Can Lindsey’s “Grahamstanding” Really Ruffle Rand? It’s important to think back to Ron vs Rudy, SC ‘07

Weeks before yesterday’s formal announcement, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was already spelling out his vision for a potential presidential bid to Politico and WaPo.

How, pundits might wonder, can a senator who’s hardly a household name - despite frequent talking head spots on cable news - and saddled with a record of bipartisanship that’s viewed with suspicion by Republican primary voters, build a campaign that’s competitive?

Lindsey Graham has a plan: make Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and, specifically, his supposedly un-Republican foreign policy, his foil. Playing off Paul, Graham hopes to mark territory as 2016’s most hawkish competitor.

On a debate stage crowded with future also-rans in near uniform agreement over world affairs, Lindsey Graham can’t wait to stand out from the GOP cattle call by pounding Rand in person.

Call it “Grahamstanding:” look for Lindsay to denounce “demagoguery” and “isolationism” in suspiciously demagogic terms (Read: “Those who believe we can disengage from the world at large and stay safe by leading from behind, vote for someone else. I'm not your man.”).  We’re sure to hear the senior Senator from the Palmetto State repeat his smear that Rand Paul’s foreign policy is “to the left of Obama.”

A 538 blogger suggests that “Lindsey Graham May Have Already Won” in his long-shot bid by making sure that his hawkish foreign policy is front and center in the conversation on the road to the nomination, and that Paul will not go unchallenged.

But there’s reason to be skeptical if Graham can take off with this strategy.

First off, the political press might hound Graham out of the race, should he “underperform” (a notion still undefined) in South Carolina’s “third in the nation” presidential primary.

Graham can’t reasonably expect a “Favorite Son” effect to take the Palmetto State effectively off the early date on the primary battleground calendar.

Graham’s relations with South Carolina’s GOP base is strained - he’s been lampooned for peddling “Grahamnesty” on immigration.  In 2014, Graham faced down a host of candidates that the Tea Party make a ruckus over.  Graham far outpaced his runner-up, but he won renomination with an unimpressive 54% of the primary vote. An early poll shows Graham back in the presidential pack in his home state.

And Graham may not even have this lane all to himself.  While former UN Ambassador John Bolton has demurred from a bid waving that banner, he’s endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), who may try to sound like even more of a warmonger than  Graham.  Unlikely at this point, but Rep. Peter King of New York has not yet closed the door on a foreign policy-focused bid.

In assessing if Lindsey Graham can gain traction as the “anti-Rand,” it’s important to think back to how Ron Paul became a phenomenon in 2007.

Back in May 2007, before he took the stage in South Carolina for a Fox News-hosted GOP presidential debate, then-Rep. Ron Paul was recognized by the political press as a famously prodigious fundraiser from his fervent mailing list fanbase, but one who barely registered in national polls.

Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani walked onstage aware that his relatively liberal stances on social issues could be a liability in this Bible Belt state. But he knew that his reputation as “America’s Mayor” during 9/11 could divert attention from those social stances among the famously flag-waving, military-venerating South Carolina Republicans. So when a moderator asked Ron Paul about 9/11, Giuliani pounced.  “As someone who lived through the attack of 9/11,” “America’s Mayor” butted in, spinning Paul’s remarks as asserting that American “invited” the attack.

It played to the hall, drawing enthusiastic backing from the crowd, just as Giuliani had expected. But spat was the first presidential debate moment to go viral and Ron Paul’s profile boomed via social media, setting the stage for his record-breaking online fundraising “money bombs.”

Just a few primaries into the season, Giuliani was out, but Ron Paul soldiered on, the only candidate other than the nominee to make it to the GOP convention.

That viral debate moment highlights the pitfalls with this strategy. Despite not being shared by most GOP voters, it was his unique perspective that carved his niche in the campaign.  It can be tough to succeed by being the loudest or most impassioned among a crowd that shares your position than voicing a view distinct among all of your rivals.

And Graham’s approach, however sharp his remarks, is much less bombastic than Rudy Giuliani’s and lacks a compelling narrative like becoming “America’s Mayor” on 9/11.  So he may not even be able to out-shout Rubio and the rest.

While his more cautious foreign policy may be generally popular with general electorate, Rand Paul remains outside of the GOP “mainstream” on foreign policy.  But in cautioning more military restraint, Rand Paul is distinct among Republican presidential hopefuls in speaking up for a view shared by a not-insignificant minority of his fellow Republicans.

Instead of forcing him out of the race or discrediting his positions, attacks against Rand Paul could just as easily redound back to his benefit.  And remember, Rand Paul’s cautiousness is shared by many more Republicans than Ron Paul’s isolationism.

