NATCHITOCHES, La., February 28, 2012—Mitt Romney won an expected victory and 29 delegates in Arizona’s primary tonight. His race against Rick Santorum in Michigan was tighter, but Romney maintained a steadily growing lead through the evening until the state was finally called for him.
How this translates into delegates isn’t clear. Michigan’s 30 delegates are apportioned by congressional district, and the winner of the popular vote might not win the most delegates. As of tonight, Romney has nine and Santorum, seven. Arizona ran its primary ahead of the date allotted for its winner-take-all contest, so its delegates could be challenged at the convention, and they certainly will be if Romney’s margin is close.
A Romney loss in Michigan would have been interpreted by the Santorum camp and CNN as an indication of his weakness as the GOP standard-bearer, and his failure to win by a more commanding margin will be seen by MSNBC as a clear loss. Romney’s weakness as standard-bearer is not a perception shared by Michigan Democrats, many of whom planned to vote for Santorum as the weakest candidate against President Obama.
According to Joe DiSanno, organizer of the “Democrats for Santorum” campaign to derail Romney in Michigan, he had 14,000 Democrats committed to vote in the primary against Romney, and a Twitter campaign to get out Democratic votes for Santorum garnered considerable attention this morning. Given their loathing of him, it would be an exaggeration to say that those Democrats voted for Santorum. Rather, they voted against Romney.
Ron Paul barely campaigned in Arizona, nor was he very active in Michigan. Newt Gingrich has been saving himself for Super Tuesday, when he hopes that a win in Georgia will make him once again a force to be reckoned with. Ron Paul is hoping for success in the Super Tuesday caucuses, though if he couldn’t win the Maine caucuses, one wonders which states he sees as promising and why.
In fact Ron Paul is an intelligent man, and so it’s unlikely that he’s in this anymore to win it, not if “winning” means taking the White House. His hope now has to be that he can influence the GOP platform, and even more importantly, that his ideals will be influential in the GOP in future election cycles. If that turns out to be the case, he can still “win it.”
Talk of a Paul-Romney alliance is silly, but it’s clear that Santorum is a much bigger threat to Paul’s continued influence in the GOP than Romney. Santorum’s social conservatism is anti-libertarian to its core, hostile to the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and to small-government conservatism. Paul will continue to aim his strongest fire at Santorum.
Gingrich is likewise an intelligent man (not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, though – God Himself is scarcely that smart), and he can’t honestly believe he will win the nomination. However, he just received a $10 million injection of political Viagra, and he’s so thoroughly basted in his own bile that he’s redefined winning to mean hurting Romney. Were his ego smaller or his nature less venomous, he’d be on his way out of the race tonight, but because he’s Newt, he’ll stay in it until his money runs out and plan his strategies for a brokered convention like some soap-opera villain.
While Paul will remain a force in this race, it really is becoming a two-man contest between Santorum and Romney. Michigan came close to being a one-on-one fight, and if it did nothing else, it should have helped put to rest the idiot mantra of Romney’s 30% ceiling. If Santorum and Gingrich insist that the GOP is 70% against Romney, they should explain why it seems to be even in higher percentages against them.
If the GOP eventually swings to Santorum, it will be strong evidence that the GOP is no longer a political party, but a narrow ideology. A swing to Romney won’t be a sign of GOP vigor, but it will at least give the party a better chance of holding on to the House. A Santorum nomination would guarantee Democratic domination of the government at least through 2014, and probably much longer.
Santorum will probably win Tennessee on Super Tuesday, and Gingrich, Georgia. Romney will have an uphill climb in the South, but even so, he remains the favorite to take the nomination. His religion, long a problem with Christian evangelicals, will remain an issue with southern Republicans, and also with Democrats. By itself it won’t lose him the election, but it will matter if the race is close.
It would be far too optimistic to hope that tonight marks the beginning of the end of this endless GOP race. Hopes of a brokered convention and the personalities of the remaining candidates almost guarantee that none will drop out before Super Tuesday, and that they’ll all stay in well past that. The often-repeated comment that this helps Obama and hurts the GOP isn’t necessarily true (John McCain wasn’t helped that much by the drawn out battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton), but what’s become depressingly clear is that winning is no longer being defined by most of the candidates as ejecting Obama from the White House, nor does a large chunk of the GOP base seem to care about that. The new name of the game is purity, and it will be poison to the GOP.
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. He hears that the GOP is thinking of revising its rules for the next election to avoid this sort of protracted nominating battle and hopes that they remember that there's no situation so bad that you can't make it worse. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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