In presidential politics, Republicans are usually the party of order, and Democrats are the party in turmoil. But this year, those roles are somewhat reversed.
The Democrats have a spirited fight under way, but at least they’ve identified who will be the insurgent taking on the party establishment. The Republicans have yet to settle on either an insurgent or an establishment figure — disarray that goes a long way toward explaining why their race remains so much in flux.
Now that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has rescued her campaign with a victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the party leaders who backed her candidacy early on can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for the moment. Sen. Barack Obama is the Democrats’ insurgent, their outsider. In the Republican race, Sen. John McCain is either the establishment candidate or the insurgent — depending on the moment and the issue.
Clinton has always been and remains the establishment candidate of the Democrats because for the past 16 years, she and her husband have been the dominant force in the party. She is the ultimate Democratic insider, given the party’s current power structure.
“If she’s nominated, we know the program, we know who’s in the government,” observed Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, who studies party coalitions and presidential nominations. “If you sat down with your colleagues today, you could put together half her government. Try to do that with Barack Obama.”
At the start of this presidential campaign, Democrats had to choose between two types of insurgents to challenge the establishment candidate — populist John Edwards, or post-partisan Obama. The Iowa and New Hampshire results mean that Democrats opted for Obama’s brand of insurgency. Before Clinton’s impressive comeback in New Hampshire, the Edwards camp argued that her candidacy was on the verge of collapse and that the former senator from North Carolina would be one of the two finalists for the nomination. Edwards’s advisers further contended that his partisan pitch would ultimately prove more “attractive to Democrats than Obama’s less confrontational message.
But Clinton’s rebound continues to make the Democratic contest a race between her and Obama. And it seems unlikely that the party’s rank and file will ever narrow down its choices to the two insurgents.
Demographics help power Obama’s post-partisan insurgency and fuel his challenge to the party hierarchy. College-educated voters, especially those with graduate degrees, make up an increasing share of the Democratic presidential primary electorate. More than half of the voters in New Hampshire’s Democratic contest had a college degree, according to the National Election Pool exit poll, which is conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and the Associated Press. Only 20 percent had just a high school education or less.
“These college-educated-and-above voters, who are now such an important part of the Democratic Party, don’t respond to the populism arguments as well as the reform arguments,” said Democratic media consultant Bill Carrick.
Wealthier individuals are also participating more in the party of the New Deal: 27 percent of the Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire had a family income of $100,000 or more, while 32 percent had family incomes of less than $50,000. In the state’s 2004 presidential primary, only 19 percent of the Granite State’s Democratic voters were in the highest income bracket.
Democratic strategists attribute much of Obama’s success so far to his “nontraditional” qualities. He’s a young African-American who got his start in politics as a community organizer in Chicago and is not part of the inside-the-Beltway establishment. “That makes him ‘change’ — his persona,” Carrick says. “Edwards went for the role of fighter as opposed to the person who was going to bring people together. And he’s been trapped in that persona.”
Nontraditional, consensus-building candidates tend to be attractive to independents, who by their nature are averse to party labels. Although the share of self-identified independent voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary slipped a little bit this year from four years ago — a factor in Obama’s close loss to Clinton — they still made up a sizable 42 percent of the contest’s vote, and Obama drew more of them than Clinton, 41 percent to 31 percent.
“It’s not just Democrats we’re talking about here. Our primaries are heavily composed of independents,” said veteran Democratic presidential campaign strategist Tad Devine, who played a key role in helping Al Gore and John Kerry capture the party’s 2000 and 2004 nominations, respectively. “I think the reason [independents] have chosen the post-partisan ‘change’ agenda is that they’re mad at the president but also at the Democrats in Congress.”
Thirteen of the 22 states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses on February 5 — Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah — permit independents to participate. Those states account for 1,070 of the 1,678 delegates to be awarded that day. Obama’s task seems clear: He must continue to attract new voters to the Democratic contest. He won in Iowa, where 57 percent of the Democratic caucus-goers were first-time participants. He lost in New Hampshire, where only 19 percent of those voting in his party’s contest were newcomers.
One advantage that Clinton currently holds in her quest for the nomination is her appeal to women, who have become the backbone of the Democratic Party. In the 2006 midterm elections, the network exit poll found that 60 percent of the voters calling themselves Democrats were women. Likewise, when the Gallup Organization reviewed partisan trends in nine key polls from 2004 to 2007, it found that 60 percent of self-identified Democrats were women.
Women made up 57 percent of New Hampshire’s Democratic primary voters, and Clinton won 46 percent of them, a plurality. And one of the nation’s largest political action committees, EMILY’s List, which is dedicated to electing Democratic women who support abortion rights, is spending millions of dollars on Clinton’s behalf to get women to the polls in Democratic caucuses and primaries.
Democratic strategist Devine says that Clinton’s establishment support is her “ace in the hole” in the nominating contest in part because of the money it generates and the large number of elected and party officials who are automatic national convention delegates — approximately 850, or 39 percent of the votes needed to win the nomination.