With the ghost of Giuliani's 2008 bid haunting the path to the Republican convention, why would Graham get in? To answer, consider that so much has changed in how presidential campaigns unfold since that start of the 2008 presidential campaign, just two cycles ago.

Ron Paul was one of the first to harness social media in 2008, a tool now de rigueur. And, post-Citizens United, the possibility of super pac largess dangles before Graham, hoping that it might be spread his way.

One super pac backed by some of the “Swiftboat Veterans for Truth” strategists from 2004 launched into Rand Paul the very day of his announcement. Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson’s - whose super pac kept Newt Gingrich hobbling on in 2012 - holds hawkish views that could back Graham. Support like that could keep Graham on the debate stage long after and despite of a potential single-digit home state primary performance.

A pro-Rand super pac has already called Graham into the ring.

In the end, it could be a wash; a symbiotic deal for both candidates.  Graham’s attacks could cement his standing as the GOP’s pre-eminent hawk, and compare to most of his ilk, a thoughtful one at that.

And attacks on Rand Paul that draw attention to his uniquely restrained Republican foreign policy could attract more support among cautious Republicans than his father could have hoped to win.

Is There An Enthusiasm Gap Among Republicans???

Things have been dark here for many months.  Now that the campaign is heating up, I'm going to try getting some things up on a more regular basis.  I've got a couple of posts in the works but let's start with a short little data exploration.

With two Republican votes already in the books and another taking place in South Carolina this weekend, one question that has gotten a bit of attention is whether Republican voters are enthusiastic about their choices, especially now that the field is winnowing.  For any party hoping to win the presidency--or any other election for that matter--turning out your voters is of primary importance.  The assumption going into 2012 for Republicans was that given the degree of opposition on the right to the Obama presidency, and coming on the tails of their success in the 2010 midterms, there would be tremendous energy and activism mobilized to propel whoever won the nomination into the White House.

While we've only had a few contests so far, there is reason to wonder whether this assumption is in fact true. 

If we look at the results from New Hampshire, a total of 248,447 votes were cast in the Republican primary across all candidates, more than in any recent Granite State GOP primary.  When compared to 2008, this year's vote was an increase of 3.6%.

To get a sense of whether this increase is significant or tells us anything about the state of the GOP electorate, though, we need some baseline of comparison.  I decided to look at recent New Hampshire primaries in which one party was trying to take over the White House from the other--a scenario that would seem to be ripe for increased turnout and mobilization.  When we look at these contests, 2012 doesn't stack up well.

For example, in 2008 the Democrats saw a 31% increase in turnout over 2004 (287,556 vs. 219,787 votes).  Also on the Democratic side--and also a successful party flip of the White House--1992 saw the Democrats increase their turnout by an even more impressive 36% over 1988 (167,664 vs. 122,912 votes).  Looking at Republicans, in 2000 the GOP turnout was 16% higher than it was in 1996 (238,206 vs. 205,856 votes).

Unlike in later contests where the eventual nominee becomes established and most candidates have dropped out, New Hampshire primaries have full fields and permissive voting procedures--it is an "open" primary.  Thus, we would expect the voting there to be a relatively good barometer of the party's enthusiasm.  If the turnout results in New Hampshire continue into the later contests, there's reason for GOP leaders--and the eventual nominee--to worry about the fall.

Saul Anuzis to GOP Economic Populists: "This is not your average Republican twitter page!"

ElectionDissection strolled down to the offices of Americans for Tax Reform for the latest in the series of Newsmaker Breakfasts hosted by the American Spectator.  The “newsmaker” on hand was Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican Party chairman who earned the Paultards’ enduring animus by calling for Ron Paul’s exclusion from Republican presidential primary season debates after his symbiotically beneficial contretemps over 9/11 blowback with fmr. NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in South Carolina.

Despite the fact that its Congressional delegation has been shrinking in recent rounds of redistricting and expects to at the next census, Michigan’s noteworthy political legacy is even more salient as potential bailouts for the Big Three dominate the headlines.  It’s clear that Anuzis’ decades of experience in the trenches of Wolverine State politics do color his vision for a revivified GOP as he vies for RNC Chair.

Anuzis highlighted his vision for harnessing new media to facilitate disseminating the GOP’s message.  (Best line: “This is not your average Republican twitter page!” Oxymoron of the week: “Republican twitter page!”)  And he repeatedly harkened back to the fabled “Reagan Democrat,” citing appealing to this once-decisive voting bloc as the key to a Republican resurgence.  Suburban Detroit’s Macomb County boomed in the 1950s and 60s with auto workers as White Flight emptied the white working class neighborhoods of Detroit’s Wayne County.  Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg identified Macomb as the spiritual home of this famously crucial electoral demographic.  (It’s interesting to note that Greenberg, post-2008, agrees that this political dinosaur is, in fact, extinct.)   

