Emily Zanotti

Photograph: The Guardian

The 2016 Republican campaign has been unlike anything I’ve experienced in my time working in or covering politics. Since the early 2000s, I have thought that partisan politics and reality television-style entertainment have been heading for a collision course, but few could have predicted they would intersect so quickly and with such a dramatic impact on the Republican field.

Certainly, the Republican party has always been trying to reach beyond its borders to find fresh blood for its team, but there is good outreach and bad. On one hand, we had a more diverse slate of candidates in 2016 than ever before – black, Hispanic, female, immigrant, middle class, even libertarian. It demonstrated a deeper bench than in 2008 or 2012, when the fields were, predictably, white, old, rich and male.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has subverted the traditional campaign almost entirely, drawing from the hardline margins – especially where immigration is concerned – and from the aggressively, tribally partisan to find support. The former is a good development for the Republican party; the latter is a bad development for politics in general.

I’ve also been fascinated at how little “big money” has come into play in this primary season. By all rights, Jeb Bush – who started the game will hundreds of millions – should be easily ahead, but time has favored the strategic and the personal, not the multi-state ad buy. Candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are “relatable” and who have more humanizing strategies (at least as far as politicians are concerned) have done better than those with money.

It will be three weeks before I get to vote for a presidential contender, but I hope the field will have winnowed down to more serious candidates by then – and that our dalliance with fame as a substitute for leadership will have ended.

Emily Zanotti is a political communications specialist and the digital editor of The American Spectator.

James Pethokoukis

There are few notable differences between our Earth and our little-known, other-dimensional twin, which we’ll call Earth 2. Over there, for instance, dog videos dominate social media, not cat ones. And Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, offered a fresh, nostalgia-free take on the space fantasy series – what a box office bust.

And, in that dimension, the Republican party actually learned something from its 2012 presidential election defeat – particularly from how Mitt Romney lost by a 5-to-1 margin to then-president Hillary Clinton among voters who valued empathy in a president. (Romney had the same result here versus Barack Obama.)

As a result, the Republican party on Earth 2 coalesced around a policy agenda designed to meet the economic challenges facing the American middle class and poor. All that party’s presidential candidates are offering plans that cut taxes for working class families, guarantee universal healthcare through market-friendly reforms to Hillarycare and modernize the existing safety net to better help workers hurt by trade or automation. And both liberals and conservatives on the BookOfFaces and Cheeper have been buzzing about the Republican presidential debates because of the fierce battles over which candidate has the better plan to break up the megabanks that have the potential to set off massive market failures.

Things haven’t quite worked out that way here on our Earth. Despite the 2012 results, the 2016 Republican wannabes here decided to – again – offer economic plans centered around ginormous tax cuts for rich people and businesses. And while some, like Marco Rubio and the now-departed Jeb Bush, have offered detailed college and healthcare plans, respectively, few voters know about them. A genuine, sustained, plausible effort to connect with the anxious 99% might have tamped down on Trumpism. (On Earth 2, Trump is running as a Democrat and giving Vice-President Obama a serious run for his money in their primary.)

As it is, voters – by a wide margin – believe that the Republican party favors the rich over the middle class and poor. And the party’s current frontrunner is someone who exploits voters’ fear, rather than engaging their aspirations. Given that our Democratic president has presided over seven years of slow economic and wage growth, the Republican party should be favored to win the presidency. But right now, for good reason, it isn’t.

And I don’t blame the voters for that.

James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute.

Lisa De Pasquale

Photograph: The Guardian

Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture” – but that hasn’t exactly given Republicans an electoral edge in the past. In 2016, though, Andrew’s maxim might pay off if Republicans banish the one-dimensional politician act: we need more of Rubio talking about hip-hop and EDM, and less Cruz talking about why he stopped listening to rock and roll after 9/11.

Conservatives can sometimes be our own worst enemy when it comes to embracing pop culture – even when it could benefit our candidates politically.

Many have complained about Barack Obama doing interviews with Jimmy Fallon or Ellen – but their vast audiences listen to those complaints and hear Republicans don’t care about my vote.

The real “mainstream media” Americans consume isn’t CNN and Sunday political talk shows: it’s Bravo and late-night talk shows.

Conservatives have a fantastic opportunity in 2016 to gain credibility among younger voters and in popular culture at large, given that our frontrunners are two Generation Xers and one an actual pop culture icon. (By contrast, the average age of the Democratic candidates is 71; Hillary Clinton’s attempts at being cool are more wooden than Al Gore relaxing on a Saturday night.)

