The Four Faces of the Republican Party and the Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination

H. Olsen, D. Scala

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137577481
• eBook ISBN: 9781137577535
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Four Faces of the Republican Party clearly describes how Republican Presidential nominating contests unfold. Its focus on party factions allows readers to understand the process and to predict who the eventual nominee will be. In particular, the authors explore why a conservative party always nominates candidates favored by the party's establishment and why evangelical conservatives always emerge as one of the two final contenders for the nomination. This book is essential reading for anyone – professor, student, journalist, consultant, or candidate – who wishes to understand, report on, or influence a Republican Presidential nomination contest.

1

Republican Presidential Politics

Abstract: This chapter lays out the outline of the book, an analysis of the Republican presidential primary electorate, and reviews the literature on presidential nomination campaigns. Using primary exit poll data, the authors will profile four factions of the Republican Party: moderates and liberals; somewhat conservative voters; very conservative evangelicals; and very conservative secular voters. Scholars typically focus on momentum and elite influence as key factors in determining the nomination. The authors argue that it is also important to understand the factions of a political party and their interactions. Candidates first aim to become champions of one or more factions, and then attempt to build coalitions with other factions in the later stages of the nomination process.

Keywords: presidential elections; presidential primaries; Republican Party

Olsen, Henry, and Dante J. Scala. The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137577535.0006.

The common wisdom holds that the contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination will boil down to a joust between the “establishment” and the “insurgents.” The former will allegedly be more moderate and the latter more conservative. Since most polls for two decades have shown that around two-thirds to 70 percent of self-described Republicans call themselves conservative, this elite narrative will focus on just how much the establishment candidate will need to be pulled to the right in order to fend off his insurgent challenger. And since the Tea Party has clearly become a vocal and powerful insurgent element in the GOP, the narrative will focus on two other questions: Who will gain Tea Party favor and emerge as the insurgent candidate? And can the establishment candidate escape becoming Tea Partyized during the primary season and therefore remain a viable general-election candidate?

The common wisdom has the advantage of being a neat, coherent, and exciting story. It also allows political journalists to do what they like to do most, which is to focus on the personalities of the candidates and the tactics they employ. It has only one small problem. It is wrong.

Exit and entrance polls of Republican primaries and caucuses going back to 2000 show that the Republican presidential electorate is remarkably stable. It does not divide neatly along establishment-versus-conservative lines. Rather, the GOP contains four discrete factions that are based primarily on ideology, with elements of class and religious background tempering that focus. Open nomination contests during this period are resolved first by how candidates become favorites of each of these factions, and then by how they are positioned to absorb the voting blocs of the other factions as their favorites drop out. Over the following pages, we will discuss how these factions of the Republican Party

consistently desire different qualities in a nominee, and are drawn to candidates who best display those qualities;

regularly voice different policy priorities that they wish their nominee to pursue first and foremost;

line up behind certain candidates as their champions, based on their qualities, policy priorities, and perceived viability to gain the nomination; and

persist in their support of their champions until they drop out of the race, then move toward second-best options in the remaining field if their favorites depart.

This analysis allows us to explain what we consistently observe. It explains why a conservative party rarely nominates the most conservative candidate. It explains why the party often seems to nominate the “next in line.” And, perhaps most importantly, it explains why certain candidates emerge as the “surprise” candidate in each race. Analysts and advisers who understand this elemental map of the Republican electorate will be better positioned to navigate the shoals of the nominating river and bring their favored candidate safely home to port.

Republican voters fall into four rough camps. They are: moderate or liberal voters; somewhat conservative voters; very conservative, evangelical voters; and very conservative, secular voters. Each of these groups supports extremely different types of candidates. Each of these groups has also demonstrated stable preferences over the past 15 years. Using exit-poll data from the 2000, 2008, and 2012 Republican presidential primaries, we will present a profile of each of these party factions.¹ The Republican presidential primaries in 2000, 2008, and 2012 are an excellent opportunity to study the Republican primary electorate without confounding factors. All of these contests were free-for-alls, without an incumbent president or vice president who would be expected to win the nomination of his party easily (Mayer 2010), as George W. Bush did in 2004. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney declined to run for president, leaving the contest open to numerous contenders. The last three Republican contests allow us to observe how the various factions of the party electorate reacted toward various candidates as they attempt to build coalitions that would deliver them their party’s nomination.

Moderate and liberal Republicans

The bloc of moderates and liberal voters is surprisingly strong in Republican presidential primaries and caucuses, comprising the second-largest voting bloc with approximately 25–30 percent of all GOP voters nationwide. They are especially strong in early voting states such as New Hampshire (where they have comprised between 45 and 49 percent of the GOP electorate between 1996 and 2012), Florida, and Michigan. They are, however, surprisingly numerous even in the Deep South, the most conservative portion of the country. Moderates or liberals have comprised between 31 and 39 percent of the South Carolina electorate since 1996, outnumbering or roughly equaling very conservative voters in each of those years.

