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.

We are already at the point in this prematurely unfolding 2016 presidential campaign when a glance down the list of prospective candidates can cause most observers to wince. As that seductive and sultry crooner Peggy Lee once sang, “Is that all there is?”

At the U.Va. Crystal Ball, we currently have 11 Republicans and nine Democrats as probable or possible presidential contenders. The Democrats have fewer and more tentative contenders because of the paralyzing gravitational pull of “Planet Hillary,” as the New York Times Magazine described the Clinton operation. The former secretary of state is a kind of massive Jupiter in a solar system that may not have many more worlds if she runs.


The Republicans have a sharply different problem. They have plenty of wannabes but no obvious general election winner. It’s not that we can’t construct scenarios by which this or that GOP nominee will capture the White House three years hence. Rather, it is that no one on the present list seems able to convincingly combat the growing demographic edge that produces a Democratic lead in the Electoral College.

Republicans probably won’t believe this assertion once they do reasonably well in this November’s low-turnout, red state-skewed midterm election; they’ll fool themselves again, just as they did after their 2010 midterm triumph, when the most frequently heard GOP comment was, “Even my dog could beat President Obama in 2012.”

Maybe Obama will be so unpopular by 2016, or the economy bad enough, that the Democratic nominee simply can’t win. But if the general election turns out to be closely competitive, as most open-seat contests for the White House are, who among the Republicans can redraw an Electoral College map that’s strongly in the Democrats’ favor?

Many Republicans privately worry that there isn’t anybody, but if forced to choose a champion, they will argue it is Jeb Bush. The Bush family’s extensive network of operatives and contributors will certainly be a giant assist to his nomination, and Jeb’s ties to segments of the Hispanic population, plus past success in critical Florida, give him a plausible general election strategy. But Jeb Bush was last on a Sunshine State ballot in 2002, and it’s not difficult to see him trapped in the web of his brother’s very mixed legacy. If elected he would be the third Bush in the White House. The aspiring Clinton dynasty is just working on its second occupant.

Tea Party Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas probably can’t do much better than Bush with Hispanics, despite their ethnic heritage, and because of their far-right positioning they may do far worse with other swing groups. A sitting governor is also a possibility, as I noted in a previous column: Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio are promising but untested presidential contenders, unless you count Kasich’s brief, unsuccessful 2000 bid. The unfolding e-mail brouhaha surrounding Walker, while small potatoes in some ways, shows the risks associated with any pol who hasn’t gone through the national wringer.

A more potent scandal in the Garden State has already made it obvious that Gov. Chris Christie’s White House hopes could be a bridge too far. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has a shaky libertarian-lite coalition that rhetorically reaches from Edward Snowden to Monica Lewinsky, but may be subject to catastrophic collapse due to internal stresses and contradictions. Then there’s Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; they would offer the GOP a melancholy reprise of the Goldwater landslide defeat of 1964.

Is there no one who can break the stranglehold Democrats have on 70-90 percent of various demographic minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian-Americans, and gays and lesbians) and 55-60 percent of women and the young (age 18-29)? These groups, some swelling in size, practically hand a presidential election to Democrats as long as the party’s candidate can secure a mere 38-40 percent of the white vote.

The natural GOP impulse could be to put a minority or a woman on the ticket, so that gender or ethnic identity can pull enough votes to transform electoral reality. The theory is probably flawed. All by itself, a token representative of diversity—especially in the second slot on the ticket—won’t have the juice to undo decades of partisan polarization among women and minorities.

But what about another approach—finding a nominee who doesn’t just superficially demonstrate diversity but has taken a substantive, career-threatening position in standing up for diversity? Happy talk, campaign promises and speaking slots at national conventions are wholly inadequate if the goal is the remaking of the electorate. By contrast, a genuine profile in courage who has dramatically broken with GOP orthodoxy and demonstrated a capacity for growth can get the party a hearing, maybe more, with skeptical voters.

Enter Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. Portman attracted national attention in 2013 when he announced that his son, Will, an undergraduate student at Yale, was gay. Portman declared his support not just for his son but also for same-sex marriage. This happened before the key Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and showed real family values, not the phony ones invoked by many politicians. Every political adviser on Portman’s team must have warned him of the dangers: You could lose your seat in a primary, you’ll be targeted by social conservatives, your national career will be over and your effectiveness even within the Senate will be circumscribed. It took guts to do what Portman did, with the political consequences unknown and potentially severe.

Before Portman’s dramatic announcement, I often heard political observers on both sides of the aisle name him as one of the most qualified and able presidential candidates the GOP could muster. It’s easy to see why. Portman was a respected member of the House from 1993 to 2005, then U.S. Trade Representative for President George W. Bush and subsequently director of Bush’s Office of Management and Budget. In 2010, Ohioans voted Portman into the Senate by a landslide margin, 57%-39 percent. Though Portman served late in the Bush years, the OMB post still opens him up to criticism about Bush’s smoke-and-mirrors budgets, full of debt, tax cuts and unpaid-for wars. Yet it also demonstrates he understands the federal bureaucracy and could govern from day one. The trade post gives Portman some foreign policy background, which would be useful in a run against a former secretary of state. Add to this his geographic placement in one of the swingiest states, without which no Republican has ever been elected president.