So let’s dispose of the notion that doing non-political interviews is below any political office. Thanks to Obama being comfortable in non-traditional media venues like Funny or Die, doing non-political interviews is now a prerequisite for winning a national election. From Richard Nixon on Laugh-In to Bill Clinton on Arsenio Hall, politicians have long made appearances on non-traditional shows, but President Obama’s and Michelle Obama’s embrace of non-traditional media and alternative media outlets like the Discovery Channel and the Food Network signaled to millennials and Generation Xers that they are in tune with those generations’ media consumption and willing to take the administration’s message to where those viewers are.

What people use as news sources has become increasingly niche, so taking advantage of media opportunities that previous generations would have thought too small or unserious to bother puts politicians in front of a younger electorate that doesn’t trust politicians and is the least likely to even be registered to vote.

The good news is that conservatives have candidates who are comfortable in the actual mainstream media, which gives the mainstream of America the ability to become comfortable with our candidates. In addition to the issues, Republican and conservative candidates and pundits should talk about the movies they love, the music they listen to, the TV they binge-watch and the pop culture obsessions they can’t let go of.

We’ll win in 2016 by popping our conservative media bubble – and showing how much a part of the mainstream we are, rather than the caricatures that the left tries to make us into.

Lisa De Pasquale is the author of Finding Mr Righteous and cohost of the Political Punks podcast.

Christopher R Barron

Photograph: The Guardian

In less than two weeks, I will go to the polls in my home state and cast my vote for the next nominee of the Republican party. Amazingly, even at this late date, I am not sure who I will vote for – and what has transpired in the last few months hasn’t made my choice any easier.

As a libertarian-leaning conservative I started this presidential primary cycle full of optimism about the candidacy of Senator Rand Paul. I believed that, even if Senator Paul failed in his bid to secure the nomination, his presence in the field would help move whomever the eventual nominee would be to embrace critical issues like re-thinking our foreign policy, criminal justice reform, the protection of civil liberties, ending domestic spying and a real commitment to keep the federal government out of our boardrooms and out of our bedrooms.

Man, was I wrong.

Instead of a field of candidates moving to embrace liberty, we have a field of candidates moving to embrace the politics of the absurd. Instead of embracing traditional conservative values, we have far too many candidates embracing dime-store populism, nativism and shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy.

I understand the anger of Republican primary voters, who feel that the party and the elites have over-promised and under-delivered. They are right to be angry. But the answer is to demand the next standard bearer bring the party back to its traditionally conservative and limited government roots, not to embrace the figurehead that yells the loudest.

To win in November, we don’t need a candidate promising to “tell it like it is”; we need a candidate promising to bring conservative solutions to the complex challenges face us as a nation. So far, no one has effectively done that in this field – but there is still time, and I’m not the only conservative dying to hear it.

Christopher R Barron is a conservative strategist and co-founder of GOProud, an LGBT conservative advocacy group.

Asma Gull Hasan

Photograph: The Guardian

My family and I have been to enough Republican events to know that what Republicans, and perhaps even Democrats are wanting, is a disruptor. Hillary Clinton is, and Jeb Bush was, experienced, pedigreed, and boring. While Donald Trump is certainly a disruptor, his success is really due to his resonance with the dark, bigoted underbelly of my party. I couldn’t vote for such an obviously bigoted man. My party was founded to abolish slavery, for goodness sake! But I know there are many on my side of the aisle who love the stuff he says – those who want to take back America for the “whites”.

As a sincere Republican, I believe in the free market of ideas. Let these dastardly views come out where the public can debate them. A Sanders-Trump race would be fascinating, with ideologues on both sides duking it out for their respective, core and diametrically-opposed beliefs.

If the bigots prevail, I have no doubt that Trump will walk loudly but end up carrying a small stick. The party powers-that-be, the physics of the Washington bureaucracy and gridlock will marginalize him out of the disruption he would have been elected to embody within his first 100 days. (A similar fate befell Jesse Ventura.)

I do hope, though, that his views will fail on the national scene, and that the bigots will be outnumbered and realize that they have to return to our party’s roots of freedom and liberty.

Unfortunately, this year is not going to be our chance to elect another Lincoln, but it may set the stage for a future Lincoln.