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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2012

Jobs-Elections Connection Coming Into Focus

Democrats have reason to be encouraged by this morning’s report that that the economy added 243,000 jobs in January and the overall unemployment rate has dropped to 8.3 percent. Of course the Administration should vigorously exercise its bragging rights concerning the monthly report, and especially the overall favorable employment trend of recent months.
For those who want a more nuanced understanding of what the latest employment numbers may mean for the 2012 elections, however, Nate Silver’s “Obama’s Magic Number? 150,000 Jobs Per Month” at his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog may be the most incisive data-driven analysis yet published on the relationship of employment to presidential politics. Silver takes a sobering look at the connection, and explains:

No economic indicator is the holy grail…And there are a number of non-economic variables pertinent to predicting presidential elections — wars, candidate quality and ideology, turnout, scandals and so forth…But if you want to focus a single economic indicator, job growth during the presidential election year — especially as measured by the series called nonfarm payrolls — has a lot going for it.
…Data related to the change in the level of employment have had among the highest correlations with electoral performance in the past. The correlations aren’t perfect by any means. But if you perform a true apples-to-apples comparison (that is, looking at the economic indicators alone rather than muddying them with other sorts of extraneous variables), they do at least as well as anything else in predicting elections, and slightly better than some other commonly used metrics.
Just as important, there are a lot of qualitative reasons to focus on the jobs numbers. They measure something tangible and important. They receive much attention from economists, investors, political campaigns and the news media, and therefore inform the public discussion. They are released every month after only a minimal lag. They are subject to revision, and the revisions can be significant, but they aren’t quite as bad as those for other economic series like G.D.P. or personal income growth. The jobs numbers are calculated in a comparatively straightforward way, and are usually in pretty good alignment with other economic measures. They don’t need to be adjusted for inflation.

Silver then taps some creative methodology to correlate the nonfarm payroll growth rate with the popular vote margin of defeat or victory for the incumbent party in 16 post WWII presidential elections, and he comes to some interesting conclusions, including:

Overall, the relationship between job growth and electoral performance is good but not great…Roughly speaking, there were 10 election years in which you could make a pretty good prediction about the election outcome from knowing the jobs numbers alone: 1948, 1960, and then the eight elections from 1980 onward…In six other elections, you would have needed to look beyond the jobs numbers to come to a good prediction about the outcome.

Citing some of the complicating factors that can cloud his data-driven analysis, such as Eisenhower’s charisma, the Watergate scandal and foreign policy debacles. Regarding a possible Obama-Romney race, Silver argues,

…If we knew nothing else about the election but how many jobs were created between January and October 2012, we would deem Mr. Obama to be a favorite if the economy created more than 107,000 jobs per month and an underdog otherwise. Basically, this would represent job creation at about the rate of population growth.

That’s good news for Obama. The “what have you done for me lately?” factor may signal even better news:

…The public has tended to give greater weight to recent job growth, discounting earlier performance when the trajectory seems positive…If you break it down in more detail, you’ll find that job growth during the third year of a president’s term has a positive effect on his re-election odds, while the coefficients attached to the first two years are negative.
But none of these results are statistically significant or particularly close to it; only job growth during the fourth year of a president’s term has a clear effect.

Silver then factors in presidential approval ratings into his calculations, which indicate:

Mr. Obama’s approval rating is now 46.5 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average…That isn’t terrible — it’s in the range where Mr. Obama might be able to eke out a victory in the Electoral College — but it’s somewhat below average. From 1948 through 2008, the average president had an approval rating of 52 percent as of Feb. 1 of the election year, according to the Roper Center archives.
If Mr. Obama has an approval rating of 52 percent by November, he will almost certainly win re-election. He’d also be a favorite if he’s at 50 percent. And 48 percent or 49 percent might also do the trick, since at that point Mr. Obama’s approval rating would likely exceed his disapproval rating.
But Mr. Obama is not quite there yet. The surest way for him to improve his approval rating will be to create jobs at a rate that exceeds the rate of population growth.
We can come up with an estimate of just how many jobs this might be if we put a president’s approval rating as of Feb. 1 and the payrolls numbers into a regression equation…I’ll spare you the math (although it is straightforward), but this works out to a break-even number of 166,000 jobs per month — not a huge number, but more than the 107,000 that we had estimated before accounting for Mr. Obama’s middling approval rating.
…If you run another version of the analysis that considers a president’s net approval rating, along with the rate of payroll growth net of population growth, you come up with a break-even number of 151,000 jobs per month.

