2016: A Hillary-Free Zone?

The KC Star’s Steve Rose recently attended a private (but mostly on-the-record) event with Charlie Cook:

Charlie Cook, one of the most respected political experts in the country, believes Hillary Clinton has only a 25-30 percent chance of running for president, and in any case he thinks she is either “rusty” or “she has lost her fastball.” He bases that on her disastrous book tour, in which she said some very inappropriate things and also did not sell many books.

There’s also the question of whether Clinton would rather spend the next two years running away from her old boss, and then spend the following four or eight years cleaning up his sizable mess, or if she’d rather go on collecting six-figure speaking fees. Given her age and those persistent rumors about her health (and her penchant for all that filthy lucre), Cook’s odds don’t seem far off.

But don’t pop the champagne cork just yet:

As to the future of the major political parties, Cook identified challenges for each.

“Republicans face demographic changes,” he said. He pointed out that Mitt Romney garnered 59 percent of the white vote, and no candidate who had carried whites by that kind of margin had ever lost before. The non-white vote clearly made the difference.

Republicans also face a challenge with younger voters. While they don’t think government is very effective — they grew up with Hurricane Katrina — they tend to be socially tolerant, and this is a “deal-breaker” for many who might otherwise have voted Republican.

If Chuck Schumer is right and the Democrats got pummeled for passing ♡bamaCare!!! instead of “fixing” the economy*, then the GOP will get clobbered if they pursue retrograde social battles.

Claire McCaskill is still a Senator today for exactly one reason. Her campaign tricked Missouri GOP primary voters into picking Todd Akin, by running ads claiming he was “too conservative” for Missouri voters — and the GOP base took the bait. Be wary of similar Democrat dirty tricks during the GOP primaries in 2016.

RELATED: Roger Simon wonders if the Stupid Party can learn.

*Democrats has promised ♡bamaCare!!! would fix the economy, remember?