Briefing | America’s primary elections

Outsiders’ chance

The primary contest is about to get serious. It has rarely been so ugly, uncertain or strange

WHEN Jeb Bush announced he was running for president seven months ago the tutting newspaper commentaries almost wrote themselves. With his famous name and war chest of over $100m, whistled up from Bush family benefactors in a matter of months, the former Florida governor was almost as strong a favourite for the Republican ticket as Hillary Clinton, who had made her inaugural campaign speech two days earlier, was for the Democratic one. Bush against Clinton? The prospect made American democracy seem stale and dynastic, rigged on behalf of a tiny political elite, whose members alone had the name recognition and deep pockets required to win its overpriced elections.

But now the primary process is about to get serious. In Iowa on February 1st perhaps 250,000 voters will brave icy roads to pick their champion in small groups, or caucuses. And the tutting has given way to real fear. On the Republican side, Mr Bush—or “Jeb!” as his campaign has cruelly styled him—is all but irrelevant. The son and brother of past presidents is clever and has a solid record of cutting taxes and privatising services. But Republican voters have dismissed him as dull and out-of-touch, an emblem of the political class they despise. The Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, is a celebrity builder with no previous political experience. He has raised little money, was once a registered Democrat and still refers derisively to his party as “the Republicans”, as if it is some unpromising acquisition he has been arm-twisted into buying.

Mr Trump is quick-witted, charismatic and, during years as a reality television star, has built an outrageous public persona around his gargantuan ego. “I’m intelligent,” he likes to say. “Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent.” Uncertainty over whether this is self-parody or undiluted egomania is part of the act. Mr Trump is to public service what professional wrestling, which he loves, is to sport: entertaining and ludicrously implausible, a suspension of disbelief for escapists, a crude deception for the gullible.

The digs he makes at his rivals, often in the form of tweets offering “advice”, can be amusing. A former propagator of conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s place of birth, Mr Trump is now dishing out the same treatment to his closest challenger, Ted Cruz. A first-term senator from Texas, Mr Cruz was born in Canada, but to an American mother, which puts his eligibility to be president beyond serious doubt. “Ted—free legal advice on how to pre-empt the Dems on citizen issue. Go to court now & seek declaratory judgment—you will win!” Mr Trump tweeted to his nearly 6m followers. Yet his front-runner status is based less on Mr Trump’s wit than on his gift for understanding and pandering to people’s fears.

The billionaire says that America has been beggared and wrecked by immigrant rapists, venal bankers and idiot politicians, is imperilled by Muslim maniacs, and mocked by the rest of the world. He rages against the Chinese, whom he accuses of inventing global warming to destroy American industry. Announcing his run at Trump Tower, his Manhattan skyscraper, he lamented: “We got $18 trillion in debt… we need money. We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money…Sadly, the American dream is dead.”

Trumped-up charges

Fortunately, Mr Trump has a plan to “make America great again”, a Reaganite phrase he has purloined. He wants to deport 11m illegal immigrants and their offspring, impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports, kill the relatives of terrorist suspects and bar Muslims from entering America. To stanch the influx of “rapists” (never mind that for the past six years there has been a net outflow of people from America to Mexico), he would build a “beautiful wall” along the southern border. This is his signature policy and the subject of a much-anticipated call-and-response moment at the rallies he—descending from the sky in his monogrammed helicopter—has held all over America. “What are we gonna build?” he asks. “A wall!” the crowds holler back. “Who’s gonna pay?” “Mexico!”

The notion of Mr Trump, who is backed by around 35% of Republican voters (see chart 1), as a presidential nominee is alarming. Yet Mr Cruz, who has 20% and is running him close in Iowa, is hardly a reassuring alternative. The self-made son of a Cuban immigrant, he came to national attention in 2013 when he tried to shut down the federal government in a vainglorious bid to defund Barack Obama’s health-care reform, an effort he compared to the resistance against Adolf Hitler. It was an example of the sort of cynical self-promotion for which Mr Cruz is loathed by his colleagues in the Senate.

He aims to unite the most fiscally conservative part of the Republican coalition with the most socially conservative, evangelical Christians. Offering himself as a no-compromise right-winger and scourge of the party’s elite, Mr Cruz has done well in televised debates, raised more money than most of his ten surviving rivals—including $20m in the last three months of 2015—and covered the ground assiduously in pious Iowa. Hence his new preacherly style.

“In the days that follow,” Mr Cruz recently declaimed while touring the state’s ultra-devout north-west, “we will send the regulators that descend on farmers like locusts back to Washington!” Raising his nasal voice, he then beseeched his small audience of corn farmers and their wives to pray, “for just a minute every day”, that God would make him president. If He does, Mr Cruz promises to scrap the Internal Revenue Service, institute a 10% flat-tax on income and urge the Federal Reserve to readopt the gold standard.

Without divine intervention, it is hard to imagine Americans electing either of the Republican front-runners to be president. The lesson the party drew from Mitt Romney’s failure to dislodge Mr Obama in 2012 was that, in an increasingly diverse society, the Grand Old Party needed to widen its appeal. Mr Cruz’s target audience, white Christians, represent less than half the population. The obvious solution was to woo Hispanics, one of America’s fastest-growing electoral groups, who hold some conservative views, though only 27% of them voted for Mr Romney.