But Devine cautions that Clinton needs to put a bit of distance between herself and her husband, who was a constant presence stumping in New Hampshire in the run-up to the primary. “If you want to be nominated for president and elected president,” Devine said, “you have to stand on your own right. You have to be seen as not dependent on anyone else. And you can’t do that if it looks like there is someone overshadowing you.”
Voters participating in Democratic contests will have to decide whether the scars that Hillary Clinton bears from her years as half of the nation’s first couple make her admirably combat-tested or too wounded to attract swing voters in the fall.
“The tension does continue between the established order and the new order,” observed Democratic media consultant Anita Dunn.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the order of the day is, well, disorder. Usually in Republican presidential politics, the party establishment swiftly coalesces around a candidate and helps grease his path to the nomination. In 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush was its choice. And that broad base of political and financial support helped him withstand an insurgent challenge from McCain. In 1996, then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole won the GOP nomination with the help of the party hierarchy. Eight years earlier, Dole had lost his bid for the GOP nomination because the establishment wanted then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
This time, the Republican establishment has yet to pick a horse to ride. And some party strategists are wondering when — or even if — it will saddle up.
“We’re used to having that person established early on, but the reason it hasn’t happened is, all of the candidates have had some weaknesses,” said GOP operative Terry Nelson, who managed McCain’s current presidential bid until a major campaign shake-up last summer. “I don’t think there will ever be a candidate that the establishment gets behind,” Nelson added. If it does settle on someone, he predicted that it would be because Republican primary voters “led the way,” not because anyone was anointed.
While Nelson was McCain’s manager, the senator from Arizona was rounding up support from party elders and fundraisers, but that was largely because he was perceived as the front-runner. McCain’s fondness for working with Senate Democrats on legislation — whether on campaign finance, global warming, or immigration — has never made him a favorite in the GOP outposts on K Street. When the party’s conservative base revolted over his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants now in this country, his campaign stalled.
Now back on the winning track, the McCain camp is pushing to corral establishment support, particularly financial. The day after McCain’s Granite State victory, his finance chief, Tom Loeffler, and campaignmanager, Rick Davis, held a conference call with the candidate’s fundraising team to round up the bucks. According to one participant, Loeffler said, “Now it’s our responsibility to bring it home for him.” Davis added that he would love to be able to start putting out press releases announcing new members of the finance team in all 50 states.
“McCain needs to beat [Mitt] Romney in Michigan and knock him out of the race. And then the Romney guys will be looking for a home,” said McCain fundraiser Sam Geduldig. “[Mike] Huckabee is probably viewed by the establishment as not electable. Rudy [Giuliani] has problems with social issues. [Fred] Thompson hasn’t won anywhere. McCain is the electable conservative who’s left from a talented field. It should have made sense even in the darkest days.”
But having tried the strategy once before, Nelson doubts that the maverick would wear well in an establishment suit. “Much has been written about John McCain being the onetime establishment candidate, and he may not want that role,” Nelson said. “To the extent that people do want change and there’s dissatisfaction with the Republican Washington leadership, he’s the one candidate on the Republican side who is a Washington political leader. He probably wants to stay as far away from that as he can. The more he gets close [to the GOP establishment], the more that draws attention to the fact that he is a Washington politician.”
Indeed, other Republicans have been positioning themselves as the insurgent. Huckabee has said that the party must be more responsive to the man on Main Street rather than Wall Street, and he often speaks of his family’s humble roots. After he lost the Iowa caucuses, Romney rolled out a new slogan, “Washington is broken,” and argued that his credentials as a former Republican governor of heavily Democratic Massachusetts and as a successful businessman mean that he could break the capital’s partisan gridlock.
Some observers wonder what the GOP establishment’s favor is even worth these days. The Beltway-based chiefs of some key constituency groups in the party have shown that, so far at least, they are either out of touch with their troops or are unable to mobilize them for the presidential contest.
At a breakfast briefing with reporters last year, social-issue conservatives such as Gary Bauer, president of American Values, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, discounted Huckabee’s prospects because he was unable to compete financially with some of his better-known rivals. Money was an important measure of a candidate’s viability, said Perkins, who added that social conservatives were “sophisticated” in their understanding of the role that fundraising plays in a successful presidential campaign. Yet Huckabee won in Iowa, despite being outspent by Romney by more than 10-to-1, because of support from grassroots evangelical Christian voters.
The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, conducted a well-funded independent expenditure campaign against Huckabee in Iowa, decrying his budget policies as Arkansas’s governor. But the effort failed to defeat him.
And in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, organized a targeted barrage of computerized phone calls to tell voters that McCain had not taken the group’s pledge not to raise taxes. But according to the exit poll, voters in the Republican primary cared more about balancing the budget. And among those who listed a balanced budget as their top concern, McCain handily beat Romney by 20 percentage points.
“This has been a wide-open nominating contest,” said GOP strategist Scott Reed, who managed Dole’s 1996 campaign. “I don’t know what establishment there is anymore.”