Colleagues on both sides of the aisle like Portman, who is low-key and willing to listen, if not agree, with others’ strongly held points of view. Cheap shots and grandstanding press conferences are not in his repertoire.

He’s serious, credible and smart. So why isn’t there more Portman chatter?

After one deviation from the conservative agenda on gay rights, Portman was dropped like a hot lavender potato from presidential lists, and even a vice presidential nomination is thought improbable because of the number of socially conservative delegates. This is despite Portman’s strongly conservative record on almost everything else: He has been consistently opposed to Obamacare, he supports a balanced-budget amendment, he is strongly anti-abortion and so on. His votes in Congress have earned him favorable ratings from conservative groups (e.g., an 87 percent lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union) and poor ones from liberal organizations (such as a 22 percent lifetime score by the League of Conservation Voters).

We’re not talking about Jon Huntsman here. The former Utah governor and 2012 presidential candidate famously became a media darling after moving left on any number of policies and acting as an in-house GOP critic. That is not Portman’s substance or style.

What most Republicans haven’t come to terms with is the necessity to embrace the 21st century, or at least to acquiesce in the spirit of the age. Minority Americans insist on full equality; women do not want to hear lectures about sexuality from male politicians; and the Earth is most definitely older than 10,000 years. The nation isn’t going back to the GOP heyday of the 1980s, when whites were 85 percent of the national electorate. Within a few decades, a majority of Americans will be members of minority groups—or to put it another way, whites and everyone else will be in the minority. A sincere sense of openness and inclusivity will be essential to winning the White House.

It isn’t easy to demonstrate these qualities convincingly, but this is Portman’s advantage. His ahead-of-its-time pronouncement on gay rights could be used as a wedge issue to gain leverage—or at least get a hearing—with all minority groups, to show a reformed Republican Party is open to new ideas and all people. As my Depression-era grandmother used to say, talk is cheap but it takes money to ride the train. Portman paid the fare by sticking his neck out on gay rights.

What could that buy him? Three-quarters of gays and lesbians now vote Democratic but Portman could make a case for their support. The same is true with young people under 30, who have been voting three-fifths to two-thirds Democratic in some measure because of social issues like gay rights. GOP positions on economic issues might well attract more gays and youthful voters if the party abandoned its intransigence on same-sex marriage.

As Justice Antonin Scalia conceded in his dissent in United States v. Windsor, universal same-sex marriage is only a matter of time anyway, and recent lower federal court decisions in Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Virginia are hastening the day when Republicans will have to accept the new era of marriage equality. They could get out ahead of the curve with a nominee who didn’t seem stuck in the ‘50s.

Portman could even double down by picking a VP candidate who also represents the 21st century. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, the first Latina governor of any American state, would be one such choice. And by the way, I’d bet that there will never again be an all-white-male national ticket in either party; the 2012 pairing of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan was the end of the line for exclusively male, monochromatic leadership.

No doubt many Republicans will weep and wail at the thought of modifying one of their principles, in this case, denial of equal rights to same-sex couples. There is much to admire about principled politics. It’s also true that a party can principle itself to death, or at least into permanent minority status, winning the White House only when it finds a charismatic candidate in a year when the other party has blown it (awful economy, unpopular foreign war or giant scandal).

No one would say Rob Portman is charismatic. And there again, he might have an edge in 2016. Americans tire of their incumbent presidents, and often choose a very different successor with dissimilar characteristics. Portman is all steak and no sizzle, while Obama’s critics would insist he’s been mainly sizzle and just a small piece of lean meat. As a bonus, it is very unlikely there’s any major scandal lurking in Portman’s past or present. That might present a sharp contrast to a possible Democratic nominee whose very name conjures up decades of controversies.

OK, if you’ve been with me this far, it’s time for the cold shower: The chances of Portman’s nomination for president (or even his candidacy) are minuscule, and that’s exactly my point. Whether it wins in 2016 or not, the GOP suffers from a dangerous form of political arteriosclerosis. Out-of-date social issue positions representing an America that is fast fading have clogged its arteries. To avoid deterioration or death, it is past time for a thorough arterial scrubbing and the installation of some new policy stents.

All of us—whatever our party affiliation or lack of it—have a stake in the modernization and rejuvenation of the Republican Party. A democracy with one dominant party is on the road to official misuse of power, arrogance in governing and corruption behind closed doors. Strong party competition, where neither has a lock on victory in advance of Election Day, produces the best politics and wisest administration.

The next move is up to the GOP. The Republican National Committee’s proposed rearranging of the primaries, shielding of presidential candidates from too many debates and holding of an earlier convention not only isn’t enough, it brings to mind deck-chair shuffling on the Titanic. Once deep-sixed, a storied political party is like the unsinkable Ship of Dreams: It can’t be raised from the depths. Republicans aren’t on the sea floor yet, but they are taking on water. Time for a bailout—the kind that won’t cost the taxpayers a cent.