Picking up the Republican pieces

Release dull, ultra-sanitized, uncontroversial autobiography that folks will own but never read. Check.

Buy and memorize The Quotable Ronald Reagan. Check.

Lose the beer gut. Camouflage the bald spot.  Hire writers to concoct explanation for all that weed smoked in high school?  Check. Check. Check.

{mosads}It is now safe to enter the Republican primary.

But there is still one major problem left: the current state of the Republican party. 

Tea Partiers, evangelicals, establishment RINOs, Libertarians, neocon foreign policy hawks, and moderates. According to Dr. Stella Rouse, associate professor and Director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, “it has become a party that is being pulled by different interests who would rather see the party fall apart than have a unifying strategy.”

Republican primary voters should be shopping for a candidate who can mend these fractures. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) looks poised to be that candidate.  His campaign didn’t just launch a couple weeks ago; it was fired out of a cannon giving him a 10-point surge in the Quinnipiac poll.  In February, I wrote a piece in The Baltimore Sun criticizing his social media game.  Now, it blows every other candidate’s out of the water.  By the way, he’s marcorubio16 on Snapchat.

The far-right knock on Rubio is that in 2013, he tried to reach a Senate compromise on immigration reform.  Even though he crawfished on the bill when it was clear Republicans wouldn’t get enough in the compromise, the damage was done.  Now, some of the party base sees him as a mustache-twisting villain trying to tie conservative values to the train tracks as sinister music plays in the background. 

The far-right seeing Rubio as having weak principles for an attempt at compromise is a perfect microcosm for the current ideological shrapnel that was once the GOP.  But that reform dabble might be the move that really separates him from the rest of the GOP pack.  An Economist/Yougov graph shows his net favorability among Hispanics much higher than that of the Spanish-speaking, Puerto-Rico-visiting Jeb Bush.

Bush’s numbers look strong in the crowded GOP field—he consistently holds a narrow lead over the others in national polling data—but that marginal lead is a wall of paper bricks. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found Bush at the head of the pack by 5 points over Rubio.  However, Rubio bested Bush by 9 points when respondents were asked for their second choice. As candidates drop from the race, it will be difficult for Bush to keep pace with Rubio.  

Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) is moderate enough to build a bridge from the party base to independent voters, but those voters would probably feel safer taking the tunnel.  Particularly, due to New Jersey’s credit downgrades and steady unemployment rate.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New Jersey’s unemployment rate has gone from 6.4 percent in Oct. 2014 to 6.5 percent in Mar. 2015.  Christie will have to explain why Republicans should vote for the governor of a state that isn’t recovering economically while he’s standing next to the governor of a state like Wisconsin where the unemployment rate has gone from 5.3 percent to 4.6 percent over the same period of time. 

And that Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, is a strong candidate.  If this were 2011, I think he’d have a great shot at the Republican nomination, but the current foreign policy zeitgeist favors Rubio who has served on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.  With Vladimir Putin’s aggression on the uptick, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the malignant spreading of ISIS, foreign policy issues will be salient.

Much of the party base prefers the uncompromising Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas).  All I can say to them is if you enjoyed the last 6+ years of President Obama’s leadership- if you can’t get enough divisive rhetoric and gridlock politics- Ted Cruz is your candidate.

If other candidates are taking the interstate towards GOP victory, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) seems to be taking the winding back roads, and the Libertarian faction of the GOP isn’t large enough yet to get him there.  For Paul, this primary might pave the way for a more successful run in a future, more Libertarian GOP. 

The number of candidates in play illustrates the potentially toxic diversity of interests in the party.

If the GOP base insists on taking a fingers-in-their-ears approach toward more moderate candidates, every single one of those toothy book-cover grins will be smiling up from the Barnes and Noble clearance rack in 2017.

Zipperer is an award-winning playwright and an adjunct English professor at Georgia College.