What if the Party Doesn’t Decide?

Attempting to put Trump’s ongoing lead in the polls in historical perspective, Julia Azari makes an important point:

On a related note, the previous establishment-insurgent contests had a defined set of party heirs. Taft and Truman were incumbent presidents; Humphrey was the vice president. We can hardly cast the current contest as a clash between the establishment and insurgent candidates because there is no clear establishment favorite. We can call this the “Jeb Bush (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, once Scott Walker but not now, maybe John Kasich), you’re no William Howard Taft” phenomenon. Since the policy-demanders school of nominations thought is based on the idea that elites can resist attempts at insurgency, perhaps the lack of agreement on a candidate is part of the story about why this theory may not hold, or at least has not predicted what we’ve so far observed.

One reason to be skeptical of the The Party Decides thesis is that — especially given the small n of competitive contemporary presidential primaries — it’s hard to disentangle ex ante elite support from the quality of a candidate and a campaign. It’s not clear to what extent elite support is a cause rather than a symptom of a winning campaign. (Cf. Hillary Clinton.) As multiple critics have noted, the book never really establishes a compelling causal mechanism. But even if we assume arguendo that ex ante elite support has the causal impact the thesis seems to assume, it’s not clear what this tells us about the 2016 GOP race.

Consider the 538 endorsement primary. Jeb! Bush, fer Chrissakes, still leads a heavily divided field, even though he’s run a poor campaign and his polling has been on a downward trajectory from a non-impressive peak for a while. Rubio isn’t very far ahead of the fringe candidates Christie and Huckabee. Party elites — at least as imperfectly measured by this proxy — may know they don’t want Trump, but there’s nothing remotely resembling a consensus on what Option Establishment should be.

In other words, I’m not sure what it would mean to say that the party “decided” the 2016 Republican primary. It has long been obvious to me that Rubio is the best candidate Republicans have for the general election, but it evidently doesn’t matter what I think. For whatever reason, like Republican primary voters, Republican elected officials and money men have warmed up to Rubio very slowly, and very possibly too slowly. I still think it’s more likely that it’s Cruz rather than Trump who’s the most likely to take advantage of this vacuum — Cruz is the biggest beneficiary of the collapse of the Carson “campaign” because it opens the door for him in Iowa — although I can’t rule out Trump altogether. But not only is it uncertain that party elites will be able to clear the field if they want to, it’s hard to see how they’re can be winnowing when party elites can’t decide which candidate they favor. Even if they do eventually coalesce around Rubio, it might be too late. And a lot of anti-Trump elected officials and fundraisers might just skip the middleman and hold their noses for Cruz if he wins Iowa like I expect.