Clinton is poised to declare her candidacy and the Republicans are failing to appeal to the political centre

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he made his campaign announcement on the almost unimaginably late date of 3 October 1991. Twenty-four years later, as his wife prepares to begin her second run for the White House, she is preparing to announce her candidacy next month – and if you ask some people immersed in the world of politics, she should have done it much earlier.

On the Republican side there are already more than a dozen potential candidates jockeying for position. So 10 months before a single voter will cast a ballot – and 20 months before the 2016 presidential election – the race to succeed Barack Obama has begun.

At the outset of the race the position of the two parties couldn’t be more divergent – Republicans have no clear frontrunner, no candidate of presidential stature and continued intra-party pressure to move even further and further to the far right. Democrats, on the other hand, are united in a way they have rarely been in the past. Clinton is the direct beneficiary of this harmony.

While it is entirely possible that another Democratic aspirant will enter the race between now and the first presidential caucus next January, it is difficult to imagine any scenario in which he or she would supplant her as the party nominee.

Clinton enjoys the support of 50-60% of Democrats, 40-plus points higher than the vice-president, Joe Biden. Liberal darling Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has said repeatedly that she will not run, is a touch lower in the polls, and the long-shot candidates, former Virginia senator Jim Webb, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley are all mired in the single digits.

Clinton’s strong numbers are, in part, a function of her name recognition, but make no mistake it’s also a product of her popularity within the Democratic party.

While liberal activists pine for the populist Warren and Democratic elites are no doubt suffering from Clinton exhaustion, among the party’s grassroots Hillary remains a rock star. She enjoys the strong support of African-American voters, who are the Democrats’ most reliable constituency, and women, who may be the party’s most important constituency. She even does well with the opposition – according to one recent poll, as many as one in five Republicans support her candidacy.

In head-to-head match-ups with potential GOP candidates she leads every one by double digits. Though Democrats hold an advantage in presidential campaigns, having won the popular vote in five of the last six elections, Clinton’s popularity, organising ability and fundraising prowess make her, by far, the most formidable Democratic candidate.

She is also the one Democrat most likely to have strong political coat-tails that might give the party a chance of winning back the Senate and House of Representatives in 2016.

These advantages have presented Clinton with an interesting dilemma – does she run on the issues that motivate her increasingly liberal coalition of supporters, such as income inequality, social justice, immigration and a foreign policy of restraint, or does she tack to the centre, confident that her liberal backers will turn out in huge numbers no matter what she does.

While it is far too soon to tell, Clinton seems poised to take the so-called triangulation route favoured by her husband. In a recent interview at an event in California’s Silicon Valley (the perfect business locale for a Democratic centrist), she said that one of her goals, if she ran for president, would be to “bring people from right, left, red, blue, [and] get them into a nice, warm, purple space where everybody is talking and where we’re actually trying to solve problems”.

Talking about bipartisanship is as American as apple pie and love of country, but it’s also a position that feels oddly out of tune with modern American politics, which has rarely, if ever, been as polarised as it is today. It’s hard to imagine that many Americans – after six years of constant GOP obstructionism of Barack Obama and eight years of uncompromising conservatism from George W Bush – believe that solving problems is within Washington’s current skill set. Among Clinton’s liberal coalition it’s even harder to imagine that they are looking for a politician who is trying to dull rather than sharpen the differences between the two parties.

Indeed over the past few months, as Obama has increasingly thrown political caution to the wind and taken aggressive positions on everything from immigration and the environment to opening up relations with Cuba and net neutrality, he’s rallied his supporters and seemingly paid little political price. Clinton may be constitutionally incapable of playing the role of harsh partisan – and her advisers may fear that as a female candidate, such a stance would spark a backlash – but traversing the middle of the road runs the very real risk of depressing her supporters. Still, it’s unlikely to cost her the nomination. At worst, it may lead to a primary challenge, which wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing for a candidate who hasn’t run for office in seven years and may find herself rusty in the art of politics.

To be sure, moving to the political middle is not a problem that Republicans will soon be having. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee produced a frank assessment of the party’s political shortcomings. They concluded that the GOP’s “federal wing is increasingly marginalising itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future”.

The postmortem recommended that the party “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” in order to appeal to Hispanic voters; take a softer line on gay marriage; reach out to minorities; and get out of the bubble that has made Republicans “expert” in “provid[ing] ideological reinforcement” to conservatives, but offering very little to non-believers.

National Republicans have taken none of this advice. Congressional Republicans are continuing to block immigration reform.

A presidential wannabe, Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon, said last week that prisons made people gay. Efforts to disfranchise African-American voters and ramp up abortion restrictions are continuing; and the party’s epistemological closure seems more pronounced than ever.

