"None of our candidates seem to have caught on," said GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. "You have the whack-a-mole Republican primary: As soon as one rises up, the others knock them down."
That instability has fueled fears that if a winner does not quickly emerge in a primary calendar loaded with contests in January and early February, a prolonged primary fight could delay the GOP's focus on election day in a campaign in which Democratic voters already have contributed more money and, according to several polls, expressed greater satisfaction with their choice of presidential contenders.
"I'm concerned the Democrats will settle on their nominee fairly soon and Republicans will take longer beating each other up," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. "It gives another advantage to the Democrats in a year in which they already enjoy significant advantages."
History is not on the side of a party that takes a long time to winnow its field to one candidate. In almost every presidential campaign over the last generation, the party that settled on its nominee first won the general election, said Rhodes Cook, an expert on presidential campaigns.
"If the nominating process is going on for a while, it shows the nominee is having some problem pulling his base together," Cook said. "That does not bode well for the general election."
For Republicans, the party's coalition of business interests, religious conservatives and defense hawks has been its foundation since Reagan captured the GOP nod in 1980. Bush also rode that coalition to power 20 years later, harnessing the fundraising power of business to the grass-roots energy of social conservative activists.
Republicans remain hopeful that, once their nominee is chosen, the coalition will reassemble behind him -- as it did in 1988, when Bush's father had to contend with primary challenges from evangelical leader Pat Robertson, propelled by social conservatives, and former Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), the darling of the party's supply-side-economics wing.
But the 2008 nominee may face a stiff challenge in bridging the fault lines that the fractured Republican field have exposed. For many GOP voters, some of the candidates are simply unacceptable.
The recent Times/Bloomberg poll in Iowa found that 38% of the Republicans who had chosen a candidate to back said they had no second choice. And though 61% of Iowa Democrats surveyed said they could support any of their party's nominees, 42% of Republicans expressed that view about their choices.
