Elections in America are like that significant other you always seem to keep coming back to. We can’t live with them, but we can’t survive without them, either.
Yes, to the chagrin of many, 2016 presidential election speculation is already underway. Wisconsin, home to Gov. Scott Walker – one of the most polarizing political figures in the national media – is hardly an exception.

Conjecture abounds in the weeks following every major election. National media outlets will ask the same questions and perform the same follow-up procedures they do every year. What will happen to the losers? Will our newly elected legislators manage to work together as unsuccessfully as our former representatives? And, perhaps most importantly, who will be next to throw their hat in the center of the circus?

Much ink will be spilled in the coming months assessing whether Walker, the now twice-elected governor of Wisconsin, will seek his party’s nomination for the 2016 presidential contest. Inferences sway in both directions, but if the nominating conventions were to be held today, major news sources such as CNN would list Walker as a contender for the selection.

For his part, Walker insisted he is uninterested in even thinking about the nomination and is instead focused on leading the state of Wisconsin. I’ll call baloney on that one. Everyone daydreams, politicians who have already shown a degree of comfort in the national spotlight especially.

That being said, Americans need not worry about the election of President Walker anytime soon. Here are three reasons to change the channel whenever the next pundit brings up the subject.

First of all, Walker is far too polarizing for the American electorate. There’s a good reason that Walker is on the short list of conservatives that the modern Republican establishment considers presidential; he has championed their causes in a particularly attention-grabbing fashion. By ramming through controversial legislation, presiding over investigations into the emails of critics and being one of the few governors to take the bastions of liberal power (teachers, unions) head-on, Walker has cemented a place for himself in the proverbial halls of the conservative wing.

However, while this makes Walker a darling of the Republican Party, it also makes him highly unlikely to receive its nomination for president. General elections are extraordinarily tough to win if a candidate refuses to try and win the moderate vote. Just ask former former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., whose last-gasp, make-or-break strategy was to sell himself as a moderate, sensible Republican in the presidential debates. Ask George McGovern, who ran as an anti-war liberal and got subsequently creamed – even in lieu of the Watergate scandal – by Richard Nixon. The next Republican candidate will need to be more Jon Huntsman than Sarah Palin, and the establishment will realize that in four years’ time.

Second, Walker’s celebrity is a double-edged sword. Although it can draw the type of attention that presidential hopefuls need, making national news coverage is not always a good thing. To wit, the Milwaukee County prosecutor’s investigation of one of Walker’s former top deputies has brought a potentially calamitous criminal case to the governor’s doorstep. Elections are won by relentlessly marketing an image of a candidate to voters. Voters remember these candidates by making associations between them and the images and phrases they are surrounded by. This makes early nominees particularly susceptible to death by a thousand cuts. Ask Montee Ball what having his name next to the words “arrested” and “trespassing” on national news outlets did to his Heisman hype. Headlines that mention Walker’s name and the phrase “sentencing hearing” foster a criminal image, not a presidential one.

Lastly, Walker is way too boring. While boring can be a benefit when running for major government offices – see Ryan, Paul – being elected to run the show has required an element of gravitas in the past. The former moderate Republican governor of my home state of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, couldn’t survive the 2012 primary because his middle-of-the-road, “aw shucks” Midwestern attitude couldn’t beat Rick Santorum’s climate skepticism or Newt Gingrich’s moon colony. Such is life in the political-entertainment complex of modern America.

So, although Walker’s star might still be rising in the GOP, don’t look for him on the national stage in four years. After all, he’s still got Wisconsin to take care of.

Nathaniel Olson ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science, history and psychology.