That was why, in 2013, a handful of Republican senators, including Marco Rubio, who is running third in the primary contest, joined a bipartisan, and ultimately fruitless, effort to legalise the status of millions of illegal immigrants. “It’s really hard to get people to listen to you…if they think you want to deport their grandmother,” declared Mr Rubio, a son of poor Cuban immigrants, at the time. It is even harder when you call them rapists. Mr Trump is easily the most disliked candidate of either party; 60% of voters disapprove of him.

There is a consolation for the Republicans. The Democrats could nominate someone even less electable. In Mrs Clinton’s path stands Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old “democratic socialist”, who says American capitalism is rigged against the 99% and vows to dismantle banks and build Medicare into a universal health-care system. His claim that this would save $10 trillion over a decade has elicited scepticism. An independent senator from Vermont, Mr Sanders was until recently neither a member nor even an admirer of the Democratic Party, which he has called “ideologically bankrupt”. Yet polls suggest he has the support of 37% of its primary voters and could win in Iowa and at the New Hampshire primary on February 9th.

From William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long to Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, populists are as much a part of the American political tradition as tirades against Washington. They have typically thrived at a time of anxiety. Bryan and Long were creatures of depressed economies; Mr Perot went to war with free-trade, which many Americans feared, just as the two big parties decided to embrace it; Mr Buchanan stoked the same nativist fires that have given Mr Trump’s candidacy much of its heat. This time the unease seems to be mainly economic, and it is widespread.

America has recovered well from the great recession of 2008-09—its unemployment rate is low, at 5%—yet wage growth remains anaemic. Real median household income in 2014 was almost $4,000 below its peak in 2007. That has shaken the national self-esteem; so have unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their messy aftermath, including the rise of Islamic State. Asked “Are America’s best days behind us?”, in a recent survey, 49% of respondents said that they were. Black Americans, for whom that is clearly not true, are almost the only hopeful group.

The squeeze has been hardest for people feeling pre-existing pressures: blue-collar workers, hurt by globalisation, and millennials facing rising college debts and competition for jobs. Last year’s college-leavers are, on average, $35,000 in the red, more than twice the figure of two decades ago. One or both groups are at the forefront of Europe’s many populist insurgencies: including, on the left, Syriza in Greece and the socialist leadership of Britain’s Labour Party; and on the right the French National Front and the UK Independence Party. America is no different.

Mr Trump’s biggest fans are the most pessimistic Americans, working-class whites. “The country’s spiralling downwards, people are not getting pay rises, we’re not the superpower we think we are,” lamented Todd Winslow, an office-equipment supplier, at a Trump rally in Claremont, New Hampshire. By articulating such fears, Mr Trump has validated them. That is why his supporters love him, whether or not they believe his promises. “He tells us what we all think but are afraid to say,” Mr Winslow declared. Others in the crowd liked Mr Trump’s success in business, his tough-guy style and the fact that he was not a politician. These qualities were evident in the diatribe that followed.

Ad-libbing as usual, Mr Trump boasted of his “big beautiful brain”, suggested dumping Bowe Bergdahl, an American prisoner-of-war released in a hostage swap with the Taliban, from the air over Afghanistan, and, after inviting questions from the crowd, showed familiarity with none of the issues raised. Asked whether he supported equal pay for men and women, he said: “I love equal pay, I mean I have many women, I was very, very far advanced on women…We’re going to come up with the right answer.”

Bern brightly

Mr Sanders’s crowds are similarly fervent, but younger. They are often dominated by bearded, beaded and disgruntled 18- to 29-year-olds, to whom Mr Sanders promises free education in public universities and relief on college debts. The sheer improbability of his assault on American power—he is old, cranky and wears crumpled suits—is to this group part of his appeal. If the humour of Mr Trump’s campaign is WrestleMania burlesque, Mr Sanders’s is college rag. “Feel the Bern” is its unofficial slogan. Yet that gentler tone reflects a big difference between America’s red and blue insurgencies, which is likely to determine how far they go and how much damage they do their respective parties.

Mr Sanders’s supporters want to undo the accommodation with business that the Democrats reached under Bill Clinton. But they do not hate their party: most strongly approve of Mr Obama, who is much closer politically to Mrs Clinton than he is to the Bern. That she is not doing better is largely down to her shortcomings as a candidate. Her well-funded campaign is being run by veterans of Mr Obama’s brilliant grass-roots operations and aims to emulate it in seeding and revving up networks of autonomous volunteers; but Mrs Clinton, a continuity candidate when the mood is for change, is not doing much revving. Mr Sanders’s campaign, which in 2015 netted over 2.5m donations, resembles the president’s more closely.

A scandal concerning Mrs Clinton’s foolish use of a private e-mail account while secretary of state has been damaging. It has highlighted her longstanding reputation for being untrustworthy; in a general election, that could hurt her badly. So could the independent run mulled by Michael Bloomberg, a moneybags former-mayor of New York. A free trader who worries about the environment, he would probably take more votes from the left than from the right.

