It’s hardly a secret that the Republican presidential field is surprisingly unimpressive, which has contributed to a GOP malaise. Poll after poll has shown Democratic voters enthusiastic about their choices, while Republican voters generally feel the opposite.
But it’s worth pausing, from time to time, to realize just how feeble this field really is.
It is hard to think of another campaign when Republicans have seemed less excited about their choices. That was the unmistakable lesson of the rapid ascension in recent polls of Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, the latest in a line of Republican flavors of the month. A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that none of the Republican candidates — not even the suddenly hot Mr. Huckabee — was viewed favorably by even half of Republican voters. […]
[W]hat is worrying Republicans these days is that this tepid rank-and-file reception to the best the party has to offer suggests that the Republican Party is hitting a wall after dominating American politics for most of the last 35 years. Republican voters are reacting to — or rather, not reacting to — a field of presidential candidates who have defined their candidacies with familiar, even musty, Republican promises, slogans and policies. […]
Richard Lowry, the editor of the conservative magazine National Review, said the field “has been less than the sum of its parts.”
To quantify this a bit, Richard Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, noted data that showed a 17-point “intensity gap” between the Republicans and the Democrats looking ahead to the ’08 campaign. “That is a monster number,” Bond said. “It shows that the Republicans are not fired up and it’s going to take a nominee who can clearly articulate a post-Bush vision for the country.”
To be sure, this could change once there’s a Democratic nominee Republicans can rally in opposition to. But what does it say about the modern Republican Party that they need a Dem to save their electoral chances?