The GOP Free-for-All

You hear the darnedest things in Iowa these days: Newt Gingrich is a greedy influence peddler with zany ideas. Mitt Romney’s core principle is getting elected. Ron Paul fights for our right to buy unpasteurized milk with gold. And Rick Perry can’t remember three things at once.

The 2012 Republican presidential campaign heads into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses on a decidedly negative note, with the candidates scorching one another nonstop. The noise within the party is making it harder for voters to hear its message: that America’s lingering economic blues won’t go away until a Republican is elected President in November. But the attacks are so fierce in part because the race is so muddled. After a year of campaigning that occasionally felt like a theater of the absurd (thank you, Herman Cain), Romney, Paul and Gingrich are now closely bunched in a top tier of candidates. And it’s not certain that the Iowa results will make things any clearer.

The race is close partly because Republicans are still sorting out multiple identity crises. The long season of televised debates has uncovered a party that’s second-guessing verities it hasn’t questioned for decades: U.S. involvement overseas, the authority of the federal judiciary and whether the Federal Reserve is a borderline criminal enterprise. Those debates have done more than produce viral videos and “oops” moments. They have demonstrated the sharp ideological and emotional divide between the GOP’s Tea Party rabble-rousers and its Washington-led power brokers.

The Tea Party stormed Washington’s castles in 2010, and now the 2012 primaries are a test of whether the party’s insurgents can hold their ground against a GOP machine trying to regain control–beginning with an effort to usher in the Establishment-approved candidate, Mitt Romney, to the nomination so that he can train his sights on Barack Obama. But with some three-quarters of Republican voters backing a candidate not named Mitt–including the growing number who support that ultimate outsider, libertarian Paul–Romney’s path looks anything but smooth.

After a year that has already seen the surge and collapse of short-lived darlings like Cain and Michele Bachmann and the flirtations of Sarah Palin, the field is still convulsing. Romney, Paul and Gingrich all have a decent shot at winning Iowa. Dark horses Perry and Rick Santorum could undergo miraculous revivals if they survive New Hampshire on Jan. 10 and make a stand in either South Carolina 11 days later or Florida on Jan. 31.

And it’s possible that the confusion is just beginning. Party rule changes have made for a stretched-out primary process, and the Supreme Court has unleashed big-spending political groups tied to, but not run by, the various candidates. That combination could make for a longer and nastier fight than Republicans are used to, one that GOP insiders fear will leave their eventual nominee battered and broke while Obama and the Democrats enjoy an unobstructed head start that could be hard to overcome.

A Slow-Motion Nomination?

Four years ago, Obama and Hillary Clinton fought a grueling primary battle that stretched all the way into June. On the Republican side, by contrast, the process was typically tidy. Carrying momentum from winning New Hampshire, John McCain effectively wrapped up the GOP nomination by Feb. 5. Romney, then making his first White House bid, quit the race two days later. It had taken George W. Bush roughly as long to dispatch McCain eight years earlier. Quick and dirty is the GOP-primary rule. This time, things could be more complicated, Republicans say, and they don’t sound happy about it.

Reason one is the calendar. To clinch the GOP nomination, a candidate needs to collect 1,144 delegates. But that will take longer than it did in 2008. The 11 primaries and caucuses scheduled through the end of February will award less than 20% of that total, and many of the big states with the most delegates–including Pennsylvania, Texas and New York–don’t vote until April. Even an uncontested candidate wouldn’t rack up enough delegates to become the nominee before late March. California, which voted on Feb. 5 four years ago, doesn’t plan to award its 172 delegates until June 5 this year.

Reason two: delegate rules. Thanks to a decision by the national party in 2010, more states will award their delegates on a proportional basis rather than through the efficient winner-take-all model of past years. That means a losing candidate who captures only a third of the vote in a given primary walks away with one-third of the state’s delegates rather than none. (Thirty-six states will follow this new system.) That in turn means it will take a front runner longer to build a decisive delegate margin.

But it might also mean the eventual nominee will have suffered more intramural attacks, issued more base-pleasing promises that could cause problems in a general election and spent millions of dollars that could have been reserved for attacks on Obama. “The dynamic of the race will be completely changed in 2012 because of the proportional split of delegates,” says Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Party officials insist these fears are overblown, noting that a long primary fight helped Obama build his organization in 2008 and could do the same for a GOP nominee. Many Republicans disagree. “How this helps us capture the White House is thoroughly impossible for me to understand,” says one party insider.

Supersized Money

In late December, television sets in Iowa practically vibrated from the barrage of negative campaign ads. Many–perhaps even most–of those ads came not from the candidates themselves but from independent groups that are redefining money’s role in presidential politics.

The new groups are known as super PACs, and they sprang up after a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, known as Citizens United, loosened campaign-finance laws, in effect giving a green light to unlimited contributions and spending by groups that operate independently of any candidate. Thus, supporters of Romney created Restore Our Future PAC, Perry associates started Make Us Great Again, and Gingrich supporters, after his surprise surge, hurriedly assembled Winning Our Future.

Unlike traditional campaigns, these groups can raise and spend as much as they want–and with far less disclosure about the identities of their donors. So while Romney’s campaign can raise no more than $2,500 from any single donor per election, Restore Our Future could, in theory, accept a $25 million donation. Super PACs can’t directly coordinate with campaigns, but that dividing line is more often breached than observed.

