The most recent party failure was Arizona Sen. John McCain’s ascent to the Republican nomination in 2008. While McCain won some early endorsements, he certainly did not win the invisible primary. McCain – a self-described maverick – made enemies within his party by breaking from conservative orthodoxy on campaign finance reform, immigration and other issues. McCain’s enemies had a real incentive to find a broadly appealing McCain alternative, but they didn’t. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson momentarily appeared to be a conservative consensus candidate, but Thompson proved to be a lackluster campaigner. So the party, unable to settle on a consensus choice, ended up being stuck with a nominee that some factions strongly disliked.
So in 2016, it is entirely conceivable that the Republican Party elite will simply fail to come to a consensus. That could turn out fine for Republicans – the eventual nominee might be a decent candidate who would have been a plausible party favorite in a less crowded field (e.g. Walker, Rubio, Bush or John Kasich).
But it might turn out very poorly. If we add the 1972 and 1976 Democratic Primaries to the above list (the parties did not decide in these elections because they had yet to adapt to the post-McGovern-Fraser reforms, which led to the end of the convention-centric nomination process and ushered in our modern era of state by state primaries) we get the following list of nominees: McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Kerry and McCain. There’s only one president on that list, and after eight years of Obama the Republican elite may not want to risk waiting and seeing which candidate the primary voters choose. Because, as my boss Sean Trende notes, voters plausibly could pick any of them.
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