Eyebrows were raised in London last month when Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, refused to answer a question about whether he believed in evolution. Back in the US, the only surprise would have been if Walker had said he did believe in it. Even more shocking would have been an affirmative response to whether climate change was real and caused by man – a view that is held by no Republican running for president.

Since 2012, Republicans, in order to appeal to the party’s increasingly extremist and radical base of supporters, have continued to stake out territory on the furthest rightward end of the American political spectrum.

The dozen potential GOP presidential candidates are practically competing among themselves to see who can move further to the right. Rather than produce an embarrassment of riches, the assemblage of GOP candidates is more of an embarrassment.

The only one among them with anything resembling presidential stature is Jeb Bush, who has perhaps the worst last name in American politics and has not run for elected office in 13 years.

Being a good politician is difficult; being a politician good enough to win the presidency is really hard; capturing the White House after spending more than a decade doing little more than getting rich and living comfortably is unheard of.

It’s not to say that it’s impossible, but the challenges facing Bush should not be underestimated. Apart from his rustiness, Bush has a bigger problem with the right. As governor of Florida he cut taxes, restricted abortion rights and most infamously intervened in preventing a feeding tube from being removed from Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state. Yet none of this has stopped conservatives from criticising Bush for his apparent apostasy on education and immigration.

That’s less of a dilemma for others in the GOP field, such as Scott Walker, who took on public-sector unions in Wisconsin and boasts hardline positions on social issues. Walker’s problem is that what works in the 20th biggest US state, by population, doesn’t necessarily work on a national level. Walker’s embarrassing non-answer on evolution was recently matched by his punt on the question of whether he agreed with the comment by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, that Obama did not love America and isn’t a good Christian. In an effort to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, Walker even said that he would stand up to Islamic State the way that he had stood up to unions in Wisconsin.

The US media have begun to anoint Walker as frontrunner for the GOP nomination, but he has offered little indication that he is ready for the intense scrutiny of a presidential campaign.

The rest of the GOP field doesn’t offer much hope for Republicans. The former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, won the Iowa caucus in 2008 and is probably the most accessible politician in the party. The problem is that beneath his “aw shucks” demeanour lurks a far-right and occasionally mean-spirited social conservative who will hold little appeal for the majority of Americans. There’s Carson, who has never run for office, and, as his recent “going to prison makes you gay” comments suggest, is not the most grounded political figure. Nevertheless, he is polling around double digits among Republican voters. This places him ahead of more accomplished politicians (ie ones who’ve actually won an election) like the quickly deflating New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, and the former Texas governor, Rick Perry, who is now donning spectacles in an effort to prove that he’s not quite as “limited” as he seemed during his first presidential run in 2012.

The two wild cards are Rand Paul, who is running on a strong libertarian platform that includes taking more moderate positions on crime, surveillance and, most prominently, foreign policy, and the enfant terrible of the Tea Party set, Ted Cruz. Paul has been a persistent critic of US military interventions and has called for the US to adopt a more modest approach to national security.

After the “war on terror”, one might imagine that such views would hold great appeal among Americans. Paul’s problem is that Republican rank-and-file voters haven’t learnt many lessons from the disastrous US war on terror – and remain as hawkish as ever. A case in point is that after Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress outlining the ideological conservatism of the mullahs in Iran, the conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin criticised him for failing to applaud the Israeli prime minister with appropriate enthusiasm.

Cruz is a potential dark horse, if only because he is the id of the Tea Party movement and an uncompromising political extremist in every sense. In 2013 he engineered the shutdown of the federal government by House Republicans (he’s a senator by the way) in a futile effort to repeal Obamacare.

After Netanyahu’s speech, he compared, with a straight face, the current Iranian regime to Nazi Germany and Obama to Neville Chamberlain. He is the ultimate conservative bomb-thrower, which has earned him unending enmity from the Republicans establishment, but may give him the right profile to appeal to Republican extremists.

It’s anyone’s guess as to who will emerge from this field, a situation that could create serious headaches for Republicans. The longer the race goes on, the more the political incentives that have driven Republicans further right will intensify. How else can a Walker or Bush or perhaps Florida senator Marco Rubio or Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal or Ohio governor John Kasich differentiate themselves from the pack? Certainly not by moving to the middle.

Moreover, with the US economy showing dramatic improvement, the longest sustained period of job growth since the 1960s and unemployment down to 5.5%, Republicans will have an even harder time coming up with a rationale for voters to change course.

Granted, it’s never easy for one party in America to win three straight presidential elections – and this will be a challenge for Clinton. But there’s little question that it’s her race to lose.

For the rest of us, the challenge will be having to put up with 20 more months of this.