More than a dozen Republican governors and senators are rushing to line up supporters, pore over policies and map out strategies for the 2016 presidential campaign, concluding that last week’s midterm rout of Democrats shows that the GOP has a strong chance of taking back the White House…

“Tuesday night certainly gives the Republicans a sense of hope and momentum, and that fuels enthusiasm, interest and engagement,” said former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (R), a 2012 presidential candidate. “There’s an enhanced opportunity that will propel more candidates toward 2016.”

For the first time in a generation, there is no singularly dominant contender on the Republican side, leaving a passel of governors, senators and other luminaries jockeying for position.

At the time [of Cruz’s ObamaCare filibuster], Paul was seen as a likely 2016 presidential primary contender, but the idea of a Cruz presidential bid still seemed a bit far-fetched and premature. After all, the first-term Texas Republican had been sworn in to serve in his first-ever elected office only eight months earlier.

But barely over a year later, it looks increasingly likely that both men will vie for the Republican presidential nomination and launch campaigns this winter.

As Cruz games out his strategy for the new Congress, which will be controlled by his own party for the first time in his career as a senator, he and Paul are now clearly rivals, as opposed to the uneasy allies they were a year ago.

One thing’s for sure: Don’t expect a repeat of their 2013 alliance. An aide to Paul said that if Cruz launches another crusade against Obamacare next year, Paul will want little to do with it.

“He won’t be in the middle of that fight,” the Paul aide told me last week. “I don’t think he’s going to get all wrapped around the axle. He’s supportive of the idea of repealing Obamacare, but he’s not going to be the tip of the spear.”

Paul reiterated his long-standing assertion that he won’t officially decide about a presidential run until the spring, but his advisers have already laid out a timetable: They expect the campaign will be a “go” by mid-April, with an announcement as quickly after that as his staff can put together a fly-around to the early states.

Before zeroing in on Louisville as Paul’s likely campaign headquarters, advisers reached out to veterans of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign to consult on the advisability and specific requirements of running a national campaign from outside Washington, deciding the symbolic importance of basing the campaign in his home state outweighed any concerns about easy access for Washington-based staffers and political operatives from across the country…

Paul argues that even modest success would make his campaign transformative in the mold of FDR for the Democrats and Ronald Reagan for the Republicans. “There’s been very few people who have changed the demographics of how people voted,” he said.

I admire Paul’s outreach to minority voters, and I was very skeptical of the immigration bill Rubio shepherded through the Senate last year. But I have agreed with practically every domestic policy stance the Florida senator has taken since, and his reform agenda seems more sensible on substance and more plausible as politics than Paul’s more stringent libertarianism.

But then on foreign policy my sympathies reverse. Paul’s ties to his father’s more paranoid worldview are problematic, but the realism and restraint he’s championing seem wiser than the G.O.P.’s frequent interventionist tilt. To imagine Rubio as a successful foreign policy president, I have to imagine an administration in the mold of Ronald Reagan’s, where hawkish rhetoric coexists with deep caution about committing U.S. ground troops — and I think there’s reason to worry we’d get incaution and quagmire instead.

I suspect that the Republican electorate would also have mixed sympathies … and that is exactly why the party should want to see these men debate. Maybe that debate would end with one victorious and the other clearly vanquished; maybe it would encourage a kind of partial synthesis, perhaps offered by a savvy rival like Christie. But however the debate turned out, it would involve exactly the issues the Republicans need to work through before they’re given control of the White House once again.

One potential alternative to a Paul-Rubio tilt, meanwhile, is almost too grim to mention: a campaign in which neither man gets traction precisely because they’ve staked out too many positions, and instead the establishment money flows to a candidate (Jeb, Christie, even Romney redivivus) who plays it safe while Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and others have an empty scrum on the right to see who gets to finish second.

Rubio would fill his White House with people who still regard the Iraq War as a good idea. Paul would tap people who believe it to have been an ill-conceived mistake. Rubio would ally with people who sing, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Paul represents the opposing foreign-policy faction in the GOP.

To present the difference between them in terms of the War in Libya is to minimize its importance. Imprudent as it was, Libya didn’t cost much in blood or treasure, whereas Iraq is clarifying. Douthat may believe that a Rubio domestic agenda would serve America better than a Paul domestic agenda. But is the difference so great as to outweigh the risk of a Rubio war that kills 4,489 Americans, wounds tens of thousands, exposes hundreds to chemical agents, and triggers a PTSD epidemic? Is Rubio’s tax plan so good that its worth risking another $6 trillion war tab?

It’s too risky to put another Iraq hawk in the White House, especially when they’ve given no indication of having learned anything from that historic debacle. Every president makes mistakes. Every president favors some dumb policies. Rubio seems more likely than his rival to favor the sort of mistake that ends in a tear-stained wall where the names of dead 19-year-olds are engraved in polished stone.

