NATCHITOCHES, La., January 17, 2012—With one primary over and 12 delegates decided, Mitt Romney’s campaign has taken on an air of inevitability.
We might be forgiven for asking, “how?” Less than one percent of the delegates have been selected. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have spoken (sort of; voters in Iowa didn’t choose any delegates), but not in Texas, New York, California, Ohio, Michigan, nor any other state that will have a big impact on the national election.
Romney has money, but so did Phil Gramm. Gramm boasted of his campaign war chest, then won just one delegate. Romney has national organization and endorsements from more newspapers and members of Congress than any of his rivals, but those don’t make a candidate inevitable.
A great deal could still happen to upset the race. It’s extremely unlikely that Romney has any serious undiscovered skeletons in his closet, but he could make a huge gaffe. It’s happened before. But in fact he is looking inevitable, and there are good reasons for it.
Romney has money. Yes, we remember Phil Gramm, but Romney has been using his money to better effect, and money leverages a candidate’s other assets. Among those the most important is time. Rick Santorum spent much less per vote received in Iowa than Romney did, but he had to spend all his time there. Romney, on the other hand, was spending time in other states and building his poll numbers there, and unlike Santorum, he had the money to do it. He might have won as many votes in Iowa without spending the money, but at the cost of his gains elsewhere.
Money is a political force multiplier. All else equal, it confers an enormous advantage. Even inevitability.
Romney is bland. It’s been said over and over again that Romney won’t energize the GOP base. It’s become an article of faith that you can’t win an election without energizing the base. But the fact is, the base is at the party extremes. Better than energizing the base is being blandly attractive to the middle. Romney, unexciting as he is, is the safe dish to serve at your party, the cheesy potatoes that bore the food critics, but also don’t scare any guests away.
The coming election will be a referendum on President Obama. If Obama is doing well, the Republican nominee will lose. If he’s doing badly, the middle will jump ship, as long as they aren’t jumping to a scarier ship than they're on. Gingrich, Perry and Santorum, red-meat conservatives all, will never win that middle. A lot of Republicans know it, and if Republicans who want Obama out of the White House find Romney unexciting, that’s part of his appeal.
Gingrich, Santorum and Perry are arranged in a circular firing squad. Were two of the three out of the race, Romney might look a lot less inevitable. Gingrich has called on the two Ricks to drop out, telling South Carolina voters, “any vote for Santorum or Perry in effect is a vote to allow Romney to become the nominee. Because we’ve got to bring conservatives together in order to stop him.”
Gingrich is the black knight. Cut of his arms and legs, and he'll try to bite your knees. He’s convinced himself that only he can defeat Obama in the fall, because only he has the brains and experience to “design a national campaign” that will present him as an effective and “strategic” conservative alternative to Obama.
Santorum isn’t inclined to bow out, either. He’s argued that “everybody has a right to be in this race if they want to be in this race,” for as long as they have the money to go on. He and Perry both greeted Gingrich’s suggestion that they drop out with mild derision.
The presence of three men who are fighting for the conservative wing of the GOP has the same effect that eight or nine candidates had overall: It makes the entire field look small. It’s become the common wisdom that the GOP field was second-rate, but that’s not true. It contained and contains some very accomplished men and women, most with more substantial backgrounds than Obama brought to the 2008 campaign. Some had feet of clay as campaigners, but more than that, when you put eight people on a stage for a debate, they’ll look and sound less serious than just two.
One conservative against Romney would loom large. Three look and sound small. Perry might go away after South Carolina, but Gingrich and Santorum seem prepared to stay in it until they’re dragged out. They'll help Romney look presidential.
Ron Paul. Paul is the wild card here. He stands in starkest contrast to Romney. The other three blur the picture, and so it may be in Paul’s interest to see them go first, not Romney. As the campaign goes on, we can expect to see Paul’s fire turned against Romney, but for now he’s kept it leveled mostly at Gingrich and Santorum. (His campaign manager snidely remarked that Perry is only “marginally attached to the presidential race.”)
Paul is the only candidate who has the money and support to go the distance with Romney. Perry has been exposed as the weakest of the bunch, and Santorum hasn’t been able to build an organization anywhere near as impressive as Romney’s. The fiasco in Virginia exposed the organizations of Santorum, Perry and Gingrich all as inept.
The Paul campaign may not be a reason that Romney’s candidacy looks inevitable (his supporters will argue that his presence in the race is the one real firewall between Romney and the nomination), but it helps put the weaknesses of the other three in much sharper focus.
If the ultimate victory of Romney looks inevitable, we should all understand that it isn’t. He needs 1,144 delegates to tie up the nomination. He’s almost 1,140 shy of that. If Romney does lock it up, it will be well before he has that many delegates. If Newt and the two Ricks don’t reduce their numbers by two, and quickly, they won’t have any chance at all of stopping him. Even then, it will take a miracle.
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. An econometrician, he understands statistical inference, but he just can't understand calling a race on the basis of one percent of the vote. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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