Daniel Larison

The Next Republican Nominee and The GOP’s Path of Least Resistance

Would Huntsman Have Done Any Better?

By Daniel Larison • November 21, 2012, 11:58 AM

Doug Mataconis responds to the report that the Obama campaign believed that Jon Huntsman would be a formidable Republican opponent:

If there was anyone running for President on the Republican side in 2012 other than Mitt Romney who could have given Barack Obama a run for his money, it was Jon Huntsman.

It’s not news that the Obama team viewed Huntsman as a greater threat than other likely Republican candidates, but it is worth considering whether Huntsman would have realistically been more competitive this year than the eventual nominee. Huntsman modeled his post-2008 public persona and campaign strategy on John McCain’s presidential bid in 1999 and 2000. The question that needs to be answered here is whether someone running that sort of campaign would be better or worse-positioned to run against a slightly favored incumbent president.

For the purposes of this post, let’s imagine that Romney didn’t run in 2012 and Huntsman’s decision to focus almost all of his attention on New Hampshire wasn’t a huge mistake. As a result, Huntsman was able to win some combination of 2008 McCain and Romney voters to secure the nomination. As the sole relative moderate in the Republican field in this scenario, he would have benefited from the same divided conservative vote that aided Romney. Having managed to win the nomination, what advantages would Huntsman have had that Romney lacked in the general election?

His ability to raise money and organize a campaign would probably not be any greater. On the whole, his policy views during the primaries did not differ that greatly from Romney’s, so it’s not certain that he would have been perceived more favorably by voters that rejected Romney. Huntsman would not have had the same kind of business baggage that Romney had, but it’s possible that there are unappealing things in Huntsman’s business record that never received attention because he had not become competitive enough to warrant a lot of scrutiny. Would more voters have turned out to support Huntsman? We can’t know the answer to that, but it’s hard to see what there was about Huntsman or his message that would have inspired more people to vote.

Since he is a relative moderate on immigration, a Huntsman nomination would have tested the idea that this was one of Romney’s fatal weaknesses in the general election. Even if Huntsman’s immigration position made some significant difference, that would not have been enough by itself to secure a Republican victory. At the same time, despite occasional nods towards foreign policy restraint (notably his opposition to the Libyan war and admittedly silly “nation-building at home” rhetoric), Huntsman’s position on Iran was so belligerent that it would have made it even easier for Obama to portray him as reckless. On Iran, Huntsman would have been even easier to portray as another McCain, while at the same time Huntsman would be boxed in on criticizing the administration on foreign policy because of his service in Beijing.

While many partisans viewed Huntsman’s acceptance of the ambassadorship to China as evidence of disloyalty to party, there was another reason that it would have been a political liability in the general election. It is extremely difficult for anyone who agrees to serve in an administration to campaign against the re-election of the same president who appointed him. Barring some major disagreement that compelled someone in that position to break with the incumbent, the challenger would appear overly ambitious and opportunistic. The argument for Huntsman as a better general election candidate might seem appealing at first glance, but on closer inspection it isn’t very persuasive. Because of his position on Iran, I can easily imagine how Huntsman would have been a significantly weaker general election candidate.

Posted in foreign policy, immigration, politics. Tagged Barack Obama, Doug Mataconis, Iran, Jon Huntsman, Libya, Mitt Romney.

19 Responses to Would Huntsman Have Done Any Better?

Kieselguhr Kid says:

November 21, 2012 at 1:00 pm

I think the idea that Huntsman would have been vulnerable to attacks because of more bellicose rhetoric in Iran strains belief — because the Obama campaign really didn’t make those attacks. Instead, in line with their (accurate) portrayal of Romney as a foreign policy naif, the general line of attack was, look, all the stuff he wants us to do on Iran we’re already doing, so he’s got nothing to say. In addition to which Huntsman hadn’t picked up the “Obama has abandoned Israel” thing Romney had, and despite the slightly more bellicose rhetoric on Iran you have noted down here, the fact is all along Huntsman seemed perceived by the electorate as the _least_ bellicose candidate: yes, perceptions can change as you look closer, but, to some extent they are what they are, and I think it would’ve been tricky to make the public see Huntsman The Barbarian. I also think the idea that he couldn’t pick many fights with Obama credibly on foreign policy is hardly a disadvantage — this was an election in which the electorate andily preferred Obama to the Republicans in foreign affairs. So Huntsman gives the voter a way of giving Obama a nice retirement gift for his perceived foreign affairs acumen, while still voting him out.

