The Washington Post - The Runaway Campaign: A Year Inside the Republican Race for President

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First Diversion Books edition January 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68230-366-5

June 15, 2015

It is an oppressively humid day in South Florida and Jeb Bush has come home to declare his candidacy for president. The big crowd assembled at Miami Dade College is festive and diverse, reflecting the culture of Miami that has shaped the former governor for decades and the kind of openness he believes his party needs to win the White House. Bush has had a difficult spring, his candidacy buffeted by criticism and self-inflicted wounds. But in many circles he is still seen as the politician to beat for the Republican nomination.

His speech evokes what he hopes voters will see in him, someone with executive experience, conservative values and a reformers instinct and perhaps above all, electability. I will take nothing and no one for granted, he says. The speech draws strong reviews, his best moment yet. For Bush, it is a day to put his problems behind him and begin the campaign anew.

June 16, 2015

The scene at Trump Tower on New Yorks Fifth Avenue is surreal. Down the escalator, his image reflecting on the walls around the lobby, comes Donald Trump, the billionaire developer and reality TV star. The crowd gathered in the lobby is large and boisterous. Later it will be revealed that some were paid to attend an arrangement the candidate would not long need.

Trump is there to announce, to the surprise of so many, that he will seek the White House. He has flirted with this before but always stopped short. Now he says he is in. His speech is seemingly off the cuff. He goes after China and President Obama and then turns to immigration. Mexico is sending their worst across the border, he says drug dealers, rapists and murderers among them. The language is harsh shocking to many and draws instant condemnations. For the novice politician, it is an inauspicious start to the campaign.

THE YEAR 2015 will be remembered as one of the most bizarrely compelling and genuinely unnerving in the nations modern political history.

It is clear now that there were two halves to the year for the Republican Party: BT and AT, Before Trump and After Trump. From January to mid-June the story of the Republican race was mostly conventional, with Bush the focal point for good and ill. There were unanticipated twists, among them the sheer size of the field of candidates ultimately a total of 17 who would formally declare.

Those early months, however, were only a prelude to the real events that would follow. It is hardly overstatement to say that, on June 16, everything changed though no one knew it at the time, not even Donald Trump.

Trumps entry brought scorn and dismissal. He was a clown, a carnival barker, the leading man in a sideshow with a short run. His outrageous rhetoric an appeal to nativism and antipathy toward everything from institutional powers to cultural shifts seemed to guarantee all that.

Yet even on that day in June there were signs that the elites in the party and in the political community didnt get what was stirring. From New York, Trump flew to Iowa for a rally at Hoyt Sherman Auditorium in Des Moines, where he was cheered as he strode down the aisle to the front stage.

Don and Kathy Watson were among those who had come to see him. Asked why Trump, she replied: Why not? Hes as good as anybody.... Hes not afraid. Hes not a politician. They werent certain they would support Trump, but they knew which candidate they would not support: Bush. Dump him. Weve had too many Bushes, she said.

Trumps reception that night showed that whatever the party establishment thought of him, many voters found him instantly attractive. Those early sentiments underscored the festering emotions that would soon burst forth, frustrations born of economic stress and disgust with Washington.

By the end of the year, every candidate running for the nomination could sense it and all were trying to adapt, channeling the anger as best they could. Some adapted well, and may yet win the nomination. Others didnt make it to the New Year.

Aboard his campaign bus in Iowa two days before the arrival of 2016, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida reflected on what he had seen and felt through the amazing year of 2015.

People are just tired, he said. Theyve tried Democrats, theyve tried Republicans. Theyve tried a combination of both. Theyve tried new people, theyve tried old people and nothing changes. Things get worse. They dont seem to get better, no matter whos in charge; it feels like the country is stuck in neutral and people are fed up and thats what brings us to the point where were at today.

What Rubio said was an echo of what almost every Republican candidate was saying by the end of the year. But as the election year opens, the lingering question the big unknown is whether 2015 will prove to be an aberration, a holiday from reality or a portent of things to come.

What is clearest is what didnt work in 2015, though it often worked in the past. Television advertising moved few voters. Policy rollouts fell on deaf ears. Impressive political rsums proved not to be persuasive. What took on the Republican side was a new kind of politics, one built on emotion and visceral connection. To some people, this represented a worrying turn toward a darker and more divisive politics. To others, it was a welcome turn away from what they considered to be too much political correctness.

Rick Santorum said of Trump: He may have understood the game better than any of us. But like so many people, the former senator from Pennsylvania wondered whether the billionaire mogul understands the game ahead. It is the question that hovers over everything in politics at this moment.

I think the vote is much different than a poll and so I want to see what happens when people actually vote, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in evaluating 2015. Then we can start talking about eras being defined or newly established.

The answer will come soon enough. What follows is the story of how Republicans got to where they are today, told primarily through the impressions, recollections and analyses of those who lived it personally the Republican candidates. This eBook is based almost entirely on on-the-record interviews with most of the major candidates some of whom fell away and with their advisers and other strategists. It is the story of a remarkable year in American politics.

By Dan Balz, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Matea Gold
January 3, 2016