Why do the donors and bigwigs settle on their candidate earlier than the activists do? Partly because they’re more concerned about picking a winner. Compared to Tea Party ralliers, their support is more of an investment and less of a statement. The most ideologically minded Republicans are willing to back longshot candidates like Herman Cain (the former Godfather’s Pizza executive, never elected to anything, who ran for the nomination last time). The big-money people in the party are less sentimental. They might have liked Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, who also ran last time. But they never saw any signs he could win, and so they never helped him.
The donor class, as a rule, doesn’t seek a candidate with whom it can fall in love. Its members weren’t enthusiastic about Romney, and some tried to persuade others, including Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, to get into the 2012 race. People in the party establishment are also easier to herd than the grassroots conservatives are, because they’re engaged earlier, they’re a smaller group and — crucially — they want to be herded. Six months before the primaries it can be hard to predict who’s going to catch fire in Iowa. It’s easy to see who’s got a national fundraising base.
Picking a candidate early is one mark of the party establishment that separates it from the grassroots. Another is a limited imagination. Hence the painfully truncated list of people the establishment seems to be considering right now, dominated as it is by old Republican names like Romney and Bush. Republicans who oppose the establishment, and want to wrest control of the party from it, have on the other hand a surplus of imagination: That’s how they can talk themselves into the idea that candidates like Cain are viable.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member