New York Times
By Jonathan Martin
March 29, 2015
As
Jeb Bush mingled with Hispanic workers on a company tour a few weeks
ago on his first trip here as an all-but-declared candidate for
president, he was able to guess
the region in Colombia where one woman was born just from hearing her
accent.
That
night, he told Republicans that their party had to “go out and reach
out to people of every walk of life, not with a divisive message but one
that is unifying.”
A
day later, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, making his own maiden New
Hampshire swing, proudly donned a hat given to him by a gun-rights group
and, highlighting his frugality,
bragged about the sweater he had bought at Kohl’s for a dollar.
He
recounted the central lesson he had taken from his rancorous clashes
with liberal protesters and public-employee union members in his state:
“Instead of intimidating
us, it reminded us exactly who elected us and the job they elected us
to do,” he said.
The
first votes of the primary season will not be cast until the Iowa
caucuses next February, but Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, and
Mr. Walker are fast becoming
the most prominent exponents of two dueling visions of how the
Republican Party can retake the White House in 2016 — by extending its
reach, or by energizing more of the sorts of people who have sided with
Republicans in the past.
The
two men share many policy positions, but offer strikingly divergent
messages and are pursuing very different electoral strategies. And their
political approaches seem
inextricably linked to their biographies.
Mr.
Bush, a privileged scion who married a Mexican woman and boasts of
being bicultural, reflects his polyglot adopted hometown, Miami, and
state. He is telling Republicans,
in effect, that they must accept a changing country: that the path to
the presidency will be found through appealing to voters who may not
look like them, and with a standard-bearer whose state and immediate
family resemble tomorrow’s America.
Mr.
Walker, a small-town minister’s son who met his wife, a Milwaukee
native, at a Wisconsin barbecue joint, is a product of one of the most
politically and racially polarized
regions of the country, metropolitan Milwaukee. He has succeeded by
confronting his adversaries and by generating soaring levels of support
from his fellow Republicans in a state they have failed to carry in a
presidential race for more than three decades.
The party’s way forward, by Mr. Walker’s lights, lies in demonstrating
toughness in the face of intense opposition from the left and mobilizing
those who are already inclined to support conservatism.
“I
think Jeb is counting on the party’s hunger to win, and Walker is
counting on their urge to fight,” said Representative Tom Cole, an
Oklahoma Republican and longtime
party strategist.
Neither
may ultimately become the nominee in what is shaping up as an unusually
crowded and volatile campaign. But their opposing political identities
offer a distillation
of a wider debate roiling Republicans, the conclusion of which could
shape the party for years to come.
“One
of them wants to re-energize the party from within, and the other one
wants to re-energize the party from without,” said Alex Castellanos, a
veteran Republican consultant.
Applied
to the electoral map, the inside route would most likely mean that Mr.
Walker would try to capture a band of Midwestern and Great Lakes states
filled with the
sort of working-class white voters he reflects. He frequently notes
that Republicans have not carried Wisconsin since 1984, a not-so-subtle
suggestion that he could. He also would surely eye four other Rust Belt
states President Obama carried both times: Iowa,
Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Mr.
Bush would almost certainly set his sights on the increasingly diverse
states Mr. Obama carried at least once in his two elections: Colorado,
Florida, Nevada, New
Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia. The voting-age population in each
of those states is at least 25 percent nonwhite, and in some of them
substantially higher.
Mr.
Bush’s calculus is based in part on the 2012 election: Mitt Romney
received 17 percent of the nonwhite vote, meaning that if the next
Republican nominee does no better,
he or she will have to receive 65 percent of the white vote to win,
said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
Mr.
Bush’s message is to challenge and persuade his own party. He sticks to
his support for an immigration overhaul and backs the Common Core
education standards, unpopular
stances with many conservatives. Facing criticism and trying to convert
skeptics rather than bending to the will of the party base, Mr. Bush
has said, are a sign of “backbone.”
Mr.
