The governor says GOP primary voters don’t want donors to clear the field.
‘If I were to decide to run [for president], it would have nothing to do with polls or fundraising or whatever,” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal says to a group of reporters munching on Chick-fil-A lunch at an upstairs conference room at the Heritage Foundation. “When I started my first race, I was at 2 percent, which was within the margin of error.”
If Jindal does decide to run, he’ll need to perform that difficult climb again. A Fox News poll conducted in late January asked Republicans nationwide whom they preferred as the 2016 Republican nominee. Jindal received 2 percent. When Mitt Romney — who has since declared he won’t be running — was removed from the mix, the Louisiana governor received . . . 3 percent.
The most recent Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers found Jindal at . . . 2 percent.
The most recent Bloomberg poll of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire found Jindal at . . . 3 percent.
There are some brighter numbers in that mix. In Iowa, 39 percent of Iowa Republican caucusgoers have a favorable impression of him, and only 20 percent say their impression is unfavorable. In New Hampshire, the numbers are similar, 41 percent of likely primary voters saying they have a favorable impression of him and only 12 percent unfavorable.
But Jindal starts the 2016 cycle at or near the bottom of the pack, which is mildly surprising considering his increasingly prominent role in the Republican party during the Obama era.
He served two terms in the House of Representatives before being elected governor of Louisiana in 2007, when the state was still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. He had to skip the 2008 Republican National Convention to manage his state’s preparation for Hurricane Gustav, helping oversee one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history. He assembled a serious record on budget cuts, school choice, job creation, and overhauling ethics laws and scared off any serious Democratic opposition in 2011. He got into a prolonged legal battle with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration’s Department of Justice over school-choice reforms and vouchers. He directed the Republican Governors Association for a year and has been a regular presence on the cable news networks. Thanks to the oil and gas boom, much of Jindal’s term has been marked by economic good news. After Obama’s victory, he attempted to reset the party, declaring that Republicans couldn’t just be “the Party of No.”
There have been missteps, too. In February 2009, Jindal delivered a widely panned official Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress. His job-approval rating in Louisiana is pretty low these days, and the sharp drop in oil revenue has helped contribute to a suddenly yawning deficit in the state budget.
And yet, significant numbers of Republicans in those early primary states aren’t familiar with him. Just under half of GOP primary voters in New Hampshire have neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression of him, and 41 percent of likely Iowa caucusgoers “aren’t sure” what they think of him.
“I live in a state that is farther way from major media markets, I get it,” Jindal says. “But the reality is, I don’t think this election will be decided by the insiders.” He continued: “I don’t think the voters want the donors, the political consultants, the establishment to pick their candidate, to clear the field. I know that there are a lot of Republicans that wring their hands and say, ‘Well, this is messy.’ We might have too many debates, it might go on too long – well, the reality is, democracy is messy.”
Jindal has already indicated that he opposes the Republican National Committee’s effort to limit the number of presidential debates. Responding to what it deemed a chaotic schedule and excessive number of debates in the 2012 cycle, the RNC announced that it had approved nine official debates, and there has been some speculation that the committee could attempt to punish candidates who appear at unsanctioned debates.
“There’s going to be severe backlash if the party leaders think they’re going to get to pick the candidate,” Jindal said. “I think this is going to be a long process. We have a deep bench, and we have more credible candidates than we’ve had in a long time. There’s not a sense that there’s anybody who’s preordained. In previous elections, it was almost as if among Republicans, if you had lost the last one, or if you had been awaiting around patiently, it was now your turn.”
Jindal associates point out that he hasn’t even really begun an effort to build name ID in those early primary states. By contrast, neurosurgeon and potential candidate Ben Carson’s name is used in numerous right-leaning direct-mail fundraising efforts; as Time put it, “Carson’s online fundraising efforts are so prolific that his own political operation is sometimes not aware of them.”
The thinking is that the Republican base is extremely unlikely to rush into the decision of choosing their 2016 nominee. Almost every candidate in the 2012 Republican presidential field enjoyed a short period as frontrunner, and a similar dynamic is likely to exist in the 2016 cycle, ensuring that at some point in the coming year, Jindal will get his moment in the spotlight to shine and boost those single-digit polling numbers.
Jindal says he’ll make his decision whether or not to run for president in the coming months.
— Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO.