In politics, this is the year of “we want something different.” Among Republicans, there’s the surprising endurance of Donald Trump at the top of most polls, and the unlikely emergence of Ted Cruz, despised by the GOP establishment, as Trump's most-likely rival for the nomination. Among Democrats, Bernie Sanders might win in both Iowa and New Hampshire, something that would threaten the Hillary Clinton juggernaut.
This year, history may play that joke not on one party, but both – and all of us. The 2016 campaign may be a Goldwater vs. McGovern race.
This is an imperfect analogy, as all historical analogies are. Trump, for instance, is no Goldwater. He is both a more talented politician and more ideologically squishy. But, like Goldwater, he is broadly unpopular. It’s not clear how he wins a majority of electoral votes.
Cruz, meanwhile, is as close to a latter-day Goldwater as you can get in the Republican Party. Unlike most recent Republican nominees, his strategy does aim at sanding off the edges of conservative positions to maximize their appeal to the broad center of American politics, but for maximizing the turnout of conservative voters. In other words, a strategy that is likely to fail under normal circumstances.
Unless either of them is running against Sanders. Sanders’ espousal of socialism will marginalize him with many voters before they even hear what he has to say. An opponent will beat him over the head with it. Sanders’ positions push the debate considerably to the left of where it’s been under President Obama.
So what happens in a Trump or Cruz vs. Sanders race? Ironically, though the campaign has so far generated a lot of unexpected passion and interest on both sides, in a Goldwater vs. McGovern race a lot of voters would simply shrug their shoulders and stay home. The “center” of American politics, a common ground that has already dramatically shrunk, would effectively disappear (though Trump’s heterodox positions on some issues might help him there.) Swing voters would become as common as unicorns. Debates would be bizarre, with little common ground and candidates on the same stage addressing separate audiences (except perhaps on foreign policy, where both sides express skepticism about U.S. interventions abroad).
Ultimately, whoever is elected would win narrowly and lack broad support. Coattails would be short – meaning that, for President Sanders in particular, the odds of facing a Republican Congress in 2017 would be pretty good. If Trump or Cruz were to win, on the other hand, the GOP would own all three branches of government. (On a practical level, the power arrangements of 2017 and beyond aren’t that different than if more establishment-friendly candidates – Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio – are elected.) So in a Goldwater vs. McGovern race, Goldwater is probably in a better position.