On the other hand of course the role foreign policy played in a Huntsman/Obama matchup probably would’ve been quite larger and different, so maybe we can’t really extrapolate much either way.

One imagine he could’ve appealed to a substantial part of the electorate, the reign-in-financial-interests section, rather better than Romney (why, hello, Mr. Millman). Huntsman remains the only candidate of either party that I can recall calling for an active breakup, for example, of too-big-to-fail financial institutions.
Darth Thulhu says:

November 21, 2012 at 1:26 pm

I think you are missing the point of a “John McCain 2000″ candidacy, which makes most of this analysis beside the point. If Huntsman would have been stronger, it is not because of any of these piecemeal minor slivers of policy, but rather because “John McCain 2000″ was all about wooing media narrative and selling a coherent vision.

Romney’s Republicans were completely incoherent and completely lacking in compelling narrative or sane policy recommendations. Romney could neither convincingly oppose Obamacare nor convincingly offer a workable alternative. Romney could not acknowledge elementary science in any field nor have his “Sister Souljah moment” telling fundamentalist inerrantists to go pound sand. Romney could not call on *any* foreign policy experience nor project himself as even minimally competent in the area as he drafted all the Bush II alumni.

The Huntsman counterfactual necessarily assumes a much more canny (or lucky) Huntsman who was somehow able to unseat Romney (or never face him), but it also assumes a huge number of unknowables:

1) Would bashing Obama as a Drone Warrior alienating “allies” who might otherwise assist with containment of Iran work?

2) Would bashing Obama for having mismanaged the Chinese relationship (and thereby harming the US economy) have worked?

3) Would Huntsman’s much more impressive Governorship of Utah have given him useful economic-experience ammunition (which Romney clearly lacked) and would those arguments have worked?

4) Would a Republican Presidential Nominee who unapologetically bashed far-right social haters like Akin and Mourdoch have caused those candidates to drop out? Would that painful purge of lost causes impress repulsed independents by enough to matter?

5) Would Huntsman have run a less incompetent Convention, perhaps one that actually laid out a non-Reagan-hagiographic vision for modern conservative governance?

6) Would Huntsman successfully create a narrative of bad policy choices made by Obama and offered convincing counter-policies more appealing to struggling Americans?

All of this is unknowable, but at the very least this hypothetical Huntsman wouldn’t enter the field looking like a plutocratic vampire-squid with no core principles and a completely craven acquiescence to the worst policies of the extremists in his base. That certainly couldn’t hurt.
Myron Hudson says:

November 21, 2012 at 2:14 pm

Good questions by Darth Thulhu above. I would say yes to all questions except #4. But I don’t think that pure competence alone could carry a candidate through the primaries, and therein lies the problem.
Geoff Guth says:

November 21, 2012 at 3:43 pm

It is extremely difficult for anyone who agrees to serve in an administration to campaign against the re-election of the same president who appointed him.

I think this would have been true if Huntsman were a Democrat. But he was appointed back when Obama was still actively trying to reach out to Republicans and involve them in the governing process. Huntsman was appointed specifically as a qualified Republican in order to give Obama bipartisan credibility.

And indeed, this might even have played to Huntsman’s advantage: his willingness to be part of the administration would have established his ability to work with the other side, far beyond anything Obama has been capable of.
Daniel McCarthy says:

November 21, 2012 at 3:55 pm

Yes, there’s definitely a narrative line there: Americans didn’t want to dislike Obama, but they were disappointed in his failures. Huntsman, having worked with Obama, could have capitalized on that sentiment.
Chris says:

November 21, 2012 at 4:04 pm

We walked into the election cycle with record unemployment and anemic economic growth, and a POTUS whose negatives had been driven up by four years of GOP assault.

What the GOP needed was someone who could capitalize on Obama’s negatives, but what they didn’t seem to realize is how their own negatives would harm them.