“Reagan Democrats,” of course were those Northern, often-ethnic and heavily Catholic, white working class voters who were lured away from their ancestral Democratic moorings by GOP appeals to their conservative opinions on moral issues, busing and crime and Cold War hawkishness.  But many of these voters were proud union men (and women) who couldn’t swallow even Ronald Reagan’s free trade agenda.  This was especially acute in Macomb Co., Michigan in the 1980’s as competition from Japanese imports rattled Detroit’s long-term game plan.

While social conservatism can be found in Michigan politicians of both parties – Reps. Dale Kildee, Bart Stupak and John Dingell count themselves as either pro-life, pro-gun or both – so, too, does the state’s formidable strain of economic populism infect voters on both sides of the aisle. 

Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace first identified this political animal instinctively, scoring above his national average in Macomb in his 1968 indie bid, and capturing a majority in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary statewide.  Twenty years later, Pat Buchanan barnstormed the state denouncing imports and racked up his best score this side of the Granite State in his challenge to George H.W. Bush’s renomination.  Four years later, he fared even better, denouncing NAFTA at every stop. 

Only an underwhelming performance in Detroit dragged Ross Perot’s percentage statewide back to his national average in 1992.  In over half of Michigan’s counties, his call to heed that “giant sucking sound” supposedly sending manufacturing jobs to Mexico pulled in over a quarter to 30% of the vote.

And in this year’s Republican presidential primary, Mike Huckabee scored well in Dutch-settled southwestern Michigan where his social conservatism no doubt resonated with the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church-goers.  But, his economic populism seems to have struck a cord here, too.  The area’s Dutch-American U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra was the only Michigander Republican to oppose NAFTA back in ’93.  Huckabee’s populist notes also played among Yoopers, too, in the Upper Peninsula’s mining and timber towns. 

But Michigan’s stunted population growth has frozen the smaller, broken rust belt cities like Saginaw, Flint, Muskegon and Bay City, where Wallace, Buchanan and Perot exploited white working class anxiety, as well as both the U.P. and the Dutch southwest where Huckabee found a base far above the Mason-Dixon Line. 

Macomb is growing, but still totals far behind Oakland’s population.  (Besides, Obama captured the county comfortably, flipping the narrow win G.W. eked out in 2004.)  Contrast Macomb to its fellow Detroit suburb, Oakland County.  Once home to Midwestern, Michigan, Gerald Ford-style regular Republicans, as this affluent and educated enclave population expands, it threatens to surpass Detroit’s Wayne County, which still continues to hemmorage residents, as the state’s largest jurisdiction.  Oakland’s Democratic trend is relentless as Obama scored the best Dem numbers since LBJ, beating FDR, even!  McCain’s percentage dipped to near Goldwater and Alf Landon lows.  Once safe GOP Rep. Joe Knollenberg also succumbed to Oakland's Democratic wave in '08, after what shouldn't have been a surprisingly close race in '06, given the county's trends were then becoming evident.  (Note, too, the strong showing by North Dakota Rep. William Lemke’s third party bid here in 1936, whose message melding social conservatism and economic populism was amplified by on air harangues from Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest whose Shrine of the Little Flower sits in now-trendy Royal Oak, a leading indicator of Oakland’s partisan progression.  Royal Oak gave Gore a 51-45 win over Bush in 2000.  By 2008, Obama’s margin here had grown to a lopsided 61-37.)

Building on a question from Economist.com blogger Dave Weigel suggesting the GOP's appeals to socially conservative voters and anti-immigrant demagoguing had aliented electorates in similar suburban counties nationwide, ElectionDissection questioned Anuzis about whether his strategy for staving off further losses in Oakland included toning down the economic populism that hasn't been a vote-winner there – especially in light of a Big Three bailout that may play well in his state, but not among the Southern-anchored grassroots of the party he wants lead - his answer focused more on this blog’s analysis of Michigan’s political geography than his thoughts on recasting the Republican message.  But Anuzis did offer some interesting off-the-cuff insight into shifting intra-state demographics – UAW retirees, for instance, migrating up north to retire and the increasingly racially diverse make-up of Oakland Co.’s electorate – which offer fodder for future posts.  

Bob Barr Blusters: Pres Nomination Campaigns don't "affect change"??!!

ElectionDissection ventured over to the National Press Club for a couple of press conferences today.   The first featured Ron Paul with his by-now-signature unfocused, “aw shucks” style with which he urged his acolytes – and the American electorate at large – to reject McCain and Obama and consider any of four third party candidates.  Green nominee and former Dem. Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, independent perennial Ralph Nader and far-right Constitution Party standard bearer “Pastor Chuck” Baldwin were all on hand to bask in Dr. Paul’s glow.  Libertarian Party nominee, former GOP Georgia U.S. Rep. Bob Barr pointedly declined the invite.

