With each passing day more and more Republicans enter the 2016 presidential election with hopes of reaching the White House, but what they are really doing is hurting the GOP's chances of reclaiming the presidency by unnecessarily dividing the base and their resources.
Although Conservatives have decried the "next in line" attitude that the Republican Party tends to follow in national elections, its common sense cannot be disputed from a financial or political standpoint.
Sure, it doesn't allow for a substantial debate on the ideas and ideals of ideology in the primaries, but must we hash these thoughts out every four years? Will the grand old party slip perilously close to the abyss if we don't fight for the right to succeed Ronald Reagan's legacy?
Newsflash: Reagan is dead. The eighties are gone. Republicans don't need twenty candidates.
Not only is it not making the party stronger, because millions of voters are being fractured across too many factions to count, but it is setting a political nuclear race into effect, which once started, will end up depleting primary coffers in a useless display of self-destruction.
What do I mean by self-destruction? Let us be serious for a moment - Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker are the only three candidates with a shot of securing the nomination. The rest are simply sucking the money and oxygen away from those with an actual chance.
If that's not self-inflicted harm against one's own party, I don't know what is.
Even worse are the lines that candidates are drawing: Cruz is the "true conservative," Paul is the "true defender of liberty," Fiorina is the "true outsider," Bush is the "nominee inherent," Huckabee is the true "social conservative," and so on and so forth.
By drawing these lines they are creating a situation where their bases think only their candidate is the one that can lead or save the Republican Party, and that anyone else is simply inferior and, dangerous to the party's overall odds, "unsupportable" in the general election.
All of this combined is why the GOP stands a decent chance of throwing the 2016 presidential election away, unless they eliminate the fringe candidates and hold a substantive debate between the three strongest candidates, which would allow them to only grow stronger.
Alas, this is the Republican Party we speak of, however, and they are not known for their intelligence.
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