There isn’t much evidence that the dynamic currently driving the Republican contest would succeed in the general election. The Washington Post/ABC survey found that 51% of registered voters (53% of independents and 56% of moderates) prefer someone with political experience over an outsider as the next president. The wave of insurgency that swept over Republicans—especially conservative Republicans, who favor an outsider by 64% to 30%—has crested short of the U.S. electorate’s mobile middle…
Against this backdrop, one might easily assume that the American people are in a quasi-revolutionary mood, disillusioned with reform and ripe for fundamental structural change. The results of the Washington Post/ABC survey suggest otherwise. Given a choice between a new president who wants to “fix the current system” and one who wants to “tear it down and start over,” the reformer beats the revolutionary by a margin of 78% to 19%.
Here again there is unity across the usual lines of division: Only 19% of conservatives and 20% of Republicans opt for the radical approach. Across the board, Americans want a leader who uses what is right about the political system to repair what is wrong with it.
This begins with making the nation’s two-party system—our legacy and our fate—work again. Two successive presidents campaigned promising to heal the partisan divide. Both failed. Neither told us how he would do it; neither knew how.
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