Half an hour later, Barr responded with a press conference of his own.  Barr and his top aide, former Ross Perot campaign honcho Russ Verney, explained Barr’s absence that morning, with Barr insisting that his bid offers “bold, focused, specific leadership,” not Ron Paul’s “amorphous kind that says ‘any of the above’ or ‘none of the above.’”  Barr asserted that the goal of his campaign is to amass as many votes as possible, hoping to affect policy change in his direction; a worthy and very reasonable goal for a third party candidate determined to run an actual political campaign, seeking actual votes, not just to hit the college lecture circuit and bloviate ad nausea. 

Barr’s and Verney’s “we’re the grownups here” mein bordered on farce.  Barr got so wrapped up in the “we’re not goofing around here” meme that, invoking Verney’s old boss Perot repeatedly, he asserted the patently preposterous claim that primary campaign vote totals, and failed nomination campaigns, are irrelevant; rather, building significant general election vote totals is the only way for alternative presidential candidates to affect policy change.  This is indubitably true for segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 American Independent bid that first identified “Reagan Democrats” among Northern Urban Ethnics and rural Southern Democrats and liberal Republican John Anderson’s 1980 indie bid that gave us sneak peaks at segments of the coalition that vaulted Obama to the Democratic nomination this year.  But for the highest vote getting third party bid in modern electoral history – Ross Perot’s snaring of nearly one in five votes in 1992 – the jury is still out as for its long term impact.

Barr’s claim was made to counter claims that Paul’s 1.2 million primary season votes did more than Barr’s effort will to further a libertarian agenda.  There is a question to be considered that Paul’s 2008 primary totals – as scattered as his message – may tell us less about a long-term libertarian vote trend than does Ed Clark’s 1980 Libertarian Party high water mark. 

Nevertheless, the litany countering Barr’s ludicrous contention is a long and venerable one.  

Let’s start with Wallace: the 670,000 votes and 3.75 million votes he garnered, respectively, in his upstart 1964 and 1972 Democratic nomination bids were dwarfed by the 9.9 million votes he attracted in his 1968 indie bid, but reinforced to Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips that millions of those voters – especially in states like Wisconsin in ’64 or in Maryland and Michigan in ’72 – who might never have voted for him in a general, or before his assassination attempt, were up for grabs.  Peeling these proto-Reagan Democrats away built the Conservative Coalition that governed under Reagan during his first term. 

Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic bid for the 1968 Democratic bid may have been as unfocused as Paul’s this year, but his 2.9 million votes forced the incumbent president, LBJ, to withdraw from consideration for re-nomination and marked the first electoral inklings of popular discontent over the Vietnam War that culminated in Nixon – the staunch anti-communist – pulling US forces out of Indochina a few years later. 

The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s nearly 10 million votes between his 1984 and 1988 bids put his slice of urban America’s agenda on the table, arguably prompting passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in a still conservative-oriented Congress and signed by a Republican president.    

Walter Mondale famously ridiculed Gary Hart’s “new ideas” bid for the 1984 Democratic nomination with the then-popular fast food chain ad refrain, “Where’s the beef?”  But the third of the Democratic primary vote and 1200 delegates that Hart’s platform attracted - a melding of cosmopolitan social liberalism with an appreciation of foreign trade and a recognition that market forces can’t be dismissed - took most observers by surprise and challenged the union orthodoxy that Mondale accepted.  Hart’s “New Democrat” agenda presaged the moderate Democratic Leadership Council from which Bill Clinton launched his successful bid for the 1992 Democratic nomination and upon whose agenda he generally governed during his tenure.  Nearly a quarter century later, Hillary Clinton reverted to Mondale’s playbook, but came up short against Barack Obama who racked up huge majorities among the very voters Hart first identified. 

Two more examples stand out because of the candidates’ associations with associates of Barr’s campaign in 2008:

Barr advisor and conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie keynoted the Libertarian convention this year.  Viguerie supported Ronald Reagan’s nearly victorious challenge to President Gerald Ford’s re-nomination in 1976, and tried to lure Reagan to a splinter conservative third party when Ford finally secured the GOP nod.  Of course, Reagan built upon the momentum of that strong ’76 bid to win the White House four years later, launching his “Reagan Revolution.”

“A Call to Economic Arms” was the theme of Paul Tsongas’ 1992 campaign that attracted unexpected support among Democratic primary voters.  Ross Perot – Verney was his spokesman – built upon Tsongas’ momentum in the fall, memorably campaigning with a series of charts to illustrate the federal fiscal dangers both these “deficit hawks” feared.  Bill Clinton’s first term stabs at getting the federal budget under control can be attributed to both Tsongas’ nomination and Perot’s general election campaigns.