Moderate and liberal voters prefer someone who is both more secular and less fiscally conservative than their somewhat conservative cousins. In 1996, for example, they preferred Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander over Bob Dole. In 2000, they were the original McCainiacs, supporting a candidate who backed campaign-finance regulation, opposed tax cuts for the top bracket, and criticized the influence of Pat Robertson. In 2008, they stuck with John McCain, giving him their crucial backing in New Hampshire and providing his margin of victory in virtually every state. In 2012, they began firmly in Ron Paul’s or Jon Huntsman’s camp. Paul and Huntsman together won 43 percent of their vote in Iowa and 50 percent in New Hampshire. Once it became clear that their candidates could not win, however, the moderate-liberal faction swung firmly toward former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in his fights with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

This latter movement is perhaps most indicative of their true preferences. The moderate or liberal voter seems motivated by a candidate’s secularism above all else. They will always vote for the Republican candidate who seems least overtly religious and are motivated to oppose the candidate who is most overtly religious. This makes them a secure bank of votes for a somewhat conservative candidate who emerges from the early stages of the primary season in a battle with a religious conservative, as occurred in 1996, 2008, and 2012.

“Somewhat conservative” Republicans

The most important of these groups is the one most journalists do not understand and therefore ignore: the somewhat conservative voters. This group is the most numerous nationally and in many states, comprising 35–40 percent of the national GOP electorate. While the numbers of liberal and moderate, very conservative, and evangelical voters vary significantly by state, somewhat conservative voters are found in similar proportions in every state. They are not very vocal, but they form the bedrock base of the Republican Party.

They also have a significant distinction: they always back the winner. The candidate who garners their favor has won each of the last four open races. This tendency runs down to the state level as well. Look at the exit polls from virtually any state caucus or primary since 1996 and you will find that the winner either received a plurality, or ran roughly even, among the somewhat conservative voters.

These voters’ preferred candidate profile can be inferred from the characteristics of their favored candidates: Bob Dole in 1996, Bush in 2000, McCain in 2008, and Romney in 2012. They like even-keeled men with substantial governing experience. They like people who express conservative values on the economy or social issues, but who do not espouse radical change. They like people who are optimistic about America; the somewhat conservative voter rejects the “culture warrior” motif that characterized Pat Buchanan’s campaigns. They are conservative in both senses of the word; they prefer the ideals of American conservatism while displaying the cautious disposition of the Burkean.

Very conservative evangelicals

The third-largest group is the moderates’ bête noire: the very conservative evangelicals. This group is small compared to the others, comprising around one-fifth of all GOP voters. They gain significant strength, however, from three unique factors. First, they are geographically concentrated in Southern and border states, where they can comprise a quarter or more of a state’s electorate. Moreover, somewhat conservative voters in Southern and border states are also likelier to be evangelical, and they tend to vote for more socially conservative candidates than do their non-Southern, nonevangelical ideological cousins. Finally, they are very motivated to turn out in caucus states, such as Iowa and Kansas, and form the single largest bloc of voters in those races.

These factors have given very conservative, evangelical-backed candidates unusual strength in Republican presidential contests. The evangelical favorite, for example, surprised pundits by winning Iowa in 2008 and 2012, and supplied the backing for second-place Iowa finishers Pat Robertson in 1988 and Pat Buchanan in 1996. Their strength in the Deep South and the border states also allowed Mike Huckabee rather than Romney to emerge as McCain’s final challenger in 2008, and that strength combined with their domination of the February 7 caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado allowed Santorum to emerge as Romney’s challenger in 2012.

This group prefers candidates who are very open about their religious beliefs, place a high priority on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and see the United States in decline because of its movement away from the faith and moral codes of its past. Their favored candidates tend to be economically more open to government intervention. Santorum, for example, advocated policies friendly to manufacturing, and Buchanan opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s. This social conservatism and economic moderation tends to place these candidates out of line with the center of the Republican Party, the somewhat conservative voter outside the Deep South. Each evangelical-backed candidate has lost this group decisively in primaries in the Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Coast, and mountain states. Indeed, they even lose them in Southern-tinged states like Virginia and Texas, where McCain’s ability to win the somewhat conservative voters, coupled with huge margins among moderates and liberals, allowed him to hold off Huckabee in one-on-one face-offs in 2008.

Very conservative, secular voters

The final and smallest GOP tribe is the one that Washington D.C. elites are most familiar with: the very conservative, secular voters. This group comprises a tiny 5–10 percent nationwide and thus never sees its choice emerge from the initial races to contend in later stages. Jack Kemp and Pete DuPont in 1988; Steve Forbes or Phil Gramm in 1996 and 2000; Fred Thompson or Romney in 2008; Herman Cain, Rick Perry, or Gingrich in 2012: each of these candidates showed promise in early polling but foundered in early races once voters became more familiar with each of the candidates. Secular moderates and somewhat conservative voters preferred candidates with less materialistic, sweeping economic radicalism while very conservative evangelicals went with someone singing from their hymnal. Thus, these voters quickly had to choose which of the remaining candidates to support in subsequent races.

