A divisive, drawn-out Republican contest to challenge Obama now more likely – and could be good for Obama.

The Republican presidential nomination contest was energised on Saturday by Representative Michelle Bachmann’s victory in the Ames straw poll, combined with Texas Governor Rick Perry’s announcement that he would be joining the race.  The unofficial starting whistle for the 2012 presidential election has thus now been blown.

Saturday’s events aside, the most striking feature of the Republican race (which currently has at least a dozen officially declared entrants) has so far been the distinct lack of excitement surrounding it.  With the US economy still weak, and Barack Obama vulnerable to defeat, this has puzzled many.

Following Bachman’s victory, and Perry’s entrance, the good news for the Republicans is that the contest will now heat up.  However, the race also becomes even more uncertain in its ultimate outcome as both of these Tea Party favourites will now challenge the mantle of the early leader in the pack:  former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a relatively moderate conservative.

This dynamic is important as a potentially crucial factor that will help determine whether Republicans win back the White House in November 2012 is whether the party will speedily and decisively unite around a nationally credible candidate.  A model here would be the 2000 nomination cycle when George W Bush emerged strongly in late 1999 and early 2000 from a wide field of candidates, well before the official nominating season began with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

However, unlike 2000, the current Republican race may now prove unusually turbulent, divisive and perhaps drawn out too, especially if the 2004 and 2008 nomination cycles are any benchmark.  Uncertainty may only be intensified by the Tea Party’s growing influence in Republican ranks.

Of course, US presidential nomination contests always have unexpected twists and turns.  What distinguished the 2004 and 2008 cycles, however, was the relative difficulty of predicting the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees on the eve of the official nominating season (with the exception of George W Bush in 2004 whose Republican renomination as president was uncontested):

• In both 2004 and 2008, the Democratic party’s early frontrunner – defined as the candidate both leading in national polls of party identifiers on the eve of Iowa caucuses; and raising more campaign finance than any other candidate in the 12 months before election year (Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton respectively) – was ultimately beaten by initially less-favoured candidates (John Kerry and Obama respectively).

• Equally, in the 2008 race for the Republican contest, John McCain emerged as the nominee, despite the fact that other candidates (Rudy Giuliani and Romney) had greater national poll strength and/or fundraising prowess before the official nominating season began.

There appears no common, overriding factor accounting for the success of Kerry, Obama, and McCain.  For instance, much of the Vietnam veteran Kerry’s surge was fuelled by ‘late’ concerns amongst Democrats that Dean’s lack of national security credentials made him unelectable against Bush in the midst of the ‘war on terror’.

By contrast, Obama’s success was driven, in significant part, by a factor that was genuinely new in the post-2000 cycles:  the fundraising and wider campaigning potential of the internet. This was exceptionally utilised by his insurgent campaign to overcome the formidable strength of Clinton’s organisation.

Far from being the norm, the collapse of these early front-runners in 2004 and 2008 was most unusual in the last three decades of presidential races. Indeed from 1980 to 2000, the eventual nominee in eight of the 10 Democratic and Republican nomination races that were contested (ie in which there was more than one candidate), was the pre-primary frontrunner.

This was true of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee in 1980; Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate in 1984; George HW Bush, the Republican nominee in 1988 and 1992; Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate in 1992; Bob Dole, the Republican nominee in 1996; Al Gore, the Democratic nominee in 2000; and George W. Bush, the Republican nominee in 2000.

Moreover, in both of the partial exceptions to this pattern, the eventual presidential nominee led the rest of the field on one of the two measures:

• In the race for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan (who ultimately won the contest) led national polls of party identifiers, although John Connally was the leading fundraiser.
 
• In the battle for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, Michael Dukakis (who eventually won the race) raised the most funds, but was behind in national polls on the eve of the Iowa caucus to Gary Hart.

For Obama, a divisive, drawn-out Republican contest would undoubtedly aid his re-election fortunes.  With his job approval ratings remaining well below 50 per cent in recent polls, it will be an uphill struggle for him to recapture the spirit of his hugely successful 2008 campaign.

Indeed, even if he becomes the first presidential candidate in US history to raise one billion dollars in campaign finance, thus potentially giving him a fundraising edge over his eventual Republican rival, Obama’s prospects in 2012 may now rest very heavily on a factor that remains largely out of his hands:  whether the US economy can avoid a ‘double-dip recession’ and recover much more robustly in coming months.

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Andrew Hammond was formerly a political analyst at Oxford Analytica, and a special adviser in the UK government

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Photo: Gage Skidmore