The Wall St. Journal is predicting an average of 155K jobs being added per month in 2012, notes Silver. But he adds that forecasting track records are “frankly pretty mediocre.” Taking all of the factors into consideration, Silver ventures, ” If payrolls growth averages 175,000 per month, Mr. Obama will probably be a favorite, but not a prohibitive one. If it averages 125,000 per month, he will be a modest underdog.”
Silver’s numbers appear to be sound enough, and 150K jobs per month seems like a good guidepost. Rachel Weiner cautions at WaPo’s The Fix, however, that “No president in recent history has been reelected with unemployment above 8 percent, and analysts suggest it would take growth of between 167,000 and 260,000 jobs a month to get there by November.”
It would be interesting to see what Silver’s analysis could do scaled down to the state level, taking into consideration Geoffrey Skelley’s point at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “after all, presidents are elected in 51 individual battles (50 states plus Washington, D.C.).” It might be worthwhile to look at needed job growth and margins of victory in the half-dozen most volatile swing states. That could be helpful to Dems in terms of laser-targeting resources.


Marshall: Obstacle Course–Obama and the 2012 Electoral Landscape

Editor’s Note: As part of an ongoing effort to encourage broad discussion of 2012 election strategy, this item by Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall is crossposted from The Progressive Fix.
As the 2012 election gets underway, President Obama is still waiting to see who his opponent will be. Candidates and campaigns matter hugely, of course, but we should also pay attention to the field on which the match will be played–and at first glance, the lay of the political land doesn’t look so favorable to Obama and his party.
The lingering economic slump has demoralized voters and tilted the electorate rightward. With idle workers, underwater homeowners, exploding deficits and debts, growing inequality, and a bitter, broken political system, objective reality isn’t exactly working in incumbents’ favor. Upon closer inspection, however, the electoral landscape may not be as forbidding for progressives as it first appears.
For one thing, the recovery finally seems to be gaining momentum, complicating Republican attempts to cast Obama as a “failed president” who doesn’t have a clue about how the economy works. For another, Republicans are incumbents too, and their intransigence and obstructionism throughout 2011 will make many swing voters reluctant to entrust them with undivided control of the federal government. Finally, the fractious battle for the GOP nomination reveals a party at war with itself, while conservatives’ venomous attacks on Obama push Democrats toward unity.
But no matter whom the Republicans pick as their standard bearer, the tricky political terrain confronts Obama with three strategic imperatives: 1) roll up a big majority of moderate voters; 2) win back a good chunk of the independents who deserted his party in 2010; and 3) fashion a stronger economic message that combines jobs and fiscal responsibility.
Moderates Matter More Than Ever
Obama today faces an electorate that’s more conservative than the one that elected him in 2008. According to new polls by Gallup, 40 percent of the public identifies as conservative, while just 21 percent fess up to being liberals.
That’s up three points from 2008, and up significantly from the one-third share of the electorate that conservatives have averaged in polls going back three decades.
The recent uptick is most likely a reaction to an unusually severe economic downturn. The fact remains, however, that whereas there used to be 1.5 conservatives for every liberal in America, in 2012 the ratio is nearly 2-1. The new arithmetic doesn’t mean Democrats are doomed; it does mean they have to do exceptionally well among moderates to win.
That in fact is what Obama did in 2008, when he carried 60 percent of the moderate vote. But he’ll probably have to do even better this time to compensate both for the rise in self-identified conservatives and a likely falloff in support among his core 2008 constituencies: minorities, young voters, single women and highly educated professionals. Liberals consider themselves the Democratic “base,” but there just aren’t enough of them to deliver victory. In 2008, half of Obama’s vote came from moderates, while liberals accounted for 37 percent. Conversely, Republicans will need fewer moderates to build majorities because more voters now describe themselves as conservatives.
Of course, voters don’t define themselves exclusively by their political outlook, and things get more complicated for Republicans when we look at trends in partisan affiliation. Last year, according to Gallup, a record-high 40 percent of Americans described themselves as independents. In addition, more identified as Democrats (31 percent) than as Republicans (27 percent).
Does the much ballyhooed fact that independents are now the biggest “party” in America bode well for third-party challengers? Not necessarily. There may be more of them, but most independents continue to lean to one party or the other. As a group, they’ve grown more conservative in the last several years, and Gallup says more leaners incline today toward the Republicans than Democrats, resulting in an even, 45-45 partisan split. Genuinely unaffiliated voters make only about 10-15 percent of the electorate.


