2016 Here We Come

It has begun. The great Rand Paul-Chris Christie race in the 2016 Republican presidential primary is in full swing—and has been this entire election season, commencing well before Senator Paul took the day after Christie’s bruising reelection to criticize the New Jersey governor. This precipitous opening was not exactly inevitable; after all, the Kentucky Senator did not have to face voters on Tuesday, and many pundits observed his somewhat surprising timorousness during last month’s government shutdown. But Paul could not wait, and his involvement in this cycle’s race for governor of Virginia marked his first purely politically motivated step for the 2016 GOP crown. Unfortunately for him, that has led to the current score—Christie 1, Paul 0.

The next presidential election is shaping up to be the end-all be-all brawl for the future of the Republican Party. The battle lines have been drawn. In one corner stands the scion to the political dynasty founded by the self-proclaimed father of the Tea Party. In the other, we have the supposed champion of the moderates, the man who still receives puritanical flak for consorting with President Obama during Hurricane Sandy last year. The friction between the two transcends ideological disagreements, and their rivalry is clearly personal. Earlier this year, Christie characterized the privacy concerns of libertarians like Paul as “esoteric, intellectual debates,” and Paul responded by attacking the conservative credentials of “the king of bacon talking about bacon.”

Ad hominem attacks aside, the results of Tuesday night’s elections provide premonitory implications about the Christie-Paul spat; in the past couple weeks, the political decisions of other prominent Republicans established the relative fortunes of Christie in New Jersey and Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia as a de facto proxy campaign between the two GOP heavyweights. The results: Christie won by 22 points in the deep-blue Garden State; “Cooch” lost by two and a half points in reddish-purple Old Dominion.

To say that these results map onto a victory for Christie and (even more so) a loss for Paul may seem like a stretch. After all, Rand Paul is not the “untrustworthy and unlikeable” Ken Cuccinelli, nor is he Barbara Buono, Christie’s erstwhile, “little-known” Democratic opponent for the Governor’s Mansion. But Rand Paul tied his standing with Cuccinelli’s in a race in which the GOP establishment worrisomely kept significant resources from the party’s Tea Party-flavored standard-bearer. Whereas Cuccinelli’s opponent, Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe—made famous for his ideologically deficient pragmatism in Mark Leibovich’s summer hit “This Town”—was joined by Democratic bigwigs Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on the campaign trail, Cuccinelli could not even secure the endorsement of Virginia’s quintessential most prominent (excluding scandal-embroiled Governor Bob McDonnell) establishment Republican, Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling.

There are a variety of explanations for the national GOP’s abandonment of Cuccinelli, although New York Times columnist Ross G. Douthat ’02 does a good job dispelling the seemingly rational ones employed by the party itself. Regardless of reasoning, the desertion of Cuccinelli by the Christie-esque faction of the party created a vacuum at the top of the Republican attorney general’s endorsement list. Enter Senator Rand Paul.

Despite assertions from both the GOP’s D.C.-class and its libertarian wing that Cuccinelli’s social conservatism warranted a protest vote for Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis, Rand Paul, arguably the nation’s most powerful libertarian, eschewed that line of reasoning in becoming Cuccinelli’s most prominent backer. Paul and his more doctrinaire father both joined their party’s candidate on the stump in the days leading up to the election. (It should be mentioned that Florida Senator Marco Rubio, another potential candidate for the presidency, also joined Cuccinelli on the eve of Election Day, albeit with significantly less fanfare.)

What does this mean? While Cuccinelli lost, the result should not be construed as a Virginia referendum of Rand Paul’s presidential aspirations. If anything, Paul probably was successful in imploring some Sarvis voters that Cooch “would arguably be the most libertarian governor in the United States.” (Exit polls suggest that Sarvis ended up drawing more potential Democrats than potential Republicans.) But it does attest to Paul’s inability to mobilize large swaths of voters, especially—and most importantly to his primary chances—those with the pocketbooks thick enough to bankroll his campaign. That does not bode well for his chances in a party that has nominated the pragmatic, ideologically lacking option in every election post-Reagan.

The news is not all good for Chris Christie either. The complete absence of coattails assisting other Republican candidates in his state is troubling, and it should not go unnoticed by election prognosticators. Yet he won big when Paul’s candidate lost. And Paul knows it—after refusing to congratulate his fellow Republican when initially asked for comment, he later went out of his way to call Christie’s election strategy “offensive.”

Post-election withdrawal inevitably leads to takeaway mania among pundits trying desperately to sate their thirst for political horseracing.  As I see it, the takeaways are as follows. First, Paul bet big on Cuccinelli and lost, while Christie’s cozy relationship with establishmentarians of both parties proved hugely advantageous to securing his easy win. Second, we are long past the days of Ronald Reagan’s famous Eleventh Commandment; modern Republicans have no qualms “speaking ill” of their intra-party adversaries.

John F. M. Kocsis ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays. Follow him on Twitter @jfmkocsis.