"Leading" candidates as of one or two years before the actual election mean less than nothing. Want some examples??
1967: D - Edwin Muskie
1975: D - Ted Kennedy
1975: R - Ronald Reagan
1983: D - Gary Hart
1987: D - Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon
1991: D - Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas
1999: R - John McCain
2003: D - Howard Dean, John Edwards
2007: D - Hillary Clinton
You get the point. Purported "leaders" among possible candidates at this point means absolutely nothing.
That said, agree 1000% with the thread title. Democrat lite? Yeah, pass.
Except the article isn't about what the Republican Party strategy is, it's who Republican voters are saying they would pick, given the field of 16 hopefuls. And that itself is telling in two ways. First, that they can't narrow it down to fewer than 16 (the top three Dems accounted for around 85% of the Dem voter responses, compared to less than 40% of responses on the Republican side of the poll). Second, Romney doesn't have a commanding hold on republican voters, garnering only 20% of the support of the 510 Republicans surveyed, unlike the 65% of the 457 Democrat respondents that Hillary got. Clearly the Republican base isn't terribly excited about ANY of the 16 potential candidates, but Democrats are clearly ready to jump on the HIllary train.
The Republican Party is setting themselves up for failure if they don't come up with a candidate who can energize their base. I agree that two years is still a long time, but I'll also point out that (unfortunately, I would say) the election cycle is getting naturally longer and longer, and it's a fact of life that as soon as one election is over, the parties start laying the groundwork for the next one. That's a double-whammy for Republicans since the liberal left has the media on their side,
Let's just assume Hillary is the Democratic candidate in 2016. She will take the lion's share of women voters and minorities, that's almost a given since she's A) a woman and B) a democrat. Unless the Republicans can find a way to just absolutely and irrefutably assassinate her character, she has those voters locked down. So that leaves the staunch Republicans, of which I doubt there are enough to outnumber Hillary's built-in base. So who else can the Republicans get on their side? They need to get the fence-sitters, and they need to have a massive turnout of people who otherwise wouldn't have voted at all. And of course, the Dems will be fighting for those same votes, so the Republicans will have to be unbelievably convincing to swing that bloc of voters overwhelmingly their way. The only way to do that is with an exciting candidate, and no one on the right is anywhere near as excited about Romney as the left is about Clinton.
Game. Set. Match. Republicans lose, because they don't seem to be serious about this. God help us all if Hillary wins in 2016
AND Dems erode the Republican majority in Congress. Because if the Democrat base is energized by a Clinton campaign, you can count on Republicans losing ground in the House and Senate too. If Hillary wins big like I think she will, and Dems take back some seats, they'll be able to say they have a mandate from the voting public, and god only knows what they'll do then.
