Romney Will Win the GOP Nomination

This is my first blog post after a 3-year hiatus. I took some time off for personal reasons, but now, in the midst of another election season, I feel like getting back into it, albeit on a limited basis.

I feel like I need to follow up on posts I made prior to my hiatus about who will win the GOP presidential nomination. As you may recall, I predicted, based on historical precedent, that if Mike Huckabee ran for the nomination, he would win, and if he didn't run and Palin did, she would win. Of course, neither of them ended up running. It would appear, at first glance, that no one in the GOP's monarchical hierarchy was running. However, even before Huckabee announced he wasn't running, the media treated Mitt Romney as though he was 2008's 2nd place finisher (this wasn't the case). I would argue that this treatment made Romney the de facto 2nd place finisher, similar to the way George W. Bush was a de facto incumbent in 2000. This would make Romney the only 2012 candidate with a spot in the hierarchy, and therefore the inevitable nominee.

Assuming Romney loses the general election, the 2nd place finisher this time around will be in the best position to get the GOP nomination in 2016. But what if that person is Ron Paul? He has a dedicated following of a sizable minority of the party and has conveyed a desire to stay in the race to the bitter end to rack up as many delegates as possible. But Ron Paul is 76 years old, and would be 80 in 2016; no one expects him to run again. Ron Paul's son, Rand, is a U.S. senator, however, and could very well run in 2016. I suspect that Rand could very well benefit from his father's run this time around and become the de facto 2012 2nd place finisher for 2016 (similar to the way Romney is the de facto 2nd place finisher now and George W. Bush was the de facto incumbent in 2000) and achieve the highest spot on the hierarchy.  Some will claim that the party establishment won't get behind Rand, and therefore he won't win.  But looking at the chart above, Barry Goldwater, an anti-establishment Republican, won the nomination in 1964.  If Goldwater did it before, Paul could do it again.

Aside from a lone example of historical precedent, there are other reasons to believe Rand could pull off getting the nomination despite establishment opposition.  An important one is changing demographics.  The population of the Republican party is aging, and four years from now that many more people from the (post) Cold War-era big-government George W. Bush Republicans will have died off.  Meanwhile, Ron Paul is currently the only candidate bringing new voters into the party and energizing the youth vote.  So while the neocons are dying, a whole new generation of libertarians will be flooding the Republican Party.  Many of the new, younger voters in 2016 will be people who never knew the Cold War and whose only experience with Republicanism is the disasters of the Bush presidency and the current Congress.  These voters will want to move away from George W. Bush's neoconservative Republican Party and toward a more libertarian Republican Party that could finally do away with the military-industrial complex.  As Alex Massie notes, Paul is "the purest rejection of Bushian conservatism available".


And as Ryan Lizza and Erick Erickson note, the reason for all this is because George W. Bush failed to provide Republicans with an heir to the throne.  Erickson, in fact, all but admits that there is a Republican monarchical hierarchy!

The reason this Republican primary season is so chaotic is because George W. Bush failed to have a successor. Had President Bush had a Vice President to run for President, Bush would have undoubtedly made different policy decisions, but even aside from that there would have been an ascertainable front runner coming from the Bush administration to win or lose.

Because there was not such a thing and because the GOP likes orderly processes, we had to go back to 2000 and dredge up John McCain.

The Republican field was unable to reboot because we had no logical successor coming out of the White House to either win or lose. We went back to McCain and have had to work our way back through unresolved issues from 2000. And now, when the field should be rebooted, we’re having to deal with Mitt Romney who should have been displaced by an heir in 2008 and instead, because the 2008 season did not reboot the crop of candidates, is now the guy three quarters of the GOP does not want who is about to be the nominee.

Bush didn't produce a Vice-presidential heir, so the Republicans had to go back to the next person in their hierarchy, John McCain, a person they didn't trust.  McCain lost, and given the Huckabee and Palin declined to run, Romney, another candidate they don't trust, became the de facto next-in-line.   If Romney loses, by 2016 a new generation of anti-neoconservative Republicans could be waiting to take down the party establishment.

One final thought, again from Erickson:

Our process is chaotic because Bush left us no heir to win or to be rejected through a cathartic process of locking in gains or moving on from Bush. Yes, this one is Bush’s fault. On the bright side, the Democrats will have the same problem in 2016 unless Obama ditches Biden now for Hillary.

Erickson would be right about the Democrats in 2016, except for a couple faulty assumptions.  One is that Biden won't run in 2016.  I wouldn't completely rule that out yet.  He will be old, but he doesn't have Dick Cheney's health problems, and he's run for president twice before, so he clearly has the ambition.  Biden's problem is that he doesn't have an enthusiastic base of support to draw from.  He would have to start out with the support of the party establishment.  But if there appears to be more enthusiasm for an Andrew Cuomo or a Brian Schweitzer candidacy,  the party establishment might quietly tell Biden to step aside and not embarrass himself.

The other faulty assumption Erickson makes is that Democrats are monarchical in their thinking like Republicans: that we need an established order or hierarchy in order to pick our nominee.  History hasn't shown that to be the case.  True, Democrats, like Republicans, tend to nominate incumbent VP's when they run for the presidency, but that's about as deep as the hierarchy goes.  Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama all never made an impact on the presidential circuit before becoming their party's nominees.  In  fact, one could argue that being next in line hurts you in a Democratic party primary more than it helps, aside from the incumbents.