Last August, I wrote the following about Mitt Romney’s odds of winning the Republican nomination:
In a sense, the stronger President Obama looks next year, the better Romney’s chances of being nominated. He needs the prospect of an uphill general-election battle to keep his potential rivals for establishment support safely on the sidelines. And then he needs that same establishment to rally around him once the primary voting starts — not out of love or admiration, but out of fear of the populist alternative.
Six months later, this is almost exactly how things are playing out. In many ways, Romney still looks like an extraordinarily weak frontrunner, if he’s the frontrunner at all — defined by his flip-flops, dogged by the resemblance between his Massachusetts health care bill and Obamacare, and unable to break 20 percent in the polls. But the establishment’s preferred candidates — Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, possibly in that order, and then perhaps Haley Barbour as well — are all sitting on the sidelines (another possible establishment pick, Jon Thune, has already taken himself out of the running), and if the economy keeps growing and the president’s approval numbers stay close to 50 percent, they may decide to stay there for the duration. Meanwhile, the strongest populist candidate, Mike Huckabee, might not run either — which could leave a Republican field of Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, possibly Jon Huntsman, possibly Sarah Palin (though I’m betting against it), and then some folks like Rick Santorum and John Bolton filling out the debate stage. That’s a very weak field, and a race that Romney, for all his own weaknesses, stands a very good chance of winning. (It’s also a race that Pawlenty stands a decent chance of winning, for the reasons Ramesh Ponnuru lays out here.)
There’s still a long way to go, obviously, and it’s quite likely that the eventual Republican nominee will enter the lists very, very late. This is a point John Podhoretz makes well, at the end of an absolutely withering post on the existing G.O.P. field:
Once again, we have to be reminded of a few things. First, the candidate for president who won in 1992 didn’t declare his intention to seek office until the fall of 1991. Second, Barack Obama declared his candidacy in February 2007 and promptly wasted six months of money and energy and bad debating appearances. He gained no traction against Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t until October that he actually figured out how to run, and he might have spared himself the trouble if he’d waited until then.
So what does this tell us? It tells us that the person who can win has either not reached the point of deciding to run or that he is biding his time until later. It could be Chris Christie. It could be Paul Ryan. It could be Marco Rubio. It could be Bobby Jindal. One hears that the 2016 GOP race will feature all these guys in a superstar battle. If that one could, so could this one. And there’s plenty of time. Plenty.
But sometimes the “person who can win” decides not to run, and you’re left to choose between people who can’t. The last time the Republicans made big gains in the mid-term elections and then faced a vulnerable-but-formidable Democratic incumbent two years later, they found themselves choosing between Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan in the primaries, while figures like Colin Powell and Dick Cheney (now there would have been a primary campaign!) stayed on the sidelines. It could happen again: Just because the Republicans seem to need a better candidate than Mitt Romney doesn’t mean they’ll get one.