Huntsman, unknown and undefined, did not have huge negatives, and it would have been difficult for Obama to drive Huntsman’s negatives without calling his own judgement into question.
KateLE says:

November 21, 2012 at 6:43 pm

Huntsman had the grace to acknowledge that he started out in life with a significant advantage, which would have defused the oblivious rich guy image that was Romney’s problem from start to finish. Huntsman understood that most people don’t begrudge wealth, but they do begrudge an insistence on pretending that you are self made when you are not. From day 1, Romney appeared to view most of the rest of the country as ‘the help’ that he had to suffer contact with every four years to get what he wanted.

Huntsman’s probably downfall, however, would have been the GOP leadership’s insistence on constructing a fake candidate for him to run against while ignoring the actual, deeply flawed one. I doubt he could have talked them out of that.
scottinnj says:

November 21, 2012 at 10:08 pm

I don’t think Huntsman would have made a ’47%’ video and I don’t think he would have had the flop of a foreign tour that Romney had. Huntsman did not write a ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” editorial. And maybe he would have picked Portman instead of Ryan to help in Ohio.

But I don’t think Huntsman would have made a stronger argument against Obamacare and I don’t think he was going to run that far away from the Ryan plan. And most importantly I don’t think Huntsman would have run far from Bush 43.

Maybe Huntsman would have carried Florida and even Ohio, but he would still have lost.
Noah172 says:

November 21, 2012 at 11:33 pm

IIRC, Huntsman was the only Republican candidate to consider explicitly the use of ground troops in Iran. Imagine the hay that Obama could have made with that.

Hunstman would not have done better than Romney because the former would have proved even less exciting to partisans and hard-to-reach blue-collar Rust Belt whites. Hunstman had a worse version of Romney’s Mormon problem: Hunstman, from interviews that I have read, seems to be a blase, all-religions-are-the-same kind of guy, which is an even bigger downer for the GOPs megachurch base than a devout Mormon such as Romney. The McCainiac immigration stance would have lost more white votes (mostly to non-voting or protest voting) without gaining much from Hispanics. Did Hunstman seriously differ from Romney on free trade, Wall Street bailouts, plutocrat-friendly tax policy, and similar vote-losers? Not that I heard. If Romney, for all of this year’s sturm und drang and Adelson/Koch money, could get only as many votes as McCain four years ago, Hunstman likely would have garnered a few million fewer, and lost North Carolina and some other electoral votes as well.
EliteCommInc says:

November 22, 2012 at 9:40 am

Would Huntsman have had a better election showing: no. It wasn’t the candidadte it was the rhetoric coming out many many republicans.

Fears and chatter about getting their guns and food storage in order

The underground chatter about blacks, welfare hungry and other such ‘over the top rhetoric about color — it’s been silly to write off blacks as democrats

Rhetoric which seemed to suggest that everyone should be a entrepenuer

And a very practical failure to target democrats where they live. Republicans can no longer afford to write off CA, NY, and others simply because they usually swinmg left

Stop scaring people with doomsday analysis.

We’ve got to return conservatives back into the battle fields of education

I don’t think any of that would have been different with Romney
Spiritist says:

November 22, 2012 at 8:42 pm

Huntsman has a combination of intellectual sophistication, real person-ness and proven spirit of bipartisanism that made him stand out from all the other Republican candidates and would have won him some votes from Independents and Democrats willings to consider someone other than Obama.
pj says:

November 22, 2012 at 10:44 pm

Caveat: I backed Huntsman in the primary because I think he was the best of a bad field, so I am biased.

I think you’re analysis that Huntsman would come across as easier to attack on foreign policy due to his Iran rhetoric is incorrect. I think on the whole, just listening to Huntsman most people would have seen him as a throwback to the pre-neocon GOP. That said, he had other vulnerabilities.

Huntsman positives: (1) Although he is another rich guy, he just is more aware and “connects” better than Romney. He’s far less prone than Romney at making tone deaf statements (for that matter, less prone than large swaths of GOP candidates). (2) I think his combination of “tolerance” on the gay civil unions issue combined with his perceived moderation on environmental issues would make the younger demographics (Millenials+Gen X) far more willing to listen to his economic arguments which were strongly centered on the populist (and I suspect quite popular) notion of breaking up the banks. I also believe he would have made a strong play to go after and minimize Obama’s margin on college campuses. This is what Romney should have done if he was interested in making an economic argument to the folks having the highest unemployment/underemployment problem right now–new and recent college graduates. But like McCain, Romney simply ceded the vote to Obama.

