The Volokh Conspiracy - GOP Candidates, GOP Voters, and the 2008 Race:

In the Sunday NYT, Adam Nagourney has an interesting article on the lack of enthusiasm for the GOP Presidential candidates among Republican voters:

[W]hat is worrying Republicans these days is that this tepid rank-and-file reception to the best the party has to offer suggests that the Republican Party is hitting a wall after dominating American politics for most of the last 35 years. Republican voters are reacting to — or rather, not reacting to — a field of presidential candidates who have defined their candidacies with familiar, even musty, Republican promises, slogans and policies.
"Our party generally has grown stale in its message and we're not as tuned in as we once were," said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who sought his party's presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000. "We're repeating words and phrases that were from the 1980s, rather than looking ahead to 2008. We haven't been as original and fresh in our presentation as we ought to be. We have been applying our old principles to new circumstances. The world is new."

  Of course, old ideas can be good ideas, and I'd support a candidate with old good ideas over a candidate with new bad ones. But the relative lack of enthusiasm seems real, and the question is why it exists.

  My own pet theory is that this is largely a casualty of the the Bush Administration's focus on loyalty over the past 7 years. By consistently rewarding loyalty over policy, the Bush Administration made it considerably more difficult for new GOP leaders to emerge. Being a loyalist means being a follower, and voters tend to look for candidates who are leaders instead. Partly as a result, the GOP field consists mostly of candidates who haven't been active in national politics in the last few years, if ever. Four of the five leading candidates are former officeholders (a former Mayor, a former Senator, and two former Governors), who haven't been closely involved in the political process for a while. The one sitting office-holder, Senator McCain, is known for his independence from Bush.

  It would have been a different picture if Bush were more popular. But an unpopular President who greatly values loyalty doesn't make it easy for the party in the next election.

	[Orin Kerr, December 16, 2007 at 4:24pm] Trackbacks GOP Candidates, GOP Voters, and the 2008 Race: In the Sunday NYT, Adam Nagourney has an interesting article on the lack of enthusiasm for the GOP Presidential candidates among Republican voters: [W]hat is worrying Republicans these days is that this tepid rank-and-file reception to the best the party has to offer suggests that the Republican Party is hitting a wall after dominating American politics for most of the last 35 years. Republican voters are reacting to — or rather, not reacting to — a field of presidential candidates who have defined their candidacies with familiar, even musty, Republican promises, slogans and policies. "Our party generally has grown stale in its message and we're not as tuned in as we once were," said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who sought his party's presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000. "We're repeating words and phrases that were from the 1980s, rather than looking ahead to 2008. We haven't been as original and fresh in our presentation as we ought to be. We have been applying our old principles to new circumstances. The world is new." Of course, old ideas can be good ideas, and I'd support a candidate with old good ideas over a candidate with new bad ones. But the relative lack of enthusiasm seems real, and the question is why it exists. My own pet theory is that this is largely a casualty of the the Bush Administration's focus on loyalty over the past 7 years. By consistently rewarding loyalty over policy, the Bush Administration made it considerably more difficult for new GOP leaders to emerge. Being a loyalist means being a follower, and voters tend to look for candidates who are leaders instead. Partly as a result, the GOP field consists mostly of candidates who haven't been active in national politics in the last few years, if ever. Four of the five leading candidates are former officeholders (a former Mayor, a former Senator, and two former Governors), who haven't been closely involved in the political process for a while. The one sitting office-holder, Senator McCain, is known for his independence from Bush. It would have been a different picture if Bush were more popular. But an unpopular President who greatly values loyalty doesn't make it easy for the party in the next election.