Candidates face off in 2016 race
No matter their party, obstacles are ahead.
WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign got fully underway this past week with a flurry of announcements, road trips and rallies that will roll across the country with increasing intensity for the next year and a half.
Most of what grabs headlines in the coming campaign will have little or no impact on who wins, past experience has shown. Underneath the hoopla, two clashing realities will shape what is likely to be a hardfought battle.
Democrats will be trying to win a third consecutive presidential election, a difficult task made harder by the fact that by almost 2-to-1, Americans continue to believe the country is on the wrong track, polls show.
Republicans will try to win with a base of supporters that is roughly 90 percent white in an increasingly diverse country, having failed so far to develop a strategy to attract the growing minority populations who rejected them in 2008 and 2012.
Who wins will almost certainly depend on which proves more powerful — the hunger for change or the inexorable demographic wave.
The 2016 election will test whether President Barack Obama’s coalition of minorities and white liberals can hold together, turn out and defeat the aging, but still powerful, coalition of social and economic conservatives and foreign policy hawks assembled by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.
The best case for Republicans is that “the American public seldom has the stomach for a third term, and President Obama hasn’t been the kind of leader who generates a third term,” said political scientist Julia Azari of Marquette University in Milwaukee.
The two presidents in the modern era whose parties did win three or more elections, Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt, transformed American politics by embodying — and helping bring about — a change in what people believed government should do.
Obama has not accomplished that. So for Hillary Rodham Clinton — or another Democratic nominee if she stumbles — it’s hard to “talk about the Obama legacy,” because it’s not clearly defined, Azari said.
Obama came into office with hopes of leading the country toward a new acceptance of activist government. Some Democrats hoped that successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act would cause Americans to warm toward an expanded government role in guaranteeing health coverage.
Obamacare by now has helped more than 20 million Americans get insured, the biggest increase in coverage in half a century. Contrary to dire warnings from the law’s opponents, health care costs have not shot upward — the rate of health care inflation is the lowest in years — the job market has improved and the cost to the federal government is below forecasts.But the country remains divided on the law — 43 percent disapproved and 41 percent approved in the most recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation in March.
Broader measurements also find continued widespread skepticism about government.
Last year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found 51 percent of Americans felt that “government is doing too many things better left to business and individuals” compared with 45 percent saying “government should do more to solve problems.” The number on the conservative side has grown during Obama’s tenure.
Combine those sentiments with the continued, decade-long feeling that the country is on the wrong track, and 2016 would seem a good year for a Republican presidential bid.
The degree to which voters want change depends heavily on the state of the economy, said John Geer, political science professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. As economic news has improved, so have Obama’s poll standings.
Even if views of government’s role have not shifted, something else has.
Under Obama, Democrats have become more firmly established in Americans’ eyes as the party of tolerance and diversity. In a Pew poll in February, almost 6 in 10 Americans said Democrats were “tolerant and open to all groups of people.” More than 6 in 10 said Republicans were not.
In the past two decades, the country’s voting-age population has grown far more diverse, and acceptance of difference has become a more important value for Americans, particularly those younger than 50. The change can be seen in the dizzying speed with which attitudes toward same-sex marriage have shifted. An issue that Republicans used a decade ago to divide Democrats now cleaves their own party. GOP lawmakers in Indiana and Arkansas discovered that earlier this spring when votes to protect business owners with religious scruples against same-sex marriage backfired on them.
The degree to which Democrats are basing their appeal on that image of open-mindedness could be seen in the videotaped announcement Clinton used to launch her campaign. The video said almost nothing about policy, but its montage of Americans of varied races, ethnicities and sexual orientations conveyed a message about diversity.
Republicans who doubt the power of that theme do so at their peril, warns GOP pollster Whit Ayres. In the last election, he notes, Obama lost among voters who said they most valued a president who is a “strong leader” or “has a vision for the future.” But he won overwhelmingly among those who said they wanted a president who “cares about people like me.
Women and minorities have consistently rated the Republicans poorly on that dimension of political leadership, and Democrats have profited as a result.
Republicans continue to win big majorities among white voters, particularly men, those older than 50, frequent churchgoers and those living in the South. That support has enabled the party to win big victories in congressional elections, where older, white voters still predominate.But in presidential elections, the white percentage of the electorate has shrunk steadily, from 88 percent when Reagan first won in 1980, down to 72 percent in 2012.
The white percentage has dropped as increasing numbers of Latinos, and more recently Asian-Americans, have become voters. That trend will continue for decades as a diverse generation still in its teens reaches voting age and older whites pass from the scene.
What to do about that challenge has split Republicans.
Some party strategists argue that pushing just a bit harder will allow the GOP to squeeze one more victory out of the Reagan-era coalition. Obama voters may not show up without Obama on the ticket, they say.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has been the most outspoken of the current Republican presidential hopefuls in declaring that nominating a combative conservative would drive up Republican turnout.
On the other side of the divide, analysts like Ayres, who works for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and Karl Rove, who was President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, warn that the GOP will lose, regardless of its 2016 candidate, if it fails to find a way to reach out to minority voters, especially Latinos.
“Trying to win a presidential election by gaining a larger and larger share of the vote from a smaller and smaller share of the electorate is a losing proposition,” Ayres wrote in a recent book, “2016 and Beyond.”
That sort of internal debate is typical of parties that have repeatedly lost presidential elections, Geer said. Often “the activists argue that the party was not pure enough in its values, and they push for a more extreme candidate who will be true to the party’s ideology.”
It’s hard to “talk about the Obama legacy,” because it’s not clearly defined. Julia Azari, political scientist