
What both Todd and Blake, who are usually pretty solid political observers, probably had at the forefront of their minds was a recent Bloomberg poll of Iowa that had Bush in fifth place, behind Walker, Rand Paul, Huckabee and Ben Carson. But one poll does not tell the whole story.
One more constant refrain you here from political pundits and prognosticators is how immigration will be a pivotal factor in the Republican primaries and how Bush and Rubio’s stances on the issue could kill their candidacies.
Writing in the New Republic, Brian Beutler argued in December that Jeb Bush’s candidacy would be destroyed by his stance on immigration because, “Over the past two years, the right wing of the Republican Party has morphed into a movement singularly opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants.”
“That purpose deepened when President Obama announced a program to defer deportation for millions of immigrants with deep roots in the U.S,” he continued. “Bush will be less able to satisfy this segment of the GOP electorate than any other potential candidate.”
Theoretically, the same applies to Rubio since he was a key member of the Senate Gang of Eight that wrote the comprehensive immigration bill that ultimately died in the House. But the evidence that immigration will destroy either Rubio or Bush’s candidacies is slight. Most Republicans oppose President Obama’s unilateral action deferring deportations for potentially five million illegal immigrants and want to do more to secure our southern border, but the party as a whole is hardly a carbon copy of Steve King on the issue.
Indeed, polling has shown that a majority of Republican voters — often in excess of 70 percent — would support a bill that provides a pathway to legalization, or even citizenship, for many of the estimated 11 million of illegal immigrants in the country so long as certain conditions are met, like the illegal immigrants learning English and paying back taxes.
The Washington Examiner’s Drucker came to the same conclusion as it pertains to Iowa after interviewing those nine state GOP county chairmen.
“Like their fellow Republicans in Washington and around the country, Iowans are split on immigration, leaving room for various candidates who might have a record of favoring comprehensive reform,” he concluded.
There will be a lot of political commentary in the coming months as the GOP presidential primary becomes a sort of reality TV show on cable news. Some of the commentary will be good. Much of it will be bad. Buyer beware.