Yet Mrs Clinton, who is at 52% in the polls, is lucky in her opponent. Had Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts and a milder version of Mr Sanders, decided to run, she might now be in Jeb! territory. She is lucky in her party’s residual discipline. And she is lucky that a series of southern states, where black voters, who tend to like her, matter more, will vote shortly after Iowa and New Hampshire (see chart 2). This will present her with an early opportunity to douse whatever fires Mr Sanders may have started.

For the Republican establishment, none of that good fortune applies. Mr Trump and Mr Cruz are more formidable and the Republican voters who like them more mutinous than their Democratic counterparts. In their shadows, a clutch of more electable candidates, of whom Mr Rubio along with two serving governors, John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey, are probably the last serious contenders, have meanwhile struggled to distinguish themselves.

Mr Bush’s spluttering campaign has exacerbated the problem. Its fund-raising drew resources from other mainstreamers; Mr Rubio raised a paltry $6m in the third quarter of 2015, a third of the amount raised by Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon and momentary front-runner. Now it is hurting them even more, with Mr Bush desperately splurging on attack ads against his establishment rivals, especially Mr Rubio. The result is that the Republicans’ erstwhile centre ground—the “somewhat conservative” vote that constitutes about 40% of the total and usually decides the party’s nomination—is hopelessly split.

The early results may fix that problem. Whichever of the three surviving mainstreamers does best in Iowa and New Hampshire, a “somewhat conservative” state, could swiftly consolidate the establishment’s share of the vote and take on the front-runners. Mr Rubio, who is clever, fresh-faced, Spanish-speaking and almost the only Republican candidate to beat Mrs Clinton in head-to-head polling, has long looked most suitable for that role.

He is expected to top the establishment roster in Iowa. Mr Kasich, who has a good governing record, and Mr Christie, an articulate bruiser, have worked harder in New Hampshire and could beat Mr Rubio in that state. But it would have to be by a decent margin to impress the conservative donors and media eagerly waiting to anoint the next establishment champion. Mr Kasich seems too much of a stick-in-the-mud for this election, Mr Christie too moderate for many Republicans. And Mr Rubio—if he can only survive the early states—would probably do better in later-voting, more moderate states, especially his native Florida. In a protracted contest, that could prove decisive

A three-horse race could even mean that no candidate wins a majority of delegates, which might also argue for Mr Rubio over his mainstream rivals. The candidates would then try to woo each other’s delegates at the party’s convention in July, something that last happened in 1948. And across the Republican coalition Mr Rubio is a popular second choice.

Yet it is also possible that no candidate of the establishment will do well enough in the early states to rise above the others. Its vote would then remain split. In that case, Mr Trump, if his supporters turn out, or Mr Cruz, whom the early schedule favours, by moving from evangelical Iowa to the southern Bible-belt, could wrap up the nomination while the mainstreamers are stuck squabbling among themselves.

It is bad luck for Republican leaders. But they have earned it, for having long encouraged the sort of polarising invective that Mr Trump and Mr Cruz spout. Mr Obama’s health-care reform is socialist; climate science is a liberal fraud; Democrats are not just wrong but anti-American: such are mainstream Republican verities. Even before Mr Trump doubled down on it, this sort of rabble-rousing had damaged the party, because its leaders never acted commensurately with their rhetoric, making them seem weak or insincere.

An uninviting establishment

Mistrusted by voters, the establishment candidates have found it increasingly hard to offer a positive alternative to Mr Trump’s miserabilism. To some degree, all have emulated it. Invited to condemn Mr Trump’s promised ban on Muslims, at a televised debate on January 14th, Mr Rubio instead praised his rival for having “tapped into some of that anger that’s out there”. Yet if the Republican pitch is about anger, not optimism, Mr Trump should win, because he is best at that. This has probably already made it harder for the party to win a general election; before Mr Rubio could woo many Hispanics, he would have some explaining to do. Naturally, his capitulation to Mr Trump hasn’t won him any favour with the front-runner, either. After Mr Rubio, who is of average height, was recently pictured wearing Cuban heels, Mr Trump commented: “I don’t know, they’re big heels. They’re big heels. I mean those heels were really up there… I just hope it works out fine for him.”

It still might. But if Mr Trump or Mr Cruz takes Iowa and New Hampshire, the establishment will start to fear the worst. Some Republican grandees are already seeking to build bridges with Mr Trump—including Bob Dole, a former presidential candidate, in a recent article in the New York Times—on the basis that even a narcissistic bully is less awful than Mr Cruz. That is a startling admission of weakness, before any vote has been cast. Yet the leadership’s usual means of influence—money and endorsements—have proved strikingly ineffective in this strange contest.

Mr Trump has spent less than any other leading candidate; his campaign has received more television news coverage than all his rivals combined. Neither of the front-runners has been endorsed by any serving Republican governor or senator. Their strength is from a different source. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is the shouty rock anthem that concludes Mr Trump’s seething rallies. Americans, and the world, have a nail-biting few weeks ahead, wondering what that could mean.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Outsiders’ chance"

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