Negatives: Obama tarred Romney by focusing on Bain. I’m certain he would have tried to tar Huntsman by focusing on it being one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world. Huntsman also endorsed the Ryan plan and said things about eliminating the Dept of Education. He also signed the school voucher plan in Utah that was overturned by initiative even in that conservative state. Obama would have tried to campaign against him as a true Randian.

The biggest question would be whether Huntsman would have stretched the GOP base past the breaking point. I doubt Huntsman would have pandered to the right in any way if he actually got the nomination. He was backing Romney in the 2008 cycle up until the point he felt Romney was pandering to the right wing which is when he switched to McCain. It was well known down the stretch of ’08 that he also thought McCain pandered to much to the right down the stretch. I suspect he would have thrown all caution to the wind and picked a “moderate” running mate (in perception if not reality) at which point it’s anyone’s guess whether the base would cause a split in the party or still show up out of anger at Obama.
ann vasquez says:

November 23, 2012 at 2:50 am

As a very liberal democrat I can only add to this conversation that liberals even those considered very left like my fellow Code Pink friends like Huntsman. He is seen as having a great deal of integrity and common sense. His plan to break up the banks was well recieved. I am not sure these perceptions would hold up through an election cycle, but I can tell you he would have had at least some chance of swaying dissatisfied dems. Romney and Ryan activated our base with their extremism. They were perceived as scary as all hell. Many dems who went from hopey to mopey as the Obama presidency progressed (we lost initial hope with the appointment of Tim Geithner) were re-energized by the threat of an immoderate Republican Presidency. Also as a GOTV worker I can tell you the voter suppression measures backfired big time. Every black voter whose door I knocked on in WI was “fired up”. Funny how when you try to deny people their rights they fight back. If Huntsman had had the guts to speak out against the extreme elements of his party and their less than patriotic activities Obama might not have been able to so easily re energize his coalition… Romney united the factions, class war versus racial division. Barney Frank said it best “Democrats aren’t perfect, but the Republicans are nuts.”
delia ruhe says:

November 23, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Huntsman would certainly have got the votes of those Independents and Republicans who have been frightened by the sheer other-planet-ness of the far right — the creationists, the global-warming deniers, the misogynists, the racists.

As a Lefty, I was not unhappy that the party and the media together were marginalizing this rational, reasonable man’s campaign, but I thought they were making a huge mistake — and I still do.
IanH says:

November 23, 2012 at 7:02 pm

The fact that all these Democrat liberals are commenting on how they loved Huntsman is hilarious. No wonder the guy was such a hapless buffoon.
EliteCommInc. says:

November 24, 2012 at 10:30 am

Hmmm . . . IanH, my thoughts almost exactly.
stephen j gordon says:

November 24, 2012 at 6:52 pm

Not so hilarious since Romney lost.
Simply put, to many eyes, Huntsman is likable and Romney is not.
And more than one election has been decided on this simple difference.
Bryan says:

November 25, 2012 at 1:45 am

Per an old drinking buddy, I think that as a whole their entire consort would fare better if they began pronouncing themselves with an accentuated short second ‘o,’ as in “More-MAWNS.” It sounds more aggressive and evokes their heritage from pioneer-reminiscent to downright crusading. We need Neo-Vikings in Sport Utility Dragon Ships leading the Grand New Republican Party, not milk-sops in covered wagons!

Meanwhile us practicing Catholics and Orthodox Christians below the $80,000/year line can begin quietly packing our things and applying for Canadian or Mexican citizenship.
crf says:

November 25, 2012 at 2:00 pm

Would Huntsman have done better? No. I have outside observer status (Canada), but I think it was the primary race that killed Romney. It was bad pornography. Him having to debate near lunatics twisted him into something he had not been before. And the subjects discussed in the primary carried over and marred his campaign. Huntsman wouldn’t have fared better.

The Republicans cannot afford a primary season like the last. They need to find a candidate first, find THE issue second, and use the primaries to build the candidate and his issue up, not tear him down.