RALEIGH – On widely reported shake-ups in the Democratic and Republican races for president, count me skeptical.
Some canny pundits believe that Sen. Hillary Clinton is in desperate trouble, not just in Iowa but beyond. And some think that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s December surge puts him into serious contention to be the next GOP nominee for president. At the risk of embarrassing myself mightily in a few weeks, I don’t buy either scenario.
I agree that the early presidential contests are important. While moving big-state primaries to February 5 was supposed to reduce the influence of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, I think it may have increased their significance, at least a bit. There is little time to recover from early stumbles. Still, broader measures of political support are significant. I think it’s rational to discount national polling months before the first ballots are cast, but not three weeks before. Clinton is polling in the low to mid 40s. That’s what a real frontrunner looks like. The Republicans don’t have one.
It certainly looks like Clinton could lose Iowa to Sen. Barack Obama or even to former Sen. John Edwards on Jan. 3. But I think the most likely outcome is that she recovers her footing in a closely fought battle in New Hampshire on Jan. 8, gets a bit of a media boost from winning Michigan a week later (the delegates have been disallowed and most candidates have bailed out of the state, but she’s stayed and will get some headlines out of it, anyway), and then wins Nevada on Jan. 19 and South Carolina on Jan. 26. By the time she gets to the Florida primary three days later, Clinton will have sewn up the nomination.
Why do I think an Iowa loss won’t be fatal to the Clinton campaign? Well, for starters I would observe that winning Iowa is hardly a prerequisite to the Democratic nomination. Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton both lost Iowa badly and won later, by recovering in New Hampshire (to 1st and 2nd places, respectively). The first and last time a successful presidential campaign was truly born in Iowa was Jimmy Carter in 1976. If either Obama or Edwards takes the caucuses, he’ll have to translate that immediately into other victories.
Edwards, I think, has no realistic chance of doing so, but Obama does. He’s risen a lot in New Hampshire in recent weeks, shaving Clinton’s lead to single-digits. Still, imagine that he wins New Hampshire. It probably won’t be by much. That will hardly end the determined and well-financed Clinton campaign. The next competitive stop is in Nevada, where Clinton is in a strong position.
As for the Republicans, my gut feeling is that Mike Huckabee’s balloon will pop. There’s a fascinating dynamic underway in the GOP race, a confidence gap. On one side are those who believe that the modern GOP coalition — the triad formed by economic, social, and foreign-policy conservatives — is outdated and insufficient. They argue that the next Republican nominee needs some distance from conservative orthodoxy to give themselves room to appeal to voting groups in the middle. Some think Rudy Giuliani can draw socially liberal voters looking for strength and leadership qualities. Others think Huckabee can draw socially conservative voters who are anti-business populists.
On the other side of the confidence gap are those who believe recent Republican failures stem from an abandonment of the traditional triad, not its inherent limitations. Both Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson argue that they are the “true” conservatives in the race, on all three bundles of issues, though in both cases there are some lingering doubts among some Republican voters about campaign-trail conversions.
The man who doesn’t quite fit this model is John McCain, now resurgent in New Hampshire. In 2000, he was on the pessimist side of the gap, arguing that the GOP needed to embrace a different set of issues to draw independents into a winning coalition. On the other hand, McCain is the ultimate hawk and pro-life. I’ll still rate him as on the pessimist side, however, because of his embrace of environmental extremism and continued defense of the appalling McCain-Feingold monstrosity.
The pessimists believe that the confident are fooling themselves and not seeing key changes in the electorate. The confident believe that without bringing all three coalition partners to the table for the fall, any Republican nominee will lose, anyway. Ultimately, I predict GOP primary voters will side with the confident.
But I wouldn’t mind it a bit if this column, like the message to the IMF at the start of every Mission Impossible episode, were to self-destruct seconds after being read.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.