Larry J. Sabato is university professor of politics and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, which publishes the online, free Crystal Ball politics newsletter every Thursday, and a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.

Did you ever see the documentary A Perfect Candidate? It was about Oliver North’s 1994 challenge to U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, a Democrat from Virginia. Despite the title, North turned out to be less than perfect; he lost to a scandal-wounded but resilient Robb despite a Republican tidal wave.

There will never be a perfect candidate, unless brilliant genetic engineers assisted by Watson the computer decide to undertake the task in the distant future. Until then, parties are left with flawed human beings, those bundles of virtues and vices that get proctoscopic treatment during long campaigns.


As long as she runs, Hillary Clinton appears to check most of the boxes that Democratic activists require, and one of her advantages is that her strengths and weaknesses are unusually well known. It’s hard to believe that voters will learn anything big about Hillary in 2016 that they don’t already know or suspect.

Not so for the potential nominees of the Grand Old Party. Republicans lack not only a frontrunner but also politicians who could thread every needle thrust forward by the party’s interest groups while still remaining electable in November.

For a moment, though, let’s drop the naysaying. Suppose the Republicans could construct an ideal contender for 2016—someone who could actually win without repealing the essential components of the GOP platform. What would the candidate look like?

POLITICO cartoonist Matt Wuerker, with some brainstorming (but not artistic) help from myself and the U.Va. Center for Politics’ Crystal Ball team, has cleverly assembled some of the possible “body parts” for the ideal Republican competitor. You can be the judge, but the internal contradictions of ideology and personality would likely rip apart this friendly Frankenstein fairly quickly. No party can have everything, a White House nominee cannot be all things to all people and choices must be made.

The Republican eventually crowned in Cleveland is bound to be pro-free markets, pro-life on abortion and critical of Obamacare, high taxes, big spending and massive debt, to mention just a handful of issues. Political parties, with a few historical exceptions (such as William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and George McGovern in 1972 for the Democrats and Barry Goldwater in 1964 for the Republicans), prefer evolution to revolution.

Yet even some hidebound conservative Republicans understand that their party needs to change or else conceivably go the way of the Whigs. Losing 80 percent of the nonwhite vote, at least 60 percent of young people, and around two-thirds of single women, as the GOP White House nominee now does normally, appears to be a formula for consistent defeat, especially when demographic changes favor disproportionate growth in most of the voter categories where Republicans have the least appeal. So is there a reasonable evolutionary path for the GOP that could produce a Cleveland Concordat—a platform with sufficient red meat to turn out hungry conservatives but enough tasty fruit, vegetables and dessert for persuadable moderates?

You know the next line: It won’t be easy. Conservatives will insist that no real change is needed since a hard-right nominee will generate record turnout among the true-believing base (as though the same nominee won’t generate high turnout among the Democratic faithful who fear the hard right). Other Republicans will say a congenial Reaganesque nominee is all that’s required to charm voters into amnesia about the party’s rough edges. Maybe, but there’s really been no Reagan since Reagan.

Even assuming the GOP nominee will have the requisite charisma, surely the party would have to present a somewhat different face. So what would a Republican winner have to say and do? Here’s a partial menu from which to pick and choose.

Act on changing demographics: Republican leaders have been urging this since the party’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” report from March 2013. Without a reasonable immigration plan to run on, the nominee will have a hard time improving much on Mitt Romney’s awful 2012 percentages among Hispanics (27 percent) and Asian-Americans (26 percent). Substance matters more than image, but diversifying the GOP ticket can’t hurt. The era of two white males per ticket ended with Romney-Ryan. Assuming Republicans have something to sell to minorities—not just symbolic identity politics but issue positions that appeal to targeted groups—the ticket must campaign aggressively in those communities. Otherwise, key states that used to be solid pieces of winning GOP electoral maps—such as Colorado and Florida—become harder to win.