This small but influential bloc likes urbane, fiscally oriented men. Thus, they preferred Kemp or DuPont in 1988, Forbes or Gramm in 1996, Forbes in 2000, and Romney in 2008. In 2012, this group was tempted by Perry until his lack of sophistication became painfully obvious in the early debates. It then flirted with Gingrich until his temperamental issues resurfaced in Florida. After that, faced with the choice of Santorum or Romney, it swung behind Romney en masse.

The latter example is in fact this group’s modus operandi. They invariably see their preferred candidate knocked out early, and they then invariably back whoever is supported by the somewhat conservative bloc. Forbes’s early exit from the 2000 race, for example, was crucial to Bush’s ability to win South Carolina against the McCain onslaught. In New Hampshire, Bush won only 33 percent of the very conservative vote; Forbes received 20 percent. With Forbes out of the race, however, Bush was able to capture 74 percent of the very conservative vote in South Carolina.

The 2016 primaries and caucuses: champion your faction, build your coalition

The road to the Republican nomination formally begins with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Candidates for the presidential nomination of their party (as well as the media that cover them) regard these first-in-the-nation states as the dispenser of that magical elixir known as “momentum.” In the frantic process of “winnowing,” pundits often draw a cause-and-effect relationship between a candidate’s ability to exceed the expectations of conventional media wisdom, and his potential to convert performance in these first two contests into success in subsequent primaries. Excessive focus on the media-expectations game leads to a narrow reading of the vote totals, with a lack of serious thought about what those votes represent in terms of core party constituencies. Shifting the focus to the “core fundamentals” of a candidate’s performance—that is, how the candidate performed among the core Republican constituencies we have described earlier—offers a perspective that tempers the exuberance regarding the significance of strong candidate performance in the early states. Concentrating on core fundamentals of a candidate’s support also puts perspective on the effects of media perception on a candidate’s performance.

In this chapter, we develop the concept of early primaries and caucuses as “knockout rounds.” These first contests in the process not only bestow momentum. They also crown the champions of the various factions within the Republican Party. Santorum and Huckabee, for example, did not benefit from winning Iowa simply because they outperformed media expectations. They also benefited because they won Iowa by successfully courting conservative evangelicals—and thus became the national champion of that faction the day after Iowa. In similar fashion, McCain and Romney gained from winning New Hampshire by earning the allegiance of moderate and liberal Republicans seeking a champion.

After the knockout rounds, surviving candidates seek to build a coalition of voters from other factions. The task of coalition-building helps to explain why, in a party widely assumed to be moving rightward, candidates championing the moderate faction of the party (such as McCain in 2008, and Romney in 2012) have been more successful in building coalitions than their more conservative competitors for the nomination. Tea Party candidates, in contrast, face the following dilemma: They either must deny any breathing space to a more evangelical candidate, or they must emulate Bush in 2000 in having enough appeal to other factions. The likelier outcome is a repeat of the traditional GOP three-way war between its somewhat conservative center and the two large ideological wings: the moderate secularists and conservative evangelicals.

Past need not be prologue, however. In the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence decides to go back into a hellish desert to rescue a straggler. His close aide, Sherif Ali, tells him not to bother, that the straggler’s fate is foreordained. “It is written,” Ali tells the Englishman. “Nothing is written,” Lawrence angrily yells back. He then goes into the desert and returns with his man. Lawrence could conquer the desert and its heat through his will, but he could not will the desert away. GOP aspirants would do well to emulate Lawrence’s will and resourcefulness, but they too cannot will away their surroundings. Whichever candidate from whatever faction emerges, he or she will have done so by understanding the four species of GOP voters and using their wiles and the calendar to their advantage. For truly, as Ali said of Lawrence, for some men nothing is written until they write it.

The political science of presidential primaries

Our study draws upon four decades’ worth of scholarship on the modern presidential nomination process. Those wishing to learn more about the political science of presidential nominations, and how we see our work contributing to that body of knowledge, will find the following pages of interest. Those primarily interested in our analysis of exit-poll data may skim the following section, or bookmark it for future reference, and move on to Chapter 2.

The modern presidential nomination process began in 1972, after Democratic Party reforms ended a process in which state and local party bosses decided who their standard bearer would be in the November general election. In the new, more democratic system, candidates now had to build national campaigns in order to accumulate a majority of convention delegates in a series of caucuses and primaries. Surprises occurred immediately: liberal South Dakota Senator George McGovern upset frontrunner Maine Senator Ed Muskie to b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Republican Presidential Politics
• 2  Moderate and Liberal Republican Primary Voters
• 3  Somewhat Conservatives
• 4  Very Conservative Evangelicals
• 5  Very Conservative Seculars
• 6  The Paths to the 2016 Republican Nomination
• Bibliography
• Index