Political Strategy Notes

Romney’s gloatfest about his big Florida win has been gished by his latest gaffe. But the most interesting statistic of the election — the 14 percent decline in GOP primary turnout from ’08 — does not bode well for Republicans in the general election. Granted, there was a big property tax initiative on the ballot in ’08. But Janet Hook’s Wall St. Journal report, “Florida Turnout Falls Short of Hopes” notes that leading voter turnout experts believed it to be lower than expected nonetheless, all the more disappointing to the GOP because Florida is hosting the Republican national convention this summer.
Gov. Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s shameless corporate toady, signs the ‘right-to-work’ bill into law — the first rust belt state to do so. The great Hoosier, Eugene V. Debs, turns in his grave as workers begin protests.
But it looks like a ‘Stop the Insanity’ movement may be afoot among some other GOP governors, according to Michael Cooper’s New York Times article “Second Year In, Republican Governors Moderate Tone.” Well, maybe just a ‘Reduce the Cluelessness’ trend.
Jamie Stiehm’s “What’s a Republican Feminist To Do?” at the NYT ‘Campaign Stops’ blog explains the dilemma facing Republican women who don’t think women who have abortions should be criminalized. Stiehm doesn’t directly address whether some pro-choice Republican women will vote Democratic, but it’s clearly a possibility for those who strongly believe that women ought to have dominion over their own bodies. Her post also illuminates Romney’s flip-flops on the issue, in stark contrast to both of his parents. Stiehm’s best quote comes from Ted Kennedy in his victory over Romney in the ’94 Senate race: “I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice.”
Richard Cohen’s WaPo column “Republicans Have Only Themselves to Blame” provides a condensed catalog of GOP folly from the primary trail, along with some sharp zingers, among them “Yahoos stride the stage” and “The GOP is brain-dead.” As for the cause, Cohen explains: “The Republican establishment acts as if this season’s goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an act of God — a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but nitwits standing…For too long it has been mute in the face of a belligerent anti-intellectualism, pretending that knowledge and experience do not matter and that Washington is a condition and not a mere city.”
This should be Thursdays’ most unappealing event.
TDS’s James Vega did a worthy takedown of the recent WaPo article in the Fix, “Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.” Now Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Democratic Sens. Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid has a rebuttal, also in the Fix, featuring quotes placing the blame for polarization where it more plausibly belongs, including this gem by Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute: “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Josh Dzieza has a rogues’ gallery, “Who Gave $1 Million or More to Super PACs? A Daily Beast Roundup“.
Mindful that “after all, presidents are elected in 51 individual battles,” Geoffrey Skelley reviews the latest unemployment rates of the 50 states at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and discusses the possible implications. For example, “Nevada is a toss up state that…However, the terrible state of the Silver State’s economy — it has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12.6% — might be a drag on Obama…Then there are toss ups such as Virginia (6.2%) and Iowa (5.6%), which have jobless rates considerably lower than the national average. That could make these states more likely to support the status quo and vote for the incumbent. For the same reason, recent good news regarding the economies of many Rust Belt states could improve Obama’s reelection chances…Obama barely won North Carolina in 2008, and the state’s 9.9% unemployment rate helps explain why we believe, at the moment, the Republicans are slightly favored to take back the Tar Heel State in November. Conversely, New Mexico, a state with a large Hispanic population that has been trending more Democratic, has a fairly low unemployment rate, making it more likely to remain in the president’s column.”
At FiveThirtyEight.com John Sides sorts out the available data to address the question, “Did Romney’s Ad Advantage Help in Florida?” Lots of significant caveats here, but Sides concludes that “I would say there is suggestive evidence that Mr. Romney’s advantages in advertising helped him win in Florida – but it qualifies as circumstantial.”
Nate Berg reports at the Atlantic that “Increasing Density and Diversity Likely to Make Western States More Blue.” Berg notes that “much of this shift to the blue side of the spectrum is due to the heavy concentration of new growth in the urban areas of these six states and, not unrelated, their increasing minority populations…The Las Vegas metro area, for example, is now home to three out of four Nevadans. The state’s minority population also increased by about 11 percent between censuses, bringing the non-white population to nearly 45 percent. Two-thirds of Arizonans live in the Phoenix metro area. Arizona’s minority population also increased from 36.2 percent in 2000 to 42.2 percent in 2010. The Albuquerque metro area now houses about 44 percent of New Mexicans. Nearly 40 percent of all Idahoans live in the Boise metro area.”
Don’t miss this moving photo tribute to Obama’s leadership


