Harry Enten thinks the GOP could easily win in 2016. He argues that Clinton’s general election polling numbers “won’t stand up over time” and that she is “still coming off a height of popularity since serving in the non-partisan position of Secretary of State”:
At this point, a better feel of how a Democrat might do if the election were held today is polling involving Vice President Biden. Biden is a well-known standard bearer of the Democratic label. He’s been serving in a partisan office for as long as many have been alive. His favorable rating generally matches up with President Obama’s approval rating in the polls.
Last month, Biden was either neck-and-neck or trailed leading Republicans. He was 1pt ahead of Marco Rubio and 2pt ahead of Rand Paul in an early May Public Policy Polling survey. He was behind by 4pt against Paul and 6pt behind Jeb Bush in a Quinnipiac poll.
All of them are also less well-known than Biden, yet they are polling at or ahead of him.
You could argue that Bush is more moderate than the mainstream Republican candidates, though, Rubio and Paul are almost certainly to the right of it. They incidentally are three of the top four leading contenders for the nomination right now. You wouldn’t expect mainstream Republican candidates to be polling this well if the party were too out of the mainstream to win.
Reihan objects to Enten’s claim that the “GOP might be feeling the pressure to adjust its political platforms to win national elections, but it doesn’t need to”:
The conceptual problem with Enten’s piece, in my view, is that some measure of “adjustment” is inevitable, as the issue mix changes from election cycle to election cycle. Issues that were not salient in 2012 will be salient come 2016, and the process of taking a stand on emerging issues will necessarily entail shifts of emphasis, etc. The central claim made by conservative reformers or reform conservatives (or whatever we’re called this week) is that the party still needs a compelling post-Reagan, post-crisis domestic policy agenda that resonates with middle-income voters. A related claim is that though, as Enten notes, the average voter felt that Mitt Romney was closer to them ideologically than Barack Obama, this didn’t mean that the average voter felt that Romney’s policy agenda was more responsive to her needs and concerns, which is the more salient question.
The Dish 