Perry, considering a repeat presidential bid in 2016, had just spoken at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Reagan’s famous “A Time For Choosing” speech. Among his scalding criticisms of Obama, Perry explained the president’s failings as due to his background as a U.S. senator – something that happens to apply to several of his would-be challengers for the GOP presidential nomination.

“If you’re in the Senate or if you’re in the House, you can give a speech and then go home. Governors can’t. We have to govern,” Perry said, adding, “And the president of the United States, historically, has had to operate that way, too; the ones that were successful. And one of the reasons why this President is not successful is because he’s never had that experience.” 

Asked if the next president will be a senator, Perry said, “No.” 

All of this seems unlikely to stop Christie’s path to the nomination, at least in the absence of a surprisingly strong campaign from one of his challengers. Republican voters right now are aching for two things: a) someone who will visibly take the fight to people who have run the country into the ground and more importantly, b) someone who will win. No one else in the field comes close to Christie on either count. Just based on the primary experience of 2000, the lingering sour taste of two losses to Obama is going to wipe almost all considerations other than the ability to beat the Democrat nominee off the mat. I simply can’t see an embarrassing spectacle like 2012 unfolding where ideological bickering leads to nonserious candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum enjoying meaningful time as the frontrunner. I think, for better or worse, the party will coalesce around a candidate early and stick with him/her through the end. And in terms of proven results, after winning blue New Jersey in a rout in his re-election campaign, and turning what was expected to be a 3-seat loss in governor’s mansions on Tuesday into an incredible 2 or 3 seat gain (bringing the national total up to an almost unfathomable 34 or 35 GOP governors), Christie is in a unique position to brag about the ability to bring results and have coattails.

Of the other candidates in the expected field, Scott Walker is the only one who will have a similar resume to run on, and Walker’s charisma deficit has been well documented. Jindal, my personal favorite at this early juncture, will probably not fit the national zeitgeist absent a major and unforeseen change in circumstances. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has built an impressive organization but has too sizeable of a contingent that will not vote for him under any circumstances and has a congenital case of foot-in-mouth disease. Jeb, Rick Perry, and Romney are retreads and/or have faded from the public eye, and will probably not get a serious look with a strong bench this year.

There is well-publicized split within the Republican Party between its conservative and pragmatic wings, and of all the potential candidates out there, Walker is the one who is most likely to unite the two.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner in March, Walker rejected the idea that there was a tradeoff between conservatism and pragmatism. “You don’t have to compromise one for the other, meaning you can stand up for your principles, you can push your core beliefs, and you can still govern effectively,” Walker said.

The fact that he demonstrated this in Wisconsin is what makes him such a potentially strong candidate. His fight for limited government reforms in the face of a ferocious assault from national liberals endeared him to activists on the right. At the same time, his ability to successfully govern and get re-elected in a blue state is comforting to Establishment Republicans.

In short, conservatives want a fighter and Establishment Republicans want a person who can win. Walker has a great argument that he can do both.

For thirteen months, Williams followed Dr. Carson, capturing intimate moments of Carson being with his family, and documented it on film. Originally set to air on local stations in South Carolina, the decision was made to roll it out nationwide for more people to see the story of a truly great man and great American…

People will be so impressed with Carson, according to Williams, because “they think that they know him. But, they will be amazed when they see this story. He is such a good man. He is such a genius. He’s different. He’s not an ideologue. He’s a very caring person.” Beyond this, however, Williams reminds us that Carson is a surgeon by training and, as a result, he is very decisive…

Williams says that Carson is listening to others who are trying to draft him. Meanwhile, he is developing a prescription to remedy America’s problems. “He’s taken a very strong position on affordable care, family, business, Isis, and Ebola. He talks about them in a non political way in the documentary,” Williams explained, adding, “He shows he has a very clear vision of where this country should go.”

Bannon asked Williams why would Carson want to descend into the “muck and grime” of what modern politics has become. Williams replied, “As his business manager, it is the last thing that I want him to do.” But Williams goes on to assert that watching Carson is “like watching a tsunami—he’s a strong wind every day. I see him change, it’s like watching the Ten Commandments, watching Moses when he found out what God had for him—he became renewed and refreshed.”

The reality is that the only way Republicans can win the White House and make a play for independents is if they nominate somebody who is a real conservative…

The deeper issue is that when the Republican nominee is somebody who conservatives are suspicious of, the nominee has to spend the whole primary trying to convince conservatives that he or she agrees with them, and then the general election constantly reassuring them that he or she isn’t going to abandon the right just because the nomination has been sewn up. This leads to incoherent campaign messaging.

The popular myth is that a winning candidate has to play to the base in the primaries and then move to the center in the general election. But the reality is that winning candidates in both parties have tended to maintain a relatively consistent theme throughout their campaigns…

When base voters implicitly trust a candidate, they’re more likely to give that candidate the benefit of the doubt when he or she tries to communicate a message to appeal to the broader electorate, because they assume that deep down that candidate “gets it” and is “one of us.” A candidate who is constantly having to prove something to the base — from the declaration of candidacy to the waning hours of Election Day — is guaranteed to lose.