TDS Strategy Memo: After the primaries Democrats will be on receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Dems must anticipate this onslaught and begin now to plan how best to respond.

The Republican primary campaign has provided a foretaste of the bitter and divisive super-PAC driven media tactics that will be used against Obama in the fall. The fundamental and inescapable fact is that Democrats will be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Democrats must begin planning now how they will respond.
The attack will be three pronged:
First, there will be a “high road” attack directly sponsored by the Republican presidential candidate – now almost certainly Romney – and the RNC. It will be based on sanctimoniously accusing Obama of having “failed” — that he has not fulfilled his campaign promises and that his policies have proved ineffective. The media has already reported on this planned campaign and how it will reduce the need for Romney to attack Obama personally by using Obama’s own words against him.
This part of the three-pronged approach does not represent any major departure from the practices of past campaigns. Where it will significantly differ is in the use of bogus “facts” and statistics on a scale that would have been previously unacceptable. Years ago statements such as “the stimulus did not create any jobs” and “unemployment has risen under Obama” would have been dismissed as simply false by the media as soon as “mainstream” economists objected. In the modern “post-truth” Fox News world, on the other hand, even the most unambiguously false charges will be described as “debatable” rather than nonsense.
The second prong of the strategy will be a feverish invocation of the culture war narrative — one that will far excel Sarah Palin’s sneering and divisive “we’re the real, the good America; they are the degenerate coastal elites” framework that she used in the 2008 campaign.
The ads – which will come from Super-PAC’s more than official sources — will be ugly and distasteful: they will portray Obama as deeply “un-American” – foreign and alien to the heartland values and daily life of the “real” America. Romney and the Republicans have already made this the centerpiece of their “hardball” attack. Obama “goes around the world apologizing for America.” “He wants to turn America into France.” “He is a socialist who hates free enterprise.” The third-party ads will repeat these same accusations but with an overt appeal to prejudices that will be more accurately described as xenophobic rather than racial. The ads will identify Obama not with ghetto hoodlums or Black Panthers but rather with foreign ideas and ethnicities — “commies”, “America-hating Muslims” and “illegal aliens and foreigners,” all of whom support his goal of undermining America.
The most important and destructive change in 2012, however, will be in the vastly expanded dissemination of a third, flagrantly dishonest and utterly propagandistic “low road” attack – one that will be conducted both above and below the radar.
In 2008 the low road attack on Obama was conducted largely outside the official candidate and Republican party media or the major PAC’-s (one clumsy ad by the McCain campaign that attempted to make a “dog-whistle” suggestion that Obama was the anti-Christ was a notable exception). Most of the 2008 low road attacks circulated under the radar – through distribution to informal e-mail lists and comment threads, through micro-targeted direct mail, through robo-calls and through phone banks run by shadowy outside firms. Within these closed communication channels the claims were widely circulated that Obama was a secret Muslim, a radical/communist, a sympathizer with domestic terrorist bombers, and that he was behind a range of “Birtherist” and other conspiracies. Media Matters for America made pioneering attempt to map these “below the radar” attacks during the 2008 campaign and to outline how they were circulated and amplified within the various conservative communication networks, but the study was discontinued after the elections.
Observers were at first uncertain how important these sub-rosa attacks would be in the 2008 election but the absolutely pivotal role they played became very clear as the passion and enthusiasm of the Republican base became largely driven by these “disreputable” views rather than the more policy-based attack made by McCain himself. The real energy of the Republican base in 2008 was reflected in the almost fanatical Sarah Palin supporters whose enthusiasm vastly exceeded any support for McCain himself and whose signs and shouted slogans reflected the “disreputable” rumor-based views rather than opposition to Obama’s actual platform or priorities.
(The influence of the rumor-based attacks reached a dramatic climax when McCain – in the most honorable single action of his campaign – explicitly rejected the claim of a woman who asked why he didn’t tell voters “the truth” – that Obama was a Muslim terrorist and a traitor during one rally in September. McCain tried to reason with the woman, arguing that Obama was not a terrorist but simply an American with whom he disagreed but the crowd howled its fierce disapproval of his conciliatory remarks.)
Democrats should not assume that Romney will behave as honorably in 2012 as did McCain in 2008. While Romney will hold himself personally aloof, there is little or no chance that he will explicitly disavow the massive low road campaign that will be launched on his behalf.
In 2012 this low road attack – which will once again circulate in large part “under the radar” by e-mail, phone, mail and social media –will have three key characteristics:


