Candidate Quality Might Matter, Chris Christie Edition

A CNN poll conducted from January 31st to February 2nd found that Hillary Clinton led five named Republican candidates by amounts ranging from fifteen points to twenty points. That kind of makes it look like, if Hillary runs, she'll be President (given that her lead in the Democratic primary is big enough that, were her own polling figure replaced by her margin over her closest competitor, she would still be in better shape than she was at this point in the 2008 cycle), though obviously it's early and this is just one poll. But there's an interesting comparison with the last incarnation of this same poll, conducted from December 16th to 19th of 2013. In that poll, Hillary's largest lead over these same five men was twenty-one points, but her smallest lead was... negative two points. It looks, in other words, like the 2016 Presidential landscape changed dramatically over those six weeks. Except the thing is, virtually none of the numbers moved. The absolute difference between the December margin and the Groundhog Day margin for the five match-ups were one point, two points, five points, seven points, and... eighteen points. Okay, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan are doing a bit worse now than they were a couple months ago, but the story here is Chris Christie, who has spent those six weeks imploding like a black hole from which no political ambition can escape. And this, I think, is an interesting little case study for the political science concept that candidate quality is not an important variable in Presidential elections, that only the so-called "fundamentals" matter.

At first glance, the most obvious conclusion is that the Christie example strongly suggests that candidate quality does matter. In December, the Democrats and the Republicans had an equal number of high-quality candidates seen as serious contenders for the nomination, one. The match-up between the two of them suggested that the election could be something like a toss-up. Now, the Democrats outnumber the Republicans in quality candidates one-zip, and the poll suggests that the Republicans are in line to get slaughtered. Plus or minus one quality candidate could, it appears, alter American politics for the next decade more or less single-handedly. Thank you, Mayor of Fort Lee, in other words. And I think, on a certain level, this conclusion is absolutely correct. Candidate quality matters, a lot. Ask Senators Coons, Donnelly, Bennett, McCaskill, and Reid.

But I think there's an extra level of subtlety, and in the end this Christie datum suggests a refinement, albeit a substantial one, rather than a rejection of the idea that candidate quality is irrelevant.
It seems clear that, viewed in isolation, candidate quality has a significant impact on electoral outcomes. But if candidate quality is in turn highly dependent on the fundamentals, it becomes less clear that candidate quality is something you really need to worry about in attempting to predict or project an election. Whether or not this is plausible might depend on what you think "the fundamentals" include. If it's really just the economy and/or wars or whatever, it seems unlikely. Well, except in the sense that when, say, there's a recession on during election season, the challenger will probably win, and will then be credited for being the better candidate. But if we include a broader sense of ideological fundamentals, the idea that sometimes one political party's policy platform is just substantially closer to what the public wants, I think the case gets considerably stronger.

Or, to put it another way, I don't think it's an accident that the Republicans have no high-quality candidates right now. And I don't think it's an accident that the guy who had been looking for all the world like the one decent candidate they had has suddenly collapsed. Well, okay, it's an accident that he suddenly collapsed, but the decline was coming, and not just because I know Chris Christie. The basic problem is that the Republican Party, in considering whom to nominate for President in 2016, can't just stop being the Republican Party. More specifically, it can't stop being the Republican Party as it currently exists. That party holds a broad array of deeply unpopular positions, unpopular for the very good reason that they are horrid. And that's not a fringey view within the party; that's the party's official view, that's the view of basically everyone in the party. Almost every major intra-party disagreement since Barack Obama was inaugurated has been one of style or strategy, not of substance. Republicans are remarkably agreed on actual questions of what public policy should look like. They cannot avoid nominating someone who basically comes from this consensus. This consensus is incredibly unpopular. This fact can be masked by the presence of a Democrat in the White House; particularly in midterm elections, Republicans are able to just point at Obama and say "not him!" and escape most scrutiny for their own beliefs. Not so in a Presidential election to replace Obama. Therefore, the Republican Party as currently constituted is basically incapable of nominating a candidate of sufficient quality to win the general election, or at least to be anything other than a major handicap in that election.

