GOP Chairman Reince Priebus will release his report on why the Republicans lost the 2012 elections sometime tomorrow, but he gave a preview on Face the Nation this morning. What I took from it is that they think they can go a long way towards correcting things by limiting the number of debates their candidates have in the primaries and that it is important to move the convention up to June or July rather than having it in late August or early September.
I want to discuss each of these ideas separately. The debates hurt the Republicans because their candidates were far outside of the mainstream. Rick Santorum is not a normal politician. Michele Bachmann is a space cadet. Rick Perry is a moron. Newt Gingrich is a very strange individual. Ron Paul is not really a Republican. Herman Cain is just silly. In combination, those candidates were more like a circus act than people offering a serious critique of the president’s policies. In 2004 and 2008, the Democratic debates, which were also numerous, didn’t hurt the party at all. In fact, they hurt President Bush because the candidates were offering substantive critiques and the news organizations were covering those critiques and taking them seriously. The Democrats weren’t discussing birth certificates or the implementation of Sharia Law or anything equivalently detached from reality.
If the Republicans had had 23 debates between Jeb Bush, Dick Lugar, John Warner, Olympia Snowe, Jon Huntsman, Colin Powell, and Mitt Romney, then maybe the Republicans would have benefited from so many debates. But only two of those people ran for president, and they had to debate a bunch of idiots and crackpots. So, the first thing to do is to field real candidates who actually have the credentials to be plausible presidents.
I agree that both parties have too many debates, but it’s hard to limit them because each state wants an opportunity to have their particular issues addressed and there are also some constituent groups that want to host debates. Treating the debates as the problem and saying that the solution is to have many fewer of them makes it appear like the Republicans are afraid of exposing people to their message.
The convention issue is complicated. The specific reason that the Republicans want to move the convention up is that Romney wasn’t allowed to use general election funds until he was officially nominated, so he was underfunded during the summer. I understand the move from that perspective, but it comes with a cost. Holding the convention four or five months before the actual election risks making the event almost irrelevant.
The conventions started moving later in the calendar because the finance laws limited how much could be spent after the nomination, but that logic went out the window when Obama didn’t accept matching funds in 2008. So, now the logic moves in the opposite direction. Once you’ve secured the nomination by getting enough delegates, you don’t want to wait months to be able to use general election funds. In making this move, the GOP is acknowledging that no candidate in 2016 will be accepting matching funds. What they are forgetting is that the conventions were held late enough in the last cycle to have an impact on early voting. The first ballots cast in North Carolina were on September 6th, the same day the Democratic Convention in Charlotte was completed.
If the conventions have the intended impact, they provide each party a bump in the polls. Isn’t it better to have that bump when at least some people are voting than in the middle of July?
In any case, I don’t see either of these moves, on the debates or the timing of the convention, as being on point. If the party would stop populating itself with religious fundamentalists and bigots, they would be more appealing. It’s as simple as that.