Time to Factor Out Newt from Dem Strategy?

The GOP presidential primary season’s surprises notwithstanding, Romney’s Florida win makes a compelling case that Newt is basically done. Ed Kilgore’s persuasive analysis below leaves little room for Gingrich’s resurgence and makes it clear that he has two shots, long and none.
It would take a spectacular Romney gaffe to put Gingrich back in serious play, and yes, he’s had a couple of dillies. Romney is a twitchy candidate, prone to excessive jabber. No doubt his smarter handlers will cut back on live interviews as much as possible going forward. But for gaffe potential, he will never match Gingrich. Santorum has to be thinking they could both tank in a mutual gaffe frenzy.
In addition to Kilgore’s points, I would add that Newt’s gender gap vs. Romney — 24 points in the largest of swing states, ices Romney’s cake. Has there ever been a larger gender gap in a mega-state presidential primary? And it’s not like Romney has anything to offer women in terms of policy. It’s about how many women perceive Newt’s character, or rather lack of it.
Under normal circumstances, a candidate with Gingrich’s vote totals in SC and FL would be considered a leading contender in the veepstakes, at least. But team Romney could not be blamed for thinking that would be a little like putting Caligula on the ticket, or a very loose canon on deck. Certainly it would be doubling down on gaffe potential. File that one under ‘not gonna happen.’
Democrats can’t be blamed for cherishing the lurid fantasy of a Gingrich nomination, with it’s potential for lengthening Obama’s coattails far beyond what Romney’s nomination could do. In terms of planning the Obama campaign ahead, however, it looks like time to bet all resources on a contest with Romney, who will be hard enough to beat without distractions, as William Galston has argued.
Yes, Dems should keep rooting for Newt’s success in the primaries and caucuses ahead on grounds that he will further divide the GOP and taint the entire party with escalating nastiness. But Democratic time, energy and money should now be invested in preparing to beat Romney, Dems’ central challenge for 2012.


