We are seven months away from the November general election and already some Republican leaders are ready to give up on 2016.
The prospect of a clownish Donald Trump going down to a landslide defeat in the fall is too much for some GOP stalwarts to bear. Major party donors are reportedly shifting their resources to congressional races.
Some party strategists, fearful that a Trump nomination could drag down the entire GOP ticket in numerous states, have shifted their focus to preserving the party majority in the Senate.
And some loyal Republicans have already started musing about the 2020 presidential race. In Iowa, where presidential politics is a pastime, a few pundits already speculate on who might be the first Republican hopefuls to arrive in the Hawkeye State in 2017.
Michigan GOP activist Dennis Lennox is among those imagining a President Hillary Clinton at the helm and what the Republican response would be.
In this scenario first one must assume that, after losing the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, in 2020 Republican Party hindsight will be 20/20.
Finally united in recognition of past mistakes, the party would eventually coalesce around … Bill Schuette?
Yes, Lennox, in a column for The Detroit News, lays out a path for Michigan’s Republican attorney general that leads to the Oval Office.
Lennox imagines Schuette winning the 2018 race for governor – no small fete given GOP Gov. Snyder’s extreme unpopularity — and then cultivating national popularity as Republicans seek a unifying candidate to beat President Clinton.
An abbreviated version of the Lennox vision goes like this:
Schuette, who has balanced the competing interests of the establishment with the party’s vocal right-wing base over his 36 years in this or that office … lives, sleeps, and breathes politics. He relishes life on the trail, including the rubber-chicken dinners of local Republican gatherings in traditional early voting states.
His mastery of all things politics, including as attorney general when he cultivated relationships with other GOP state attorneys general (many of whom are also now governors) in the endless lawsuits against first the Obama administration and now the Clinton administration, has solidified his street cred with the militant right that propelled the anti-establishment outsiders of 2016.
