The Fix: Republicans are less happy with their 2016 field (which exists) than Democrats are with theirs (which doesn’t)

By Philip Bump March 10 at 9:51 AM

The organizing principle of a representative democracy is that people will choose from a number of interesting, qualified candidates and select the one that best matches their personal priorities. In practice, in a million ways, democracy is less elegant than that. So when it comes time to select a candidate for the most important position in the nation, sometimes no choice is just as preferable as a complicated one.

But enough with the abstract griping. A poll released on Monday by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked, among many other things, how members of each political party felt about their options in the presidential nominating process. Sixty-three percent of Democrats, who essentially have no real choice between candidates at this point, expressed satisfaction with the field, with 21 percent saying they were not satisfied. But Republicans, with a field of 2.3 million people, were even gloomier: 64 percent were satisfied, but 28 percent were not.

Part of this is because Democrats have largely decided on who they'd like to nominate, as reflected in the 50-percent-plus polling numbers for Hillary Clinton. If you have one candidate with broad support and no one else in the race, it makes sense that you'd be contented with the options presented. If I said to you, hey, I will give you one million dollars, take it or leave it, you'd probably feel pretty comfortable with the choice you'd been given.

[Clinton, Clinton; Cuomo, Warren: Could 2015 be like 1991 all over again?]

It's also the case that Republicans have generally been more dissatisfied with their choices in the past few contested presidential races. In June of 2011, opinion was split about evenly between those feeling satisfied with the Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Bachmann-Trump-Poochie field and those who were not. Which, it's safe to say, played out in the the up-and-down nature of the primary.

This doesn't tell us much about who will win. In 1996, Republicans solidified quickly behind Bob Dole, who got crushed, for example. What it does tell us is that, in national politics, sometimes the choice preferred by voters is not to have a choice at all.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He is based in New York City.