The Zombie Candidate: What Newt’s Campaign Looks Like Going Forward

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
After last night’s bitter defeat, Newt Gingrich is vowing to stay in the presidential race for a long, long time (“six to eight months” he said in Florida yesterday). Of course, that’s what candidates usually say just before and immediately after bitter defeats (see Jon Huntsman’s “Ticket to Ride” sound bite after finishing a poor third in New Hampshire), even if they have every intention of cutting a deal with a better-positioned candidate and getting off the campaign trail. But Newt may actually mean it, particularly if his sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, who is largely financing his largely Super-PAC-based campaign, continues to write checks. Gingrich is reportedly very angry about the negative ads Team Romney used to bury him once in Iowa and bury him again in Florida, and he is unpredictable. Newt may well choose to hang around for a while yet as a zombie candidate. But his vows to take his campaign “all the way to the convention” are nothing more than bluster. Newt has no realistic chance of winning the nomination, and he almost certainly knows it.
Those looking for more optimistic historical precedents won’t have a lot to go on. Since 1972 (when the current nomination system came into place), there has been exactly one occasion when the delegate selection season ended with no clear nominee–the GOP contest in 1976, which pitted an unelected incumbent president against the universally acknowledged leader of the conservative movement. There has been one other occasion when the nomination was in some doubt going into the final stages of the primary season: the Democratic contest of 2008, when two historic campaigns slugged it out on relatively even terms for months, with a raft of uncommitted superdelegates having the theoretical opportunity to decide the contest. There have also been two instances–the Democratic contests of 1980 and 1984–when a late run of victories by a candidate on the brink of elimination has created some suspense. And there has been one other–the odd pincers campaign by Frank Church and Jerry Brown against Jimmy Carter in 1976–where “late entry” candidates made a splash.
But if Newt Gingrich were to stay in the race, he’d be following a different sort of precedent: candidates with no real shot at the nomination who have hung around anyway, because they represented distinct party constituencies (like Jesse Jackson in 1988) or because they hoped to benefit from a consolidation of “buyer’s remorse” voters after it was all decided (such as Jerry Brown in 1992, and, for a while, George H.W. Bush in 1980) to boost their status as Big Dogs. As was amply demonstrated by the attacks on Gingrich from conservative opinion-leaders after his win in South Carolina, he is not the universally acknowledged leader of an important ideological faction like Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980. He also has none of the vast financial resources of a Reagan or a Kennedy, and given his consistently poor general election poll standings (especially as compared to Romney) he cannot make the kind of electability argument that supported Bush in 1980 or Hart in 1984.
And when you look at the actual timetable of this year’s nominating contest, it doesn’t give Newt a lot of natural advantages. In the February contests, he faces Romney in his home state of Michigan and Mormon-heavy Nevada, along with resource-intensive caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota–contests where Ron Paul is sure to split the anti-Romney protest vote. He’s not even on the ballot in Missouri. His best shot is the Arizona primary, and that’s an uphill battle. It’s also not clear when (or if) Rick Santorum, who will take most of his votes from the pool otherwise available to Newt, will drop out.
His odds on March 6, Super Tuesday, are no better. Gingrich must win Georgia (particularly after his endorsement by fellow-Georgian Herman Cain), is not on the ballot in Virginia, can’t win in Massachusetts, and again has to deal with an assortment of expensive caucuses scattered around the country. If he survives all that, he must then navigate another series of probably-hostile caucuses before arriving at the cash-sucking oasis of Texas on April 3. Then comes April 24, when a battery of northeastern primaries (including delegate-rich New York and Pennsylvania) looks impossible. Remember, too, that the ban on winner-take-all primaries ends on April 1, which will help the front-runner bank big delegate totals.
Throughout this horrible gauntlet, Gingrich will be exposed to increasingly intense pressure from party leaders to get out of the race–or at a minimum, to play nice–even as Romney does what he likes. Mitt will probably begin skipping the candidate debates that have been the main source of oxygen for Newt’s campaign. And in general, the media coverage–even hostile media coverage–Gingrich craves would largely dry up.
Gingrich has very few reasons to stay in, and lot of reasons not to. He has always been the kind of political showman who is capable of expressing anger strategically, and then cheerfully talking with the objects of his bile. And he has already executed two miraculous returns-from-the-grave this cycle, so it’s not as though a departure at this stage would label him a hopeless loser. The strongest obstacle to a marathon might have to do with his personal bottom line: The more Gingrich’s chance at victory approaches a mathematical impossibility, the more he will sacrifice the future affection of rank-and-file Republicans–the same people he expects to buy the books and videos, and attend the lectures, on which he depends to afford Mediterranean cruises and Tiffany’s.
So yes, Newt can stay in for a good long while, and burnish his reputation as an unconquerable pain in the ass. But barring yet another strange twist, persistence is likely to earn him little other than enduring opprobrium from party elites. Sure, he’d have the pleasure of competing pointlessly with Ron Paul to trade last-ditch delegates for some early evening convention speaking slot where no one other than hard-core CSPAN viewers will even know he was there. But that’s about all. Newt may have a “ticket to ride” to the convention, but it definitely won’t be in first-class. Even Sheldon Adelson can’t afford to buy him that.