Yield on at least one social issue: Increasingly, Republicans look like they are the party of the ‘50s, with critics debating whether it’s the 1950s or the 1850s. In 2016 the GOP has a precious opportunity to shake up perceptions before they harden into concrete, especially among the young. Sure, those under 30 will respond to pitches on jobs, taxes, college debts. But first, Republicans have to convince them they are living in the 21st century. Maybe the Supreme Court will have already eliminated same-sex marriage as an issue by making it universal—but if the court hasn’t, the GOP nominee could pull off a maneuver like Tory Prime Minister David Cameron or Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) did, and endorse it. This part of the culture war is all but over anyway; public opinion is decidedly in favor of same-sex marriage and becoming more so year by year.

Spell out GOPcare, your alternative to Obamacare: The “Party of No” needs a positive plan, and the nominee cannot avoid one on health-care reform. Which parts of the Affordable Care Act will you keep, which will you modify and which will you outright repeal? Noncommittal vagueness may work for a spotty, decentralized midterm election like 2014, but the people and the press should and will demand much more from a presidential candidate. The same is true of immigration reform, too long delayed already.

Play to the GOP’s strength on the size of government, but add a new twist of populism: Going after the Export-Import bank is a start, but most voters have never heard of it and couldn’t care less. How about attacking the government’s widespread corporate welfare and waste with the same fervor mustered for abuses in social welfare programs? The big boys of Wall Street play both partisan sides anyway. Why do Republicans remain so reflexively loyal to super-wealthy people who aren’t especially faithful to them? This is where some of the instincts of the Tea Party movement can be usefully integrated into the GOP as a whole.

Use scandal in the primaries to energize the base, but move on by the autumn: Scandal rarely is enough for victory. It took the many tentacles of Watergate corruption plus the Nixon pardon to sink Gerald Ford—barely—in 1976. And Bill Clinton’s problems didn’t keep Al Gore from winning the popular vote in 2000. Obama’s scandals—or pseudo-scandals, depending on your point of view—matter in the next presidential race, but they alone won’t determine the outcome.

Shock the public into reconsidering the GOP: Playing against type can generate media buzz—and earn voters’ reconsideration. Come up with an innovative plan on crime and incarceration that goes beyond building prisons and throwing away the jail cell key. (Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, in his new alliance with Sen. Cory Booker, the New Jersey Democrat, may have gotten a head start here.) Or adopt a libertarian viewpoint on marijuana use, and not just the medical variety. Or perhaps add some common-sense limits to the GOP’s reflexively muscular foreign and military policies. In the post-Iraq/Afghanistan era, the public has once again developed severe doubts about the United States’ policing role abroad.

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This focus on the GOP’s difficulties shouldn’t leave anyone thinking the Democrats have it made in 2016. They face two big problems: Obama will have a hard time becoming a popular president again given increased congressional deadlock and the public’s normal end-of-term fatigue. His lower job approval, assuming it continues, gives the GOP a solid chance. And Democrats will be going for a third consecutive term, which is never easy. Think back to 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, and 2008—diverse elections, four of them very close, with one thing in common: The incumbent party just couldn’t manage to grab a third term. The GOP nominee will probably pick up a point or two just based on the public’s natural tendency to shift party control after eight years of one party.

Still, these factors won’t be enough by themselves to elect the Republican ticket unless Obama completely tanks in the polls. The continuing strength of Obama’s support levels among Democrats as well as the rebounding economy makes that a doubtful proposition, and Hillary Clinton, if she is indeed the Democratic nominee, has her own considerable advantages.

It’s a polarized era with intense ideology, yet the elements of victory must still include pragmatism and a healthy respect for the views of the voters—the people who alone pick winners and losers. A party headed for defeat insists that the electorate conform to the superior wisdom of its platform; a party creating the conditions for success defers to the voters’ opinions—even if that requires painful compromise with principle.

In 2016 the GOP and its nominee will either project the substance and image of a Grand New Party, or the Republicans’ years in the wilderness will continue. And no cartoon composite can save them.