Polling about the 2016 presidential race doesn’t mean much right now, but that doesn’t mean the invisible primary isn’t going on as we speak.
This week had two great examples about how to think, and how not to think, about the 2016 presidential nomination contests. The first came in the example of a new poll in The Washington Post that purportedly shows that, “…the contest for the GOP nomination in 2016 is as wide open as any in the modern era.“ And while I’d agree that it is a pretty wide open contest, the fact remains that it is wide open because there are a number of qualified GOP candidates and no incumbent Vice President this cycle. All the polling really shows is that lots of people in the American electorate still don’t have very strong opinions about many potential GOP presidential nominees’ chances in the 2016 election cycle.
But this is to be expected. After all, most Americans don’t pay that much attention to politics and so haven’t formed opinions about people like Scott Walker or Marco Rubio yet. Instead its established politicians like Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney that have the highest level of support and disapproval in the poll, but that’s probably just because Romney recently ran for president and Hillary has been in the political spotlight for 20 years now more than anything else.
A better way to look at the 2016 nomination contests would be to follow major party events like CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, that is going on right now. These are the sorts of events in the invisible primary that might allow one of the lesser known candidates on the GOP side to raise their national profile or make inroads with important party elites. As Jonathan Bernstein pointed out:
Republicans are contending with a large field of candidates whose ideological and policy profiles are more or less identical, and who have conventional qualifications for the presidency. Yet none has any particularly strong claim to the nomination or even to the leadership of particular groups of Republicans. That’s exactly the kind of environment in which intraparty buzz and personal campaigning should make a significant difference. Party actors will be choosing from a group that includes Ryan, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Mike Pence and several others, and there isn’t much to help distinguish among them.
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To be sure it is pretty hard to determine who is “winning CPAC” at any given movement, especially for someone who is not a conservative like yours truly. But if the overall convention conveys a general sense of say a new “it boy ” to replace Chris Christie, well that could just mean something. At the very least you can play the highly subjective game of trying to rate politicians basic political skills. For example Ted Cruz’s decision to leave the convention of 11,000 conservative activists to give a speech to 100 so people about how Iranian EMP weapons could kill, “tens of millions of Americans.” Yeah, he probably has a long way to go before he’s ready for prime time.
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Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP