Just four months after posting historic election gains, Republicans are experiencing a reality check about 2012: President Barack Obama is going to be a lot tougher to defeat than he looked late last year.
Having gone from despondency in 2008 to euphoria last November, a more sober GOP is wincing in the light of day as they consider just how difficult unseating an incumbent president with a massive warchest is going to be, even with a still-dismal economy.
“I consider him a favorite, albeit a slight favorite,” said former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove. “Republicans underestimate President Obama at their own peril.”
Much of the GOP realism is rooted in a long-standing truism of American politics – that absent a major crisis of confidence, it’s highly difficult to defeat a sitting president.
But aside from the traditional advantages of incumbency, Republicans are also fretting about the strength of Obama’s campaign infrastructure, the potential limitations of their own field and, particularly, the same demographic weaknesses that haunted them in 2008.
The best indicator of the GOP outlook on 2012 may be the shape of the party’s prospective field. Many of the contenders who can afford to sit out a presidential election cycle and wait for an open-seat race – Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush come to mind – seem intent on doing so.
The view among senior Republicans is not that Obama is a sure bet or that the GOP nomination is not worth having. Many are convinced 2012 will be more competitive than 2008 and that the White House can still be won.
But there is an unmistakable sense among Republicans that the breezy predictions of Obama turning out to be the next Jimmy Carter were premature.
“The people that are sitting around saying, ‘He’s definitely going to be a one-term president. It’s going to be easy to take him out,’ they’re obviously political illiterates – political idiots, let me be blunt,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in an interview.
Some of those in the GOP, like Huckabee, who have considered or are considering a run are candid about the enormity of the challenge they’ll face, pointing to Obama’s potent political organization and the inherent power of the presidency.
“You just don’t go against a billion-dollar mountain of money, a guy who’s already won the presidency once – but he gets to fly in on Air Force One and make all his campaign stops with the trappings of the office,” said the Arkansan.
Others mulling a White House pointed to Obama’s response to what the president himself called the midterm “shellacking.”
Thune, who said last week that he wouldn’t seek the GOP nomination next year, praised Obama as a “very shrewd politician” to the Associated Press, noting that the president had moved the middle by supporting the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.
“As I observed his response and reaction to the midterm election, that was all part of my assessment of the landscape,” Thune said. “Any incumbent is a tough race, and he’s no exception. I think he’s got plenty of vulnerabilities, but I also observed how adept politically he was.”
While noting it was still early in the campaign, Christie highlighted another unmatched advantage Obama enjoys.
“He proved he could win once, so that’s one more time than anybody else who has run,” said the first-term New Jersey governor.
Then there are the structural advantages that helped lift Obama three years ago. Even as the GOP benefited last fall from what many independent voters saw as the president’s initial overreach, they still face nagging difficulties at the polls with minority voters and youths.
“The electorate will look much different in 2012 than it did in 2010,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who was a political operative for decades before coming to Congress. “It’s going to be younger, browner, and more to the left.”
The problem for Republicans is most acute among Hispanics, a pivotal bloc of the electorate in must-have Florida and the West.
“Republicans cannot afford to lose the Latino vote by 30%+ as they did in 2008,” read the slide headline on a 2012 polling presentation sent out last week by the GOP survey research firm Public Opinion Strategies.
Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster with his own firm, said that the most discouraging piece of data for the party ahead of 2012 is the GOP’s difficulty with Hispanic voters.
“If we lose the fastest-growing, largest minority group like we lost them in 2008, it’s going to be pretty tough in places like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona,” observed Ayres.
But Ayres and other Republicans pointed out that there were also some numbers on their side – namely sustained joblessness and the sense among voters that the country is on the wrong track.
“He’s going to have to win re-election with historically high unemployment,” said Cole.
The congressman said that if Obama does win he would likely break from recent historical precedent by getting re-elected with a narrower margin than what he first received upon winning the White House.
“It’s hard to see him running as strongly in places like Indiana and Ohio,” said the Oklahoman, citing two states the president won in 2008.
But Obama won’t be running in a vacuum and even before the Republicans likely to run formally launch their campaigns, party members are grumbling about their options in the typical way: by openly pining for others to get in the race
“Jeb’s opening is now,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry earlier this month in a much-buzzed-about column about the former Florida governor.
Candidates aside, Republicans also worry about the mechanics of their primary election season which, without winner-take-all contests early on, may continue longer than it has in recent cycles.
“Whoever the nominee is, whether it’s me or someone else, it’s going to be a short time window,” said Huckabee. “Probably no one can capture it until late spring, early summer. If that’s the case, [that’s a] shortened window to gear up for the general election, heal up the wounds from what will be a very gruesome campaign and to restock a war chest that’ll be empty by then.”
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who is increasingly likely to run, said Obama was beatable simply because of his record. There is a distinction between how voters view the president personally and how they view his policies.
“Americans recognize bad policy that has yielded bad results,” Barbour said in an interview, noting the country’s skyrocketing debt under the incumbent.
But the Mississippian, a former RNC chair who has worked for decades in national politics, said that as the sitting president Obama would begin with an advantage.
“Incumbent presidents don’t lose very often, particularly if it’s a president who has taken over from the other party,” said Barbour.
Just once since 1896, he noted, has a sitting president lost his re-election after taking over from the opposite party four years earlier: Carter in 1980.
Alexander Burns contributed to this report.
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