The super PACs tend to be run by close associates of the candidates, and in some cases aides jump from the campaigns to the PACs. (Gingrich’s former press aide Rick Tyler, who quit the campaign last spring, joined his Winning Our Future PAC in December.) The candidates are even allowed to raise money for their super PACs. “The energy has gone into the new super PACs,” says former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, who worries about the consequences. “We’re suddenly entering a very different world where people with large sums of money, if they choose, are going to be able to spend it easily in ways that may buy elections.”

Even before the first votes were cast in Iowa, super PACs were dominating the airwaves. At one point in mid-December, the pro-Romney Restore Our Future PAC was spending nearly three times as much as Romney’s campaign and roughly as much on Iowa advertising as all the traditional campaigns combined. As of July, which was the last time it was required to disclose its finances, the Romney PAC had raised more than $12 million; it has spent at least $2.85 million on advertising in Iowa.

Much of that went to a blistering offensive against a surging Gingrich. (“Newt has a ton of baggage,” declares one ad, citing past ethics charges and his lucrative consulting for Freddie Mac.) As the campaign heads to larger states like Florida, where advertising is both more expensive than in Iowa and more important than flesh pressing, the supposedly independent super PACs will matter even more. Perry’s PAC was founded with the ambition of raising $55 million by April.

The super PACs are one way the GOP establishment–Washington lobbyists, big-state governors and their financial networks and moneyed GOP check writers elsewhere–has quietly moved its chips behind Romney’s campaign. Sensing the potential for a public backlash against these secret societies, Romney proclaimed the advent of super PACs “a disaster.” Yet he stopped short of calling on his super PAC to cease and desist.

That’s because Romney understands that super PACs are here to stay–at least through the November election. And Obama, who decried the role of outside groups in the 2008 election, will have the support of his own super PAC: Priorities USA Action, co-founded by his former deputy press secretary Bill Burton. The group has already begun airing ads bashing Romney. Priorities USA Action hopes to raise more than $100 million to support the President’s re-election.

I Know What You Said Last Winter

Even if the GOP primaries wind down quickly, many Republicans are concerned that they will have done damage to their party. The series of televised debates–16 of them, to be exact–may have been great entertainment, a political junkie’s equivalent of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. But conservatives worry that the debates were often unserious spectacles that focused more on the candidates’ weaknesses than their strengths and produced crowd-pleasing rhetoric that might hamper the party next fall with key voter groups. “Heavy exposure from the debates and a revolving door of front runners has only hardened impressions that this field is weak,” says Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to George W. Bush.

The damage could be especially great with Hispanic voters, who are expected to make up a greater percentage of the electorate in 2012 than they did four years ago. That means Obama can weather his diminished standing among white voters if Hispanics pick up the slack, particularly in swing states like Nevada, Colorado and Florida. “It is absolutely central to the Democratic vote that Hispanics turn out,” says Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress, who studies voter groups in detail.

And that’s far more likely to happen if Hispanics are in a mood to punish the GOP. Some Republicans, notably Perry and Gingrich, have argued against demonizing illegal immigrants, but others have sought to prove their toughness on the issue. Remember when Cain proposed an electrified fence along the U.S.’s southern border? Romney, meanwhile, has hammered Perry and Gingrich for allegedly supporting amnesty programs that would allow some aliens to stay in the U.S. as citizens. “Every extra day of the Republican primary means more ugly messaging about immigration. And if Republicans don’t win back Hispanics, they will not win back the presidency,” says McKinnon.

It’s not just immigration. Primary combat–and a desire to please Iowa’s older, rural, mostly white and heavily religious electorate–has encouraged Republican candidates to move farther right of center on everything from taxes on the wealthy (don’t raise them) to Afghanistan (don’t leave quickly), positions that may be out of phase with the mood of many voters next fall.

Endgame

If so, that’s music to the ears of operatives in Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters. Democrats have been delighted to watch the Republicans savage one another for nearly a year. Meanwhile, Obama has already raised $155 million for his campaign and the Democratic Party combined. Many Republicans suspect his final 2012 haul will be in the range of $750 million to $1 billion.

Needless to say, Obama has headaches of his own. His approval numbers have been mostly low since early 2010. A recent bump in employment and a feistier pose toward Republicans have helped lift his ratings of late. But he still heads into the election year with joblessness well over 8% and a woozy global economy. In the meantime, the White House is still searching for a clear re-election message. Is it about winning the future? First-term accomplishments? Rejecting the Republicans? Taxing the rich? All of the above?

Republicans insist they will close ranks quickly after choosing their nominee, much as Democrats did after the ferocious and lengthy Obama-Clinton duel of 2008. “We’ll come together as a party as soon as we have a nominee and won’t miss a step,” says Jeff Larson, the Republican National Committee’s chief of staff.

Adding to the uncertainty is perhaps the murkiest variable of all: the possibility that a third-party candidate will enter the race sometime in 2012. Third parties tend to generate more chatter than action. But this year could be different, thanks to the well-funded and well-organized efforts of Americans Elect, a nonpartisan group that is aiming for ballot access in all 50 states for a candidate who will be chosen, in part, by a national online vote. Political insiders are already murmuring about who might mount a third-party bid in 2012–Michael Bloomberg? Jon Huntsman? Donald Trump?–and which major party has more to lose if that happens.

There’s even talk that some other late entrant may yet join the GOP race, hoping to snag the nomination at a brokered convention this summer. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, recently mused about such a scenario, and Sarah Palin noted on Dec. 19 that “it’s not too late” for “folks” to jump into the race, raising the question of whether those “folks” might include her. It means that this dizzyingly chaotic campaign may have even more surprises to come.