Walker, by contrast, aims to reinforce what Republicans believe and
reassure them that they are right. He has changed his views on both
immigration and the Common
Core, realigning himself with the party base and suggesting that this
shows he is responsive to voters.
Their language differs noticeably, too, on racially charged issues.
Mr.
Bush proudly tells of having ended racial preferences at Florida’s
universities, but in the next breath adds, as he said in February, that
the state wound up with
“more African-American and Hispanic kids attending our university
system” than before.
Mr.
Walker wins applause by noting his efforts to require drug tests of
people receiving public assistance, and uses language reminiscent of
old, loaded appeals about
indolent welfare recipients. Answering a question in Iowa about food
stamps, he turned to a metaphor about his sons’ high school football
days.
“In
all the years I watched them play football,” he said, “there never once
was a guy that got called in the game who was sitting on the bench with
his helmet off, with
his feet up.”
Whether
trying to restrain the influence of public-sector unions or to hold
those on welfare accountable, Mr. Walker is practicing the politics of
scarcity, said Matt
K. Lewis, a conservative writer.
“This
approach lends itself to tribalism,” said Mr. Lewis, who is working on a
book about how conservatives can adapt to the future. “It’s ‘If those
other people take
what we have, we can’t have it.’ ”
But
if some on the right view Mr. Walker’s approach as dispiritingly dark,
many conservatives see Mr. Bush’s inclusive tone and willingness to
offer illegal immigrants
a pathway to legal status as more Pollyanna than panacea — especially
given polls showing Hispanics are more liberal on other issues.
“His
argument is essentially that these groups that have moved away from
Republicans are going to care more about immigration than health care,”
said David Frum, an author
and speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s White House. “His
electability stands or falls on the truth of that claim.”
Mr.
Bush and Mr. Walker differ even on political polarization itself — in
ways that make it sometimes sound as though they are speaking past the
voters to each other.
Mr.
Walker explains how his standoff with protesters was a way of reminding
him who had voted for him and what he was elected to do; he named his
book on the affair “Unintimidated.”
Mr. Bush suggests that his own ambition is to tame political
polarization to address the country’s thorniest issues.
“I’m
tired of the partisan divide where nothing happens because we’re just
in this massive food fight,” Mr. Bush said this month in South Carolina.
He added, “People that
want to consider running for office have to stop preying on people’s
fears and stop dividing us and start forging consensus so that we can
move forward.”
Kevin
Madden, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Bush “is running a general
election right from the beginning because he doesn’t want to get to a
place where the nomination
is not worth having.”
“And
Walker wants to appeal to the base voter who is looking for an
alternative to the establishment candidate,” Mr. Madden said.
The
contrast plays out in ways small and large. Mr. Bush, in the early
going, has had to fire an aide to his political action committee who
made insensitive comments about
women and blacks; an aide to Mr. Walker was forced to quit after she
criticized the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses.
More
significant, their approaches to the primary campaign could also be
instructive about how each would attempt to win a general election, and
the risks they choose
to take.
“One
is a populist strategy that doubles down on turning out disaffected
white men,” Mr. Lewis said. (An adviser to Mr. Walker did not directly
dispute this assessment,
suggesting that Mr. Walker would perform well with middle-class voters,
whose support for Democratic candidates has dwindled in the last few
presidential campaigns and who have strongly supported Mr. Walker in his
gubernatorial races.)
“The
other is a gamble that conservatism can win in the free market of ideas
amongst a diverse and changing 21st-century America,” Mr. Lewis said of
Mr. Bush’s approach.
Of course, Republicans may not be strictly bound to an either-or proposition.
Winning
back the Great Lakes states could prove as decisive as reclaiming the
increasingly diverse states that Mr. Bush is focused on, said Mr. Ayres,
the pollster. He
said that was an argument for a hybrid candidate who could do both —
like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whom Mr. Ayres expects to work for
if he runs for president.
Republicans
may ultimately choose such a third way. But if it comes down to Mr.
Bush and Mr. Walker, the choice will prove revealing.
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