Presidents are selected not by the national popular vote, but by 51 separate popular votes.
Actually, according to a recent piece by electoral analyst Stuart Rothenberg in Roll Call, it will only be the vote in 10 states that determine who wins in 2016: Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. As Rothenberg puts it, "The other 40 states (and the District of Colombia) aren't particularly relevant for anyone interesting in handicapping the 2016 general election, since their partisan voting patterns and performance are in little doubt."
Those 10, then, are the swing states that either party could win, and must win at least a few of, regardless of what happens elsewhere. The rest don't matter much (although were a Republican to steal a state like Minnesota from the Democrats, or a Democrat to steal a state like Indiana from the Republicans, the swing states would all likely fall in line that way as well).
The decline in the number of contested states is a reflection of the increasing "red-blue" polarization of the electorate on a regional basis. The Republicans essentially own the South (sans Florida) and Rocky Mountain and Plains states (minus Colorado), while the Democrats have the East and West coasts (minus maybe New Hampshire).
None of this is unknown to electoral analysts, of course. Yet what makes Rothenberg's piece interesting is that it directs attention to the structural challenge facing Republicans.
On every level beneath the presidency, the GOP is in the stronger position--it is increasingly dominant in terms of governorships and state legislatures and has an overall advantage in Congress unseen since the 1920s. In at least some ways this flows from the differences between the nature of turnout in state/local races and midterm congressional contests on the one hand and turnout for presidential elections on the other.
But whatever the explanations, there are 18 states totaling 242 electoral votes (just 28 short of the necessary 270) that the Democrats have won in each of the last six presidential elections, and only 13 states accounting for only 102 electoral votes that the GOP has carried in those six elections.
Because of their larger Electoral College base, Democrats only need to "hold their own" and win a few of the swing states (Florida, with 29 electoral votes, would by itself do it) to get to the magic number. Republicans need to hold everything that both John McCain and Mitt Romney won, and also win most of the swing states, and maybe even take Washington or Minnesota from the Democratic column as well.
Republicans thus have far less margin for error, which also means that they have to find a candidate for 2016 who can run well in battleground states. As for the kind of candidate that might be, Rothenberg notes that, "Successful Republicans in Big Ten states tend to avoid the extremist label and can appeal to voters on both a personal and political level. They tend to be more optimistic and upbeat than some in their party, and they don't make it easy for their opponents to demonize them."
Alas, for the GOP this won't be the kind of ideological purist who most appeals to the Tea Party conservatives who disproportionately make up their primary electorate.
The Republicans might therefore now have a more difficult path from the primaries to November than the Democrats do--it used to be said, back before Bill Clinton and the "new Democrats" showed up, that anyone who was liberal enough to win the Democratic nomination would be too liberal to win in the fall (think George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis on this score). But it now might be the case that anyone conservative enough to win over GOP primary voters might be too conservative to win "purple" Big Ten states in the general election.
So what kind of Republican could pull off this delicate balancing act, assuming that more dogmatic options like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry can't?
First, it would have to be someone with impeccable conservative credentials, but also, consistent with Rothenberg's assessment, someone with a cheery and reassuring personality (one could argue, along these lines, that Barack Obama was the most left-leaning candidate of any major party in American history, but one who had, and still has, a demeanor that largely obscures that).
In addition, it would be preferable to find a candidate with a record of administrative competence and bipartisan accomplishment; the kind of resume most likely found in governors. It also wouldn't hurt were that governor to come from one of the more electorally significant Big Ten states, which would both improve the GOP's chance of carrying that particular state and demonstrate a capacity to win similar states.
When you begin winnowing down the potentially huge Republican field with such criteria in mind, you end up with a surprisingly short list; actually one that has only one name on it--Ohio Governor John Kasich.
And how Ohio goes, so goes the nation--whoever has won the Buckeye State in the last 13 presidential elections, dating back to 1964, has also won the presidency.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/23/2015