Scott Walker's biggest drawback: He's the most partisan Republican running for president

What happened to Scott Walker? For months, political analysts (including myself) have been saying that Walker is a candidate with unusual promise, because he alone in the presidential field can unite all the Republican factions.

The religious right loves him — he's the son of a Baptist minister who attends an evangelical church. The big money loves him — his crusade to crush labor unions is enough to warm any plutocrat's heart. In a party eager for fresh faces, he's only 47 despite being in his second term as governor of an important swing state. He's even reportedly the favorite of the Koch brothers, and there are few more important endorsements in the GOP.

Yet as he embarks on his campaign for the White House, Walker has yet to set the race on fire. Though he's leading in early polls in Iowa, The Huffington Post's average puts him in an underwhelming sixth place nationally. The New York Times reports that some Republicans are worried he isn't quite ready for prime time; some have even compared him to Sarah Palin, which is unfair but still striking.

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Could it be that even those who find him appealing in many ways are worried about what would happen if he were the party's nominee?

Scott Walker's biggest problem is this: He is the most partisan Republican running for president. And that's not how you win a national election.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about ideology. Walker is no more or less conservative than most of the GOP field; they all agree on almost everything. Nor am I arguing that a candidate has to be "moderate" to win the general election. But if you look at the politicians who have become president, you'll see that almost all of them knew how to talk to voters who don't already agree with them. This is something Walker plainly has little interest in, which isn't surprising given his experience.

Let's take a look at the 90-second video Walker's campaign released this week to announce his candidacy:

Here's the key part of the text:

The phrase "fight and win" is repeated multiple times in the video, and it seems to be the first slogan of the Walker campaign. He's hardly the first candidate to talk about fighting, but it raises the question: Who's he fighting? And the answer is clear: the people on the other side of the aisle. Walker's achievements as governor are all about either serving narrow conservative goals like cutting taxes, or crushing his Democratic enemies, like the public employee unions. It's what made him a hero to conservatives — but it won't endear him to a broader audience.

Walker's point about winning "three elections in four years in a blue state" might lead you to believe that he knows a thing or two about appealing to Democrats, but nothing could be further from the truth. As Alec MacGillis has noted, "Walker rose to power in Wisconsin less by reaching out to Democrats and swing voters than by appealing to the conservative base in a state that is as starkly polarized as any in the country. Wisconsin is not politically purple because it is full of voters who straddle party lines and swing back and forth from election to election. It is purple because it is divided into two strikingly cohesive and fiercely energized camps."

As for those three elections, Walker had the good fortune to be carried to victory on waves of high Republican turnout. He got elected in 2010, the year of the Tea Party triumph, then survived a recall in June 2012 when his supporters flooded the polls. Then he was re-elected in 2014, during another Republican sweep. If he had had to run in 2008 or 2012, when a presidential election brought out many more Democratic voters, he would almost certainly have lost.

Let's look back at our recent presidents. They all wanted very much to win partisan battles, but they were also comfortable addressing all kinds of voters. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all ascended to the White House promising to transcend partisanship. None of them managed to do it, but all evidence suggests that, at the time anyway, they were sincere in the desire and thought it might be possible.

For Clinton, it came from his experience as a Democrat in a conservative state. For Obama, it had its roots in his personal history, creating the sense that he could build bridges between people who didn't agree. But Scott Walker could never give anything like the speech that catapulted Obama to national prominence ("There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there's the United States of America!"), because he hasn't lived it and surely doesn't believe it.

So now he's talking about fighting, and the enemy in that fight is pretty obvious. That isn't necessarily a bad message in a primary, where many base voters detest the other side and want a champion who will vanquish it. But it doesn't translate well to the general election. One of his advisers told National Journal, "It's much easier to move from being a conservative to being a middle-of-the-road moderate later on." If you want to know how easy it is, ask Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Scott Walker lost the first race he ran at the tender age of 22, against an incumbent Democrat for a state assembly seat. Instead of changing his beliefs or his approach, he found some new voters, moving to a more conservative district where he won. And in every election that followed, from the state assembly to the Milwaukee county executive's office to the governorship, he never had to appeal to people who didn't already agree with him. In that polarized environment, he found victory by mobilizing Republicans to fight the Democrats they loathed.

It got him to where he is today — but if he's going to win the White House, he'll have to find a new way to run.