Douthat declares that “the most striking thing about the public polling on the 2016 Republican nomination isn’t just the absence of a clear frontrunner: It’s the absence of a clear pair or trio or even a quartet of frontrunners.” He wonders if we are deviating from “the path that every post-1970s Republican primary campaign has ultimately taken, in which a candidate who seems reasonably electable, performs well with “moderate conservative” primary voters … and wins the blessing of the party’s donor class successfully fends off a more right-wing challenger”:
Right now, most of the arguments that people are having about specific candidates — the debate over whether Rand Paul has the legs and the protean appeal required to go the distance, or whether his attempted hostile takeover will be almost-inevitably crushed; the argument about whether Jeb Bush’s potential candidacy is “a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party” or a perfectly plausible idea — are really arguments about whether this pattern this likely to hold, or whether the unprecedented unsettledness it’s likely produce a nearly unprecedented, not-since-Goldwater outcome instead. …
I believe that the party decides, and I know that party establishments basically exist to keep figures like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee from the nomination. But sometimes the party can’t make up it’s mind, and sometimes, just sometimes, the establishment fractures, fails, loses. Because of history I don’t look at Paul and Cruz and Huckabee and see likely Republican presidential nominees. But history is what’s happening now as well as what’s happened back then, and with where the field is at the moment, it seems like a mistake to look at any of them and just say, “no, they can’t.”
The Dish 