Part of how this works, obviously, is that actually high-quality candidates can't win the primary, and therefore don't run. But the other part of how it works is that candidates who are high-quality but want to win the primary anyway face a particularly tricky dilemma: they need to become acceptable to Republicans in order to be nominated, but if they've become acceptable to Republicans, they won't be acceptable to anyone else anymore. Mitt Romney only got lightly hit by this process, because he ran against a pack of clowns. Spontaneously combusting clowns. In general, though, someone like Chris Christie, who had the genuine streaks of moderation and somewhat of a penchant for actual governance rather than governance by slogan, has to throw away that capital in order to get in a position to spend it. Now, in Christie's case, he did that through an oddly obsessive focus on demonstrating his unstoppability by winning Democratic towns in the 2013 gubernatorial election, which (being corrupt) he pursued in a corrupt fashion. (That's how it looks, anyway.) His other strategy for making himself appealing to Republicans was his frequent public displays of nastiness, or what you might call bullying. Since he bullied people Republicans hate, he got them to rally 'round. The plausibility of that strategy for winning the primary was always doubtful, since at some point he'd be bullying fellow Republicans; I've also long thought it would be corrosive of his chances in the general election. And note that both of those strategies were alternatives to the more conventional approach, "repudiate every remotely moderate thing you've ever said in the past," a.k.a. the McCain/Romney Gambit.

That was perhaps a too-lengthy digression into the specific facts of Chris Christie. I can't help it; the specific facts of Chris Christie are amazing right now, and cannot be discussed enough. The point is, though, that the Republican Party is not like some baseball team that happens to see all its top prospects bust and is therefore devoid of top talent. In a way it's more like a team that places major emphasis in player acquisition on things like runs batted in that aren't truly very indicative of value: the reason they don't have any good players is that their ideas about what makes a player good do not line up with those of the relevant tribunal, the general electorate in the one case and the game of baseball itself in the other.

Now, what this doesn't necessarily explain is the vaunted political science result that what appear to be highly ideological landslides, like the elections of 1936, 1964, and 1984, are in fact wholly explained by the recent state of the economy. One way of reconciling that conclusion with my belief that candidate quality matters but is largely a dependent variable is that the kind of campaign you can run depends in large part on the state of the economy and foreign affairs. If you've got a bad economy, pound the economy. If you've got a bad war, pound the war. If you've got neither, pound the table. A party with some fundamentals-y advantage can just talk about that, and moderate its tone if not its substantive proposals. But when the incumbents are basically running the show pretty well, you pretty much have no choice but to make a grand ideological critique, with which the middle portion of the public is unlikely to agree. If they agreed with your grand ideology, they wouldn't be in the middle. Plus there's a pretty good datum suggesting that the incumbent's ideology is working reasonably well.

But that's weird as concerns the 2012 and 2016 elections. Now, people claim that the 2012 election went about as you'd expect from the state of economic growth, namely a narrow win for the incumbent. But it's weird that, in the Obama era, the Republicans have not been able to do the thing you'd expect from the above paragraph, and moderate their tone to reflect the generally lousy real-world conditions. Something's gotten into them where they can't just say, well, Obama's mismanaging things, we need someone new, they're compelled to make the grand ideological critique anyway. Now, I could write a series of blog posts about why that is; the point I'm making here is just that it's an odd occurrence, from the stand-point of political science. Another way to reformulate the idea that candidate quality has an effect but isn't important is that parties will always nominate a candidate and run a campaign of approximately optimal quality. They have a very strong incentive to do so, and if we can assume that both sides will do this then we can ignore candidate quality. But the lesson of Chris Christie is that right now that appears not to be true. We know that Republicans could be making this a competitive election with an optimal-quality candidate. We also know that they do not, in the post-Christie world at least, appear to be making it a competitive election. That suggests a failure to come up with a decent candidate, something which (I think) political scientists do not believe has ever really happened in a Presidential election in a way that mattered. If Hillary does go on to crush some mediocre hard-right Republican in 2016, they'll have some 'splaining to do.

Which is good, because being wrong is how science progresses.