TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore posts at the Washington Monthly today on “The General Election as a Continuing Primary,” which attributes a unique if dubious achievement to the GOP’s presidential nominee-apparent:

What we may be witnessing is a truly rare phenomenon: a general election where one party’s candidate is so manifestly without trust among key elements of his own “base” that they are demanding he continue to campaign as though the primaries are still going on….This is all about what conservative activists want because they did not get the assurances they wanted from their nominee during the primary season, in no small part thanks to their crappy field of candidates, and also, of course, as a reflection of Mitt’s richly earned reputation for lying.
So Romney is going to have to spend his time between now and election day not only trying to beat Barack Obama, but proving himself over and over again to “the base,” running a primary as well as a general election campaign. If I wasn’t so aware of how he’s put himself into this situation throughout a career of serial pandering to anyone he needed to fulfill his ambitions, I’d almost feel sorry for him.

Romney’s schitzy campaign looks increasingly unable to generate the needed level of enthusiasm in his “base.” And it looks like Dems have plenty of evidence to make the case to blue collar workers he is counting on that he is more likely to export their jobs than to protect their employment security. Hard to see an easy fix for either one of those problems, which is encouraging for Democrats, up and down ballot.