As part of my occasional series of posts alerting TDS readers to items I’ve written for the Washington Monthly that are strategic in nature, here’s a couple from today:
* Press coverage of key campaign staff as godlike figures is a sure sign a campaign has locked down a party nomination. That’s happening with Mitt Romney, as evidenced by a revealing account of reporters cozying up to Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades, who is getting the Keyser Soze treatment.
* Nate Silver conducts an impressive demolition of the credibility of “economic fundamentalists” whose election forecasts have gone awry. It raises a broader question about the very different assumptions that journalists and analysts bring to the table in discussing elections.
Ed Kilgore
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are three ways to look at the GOP nominating contest now that Mitt Romney has won Illinois. The first is summarized by Alex Massie in a headline earlier today: “Illinois Votes; Mitt Romney Wins; Race Still Over.” A second is to insist that, while Romney is on track to win the nomination, it’s unwise to assume anything until he has mathematically won a majority of delegates. I’d adopt the third approach, which is to look at the road ahead and assess whether there is a plausible–not just possible, but plausible–way for Romney to lose the nomination.
And looking at the calendar and the resources available to Romney and Santorum, it’s just irrational to deny Romney’s got this wrapped up. It comes down to the delegate math: Despite his various missteps, Romney has been steadily winning a majority of the delegates awarded. According to CNN’s reasonable count, Romney went into Illinois with 521 delegates, out of the 966 awarded. Romney needs 1,144 delegates–an absolute majority of those who will vote at the Convention in late August–to decisively clinch the nomination.
And the upcoming contests don’t give Santorum a chance to catch up, or to prevent Romney from reaching the magic number. Last week, the wizards at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball looked at the contests pending through the end of April: Their “guesstimate” of the most likely delegate split in this series was Romney 268, Santorum 117–and this was conceding Louisiana and Pennsylvania wins to Santorum. Looking at the other states–D.C., Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New York, and Rhode Island)–it’s hard to think of a scenario where Santorum could win significantly more than the lopsided minority Sabato suggests. Taking that into account, April could put Romney so close to the magic number of 1,144 delegates that the rest of the race would be a formality.
Sure, if Santorum somehow survives the April primaries, May looks like an oasis, with primaries in the theoretically Santo-friendly states of North Carolina, West Virginia, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Kentucky (along with less-friendly Oregon), leading up to May 29 in Texas. But all these states award delegates proportionately, which means that even a near-sweep by Santorum would do little more than reduce Romney’s lead. They wouldn’t come close to allowing Santorum to catch up.
June is dramatically less friendly to Santorum, with New Jersey and Utah–two states that Romney has in the bag, and which will award a total of 90 delegates on a statewide winner-take-all basis–along with California, where 172 delegates are up for grabs in a winner-take-all-by-congressional-district system that will likely give Mitt another plurality of close to 100 delegates.
When you add it up, as Nate Silver did earlier this month, even the best-case scenario for Rick Santorum would leave him trailing Romney by 300 delegates; Mitt would be on the brink of an absolute majority, and unpledged delegates would then be able to push him over the top.
And all these calculations assume Santorum keeps winning the kind of voters he’s won up until now at the same levels–an extremely generous assumption, given the usual tendency of voters tired of the contest to consolidate behind the front-runner. They also assume that Santorum won’t stumble in the March and April states of Louisiana and Pennsylvania; a loss in the latter, his home state, could formally end the contest very fast.
Facing this inevitable outcome, Santorum could swing for the fences with an abrasive negative campaign that galvanizes conservative misgivings about Romney. Heading into Illinois, there were already signs he was willing to do that, accusing Romney of “destroying manufacturing” as governor of Massachusetts, and of “having no core” personally. Most ominously, Santorum’s campaign may have decided to revive Newt Gingrich’s earlier attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital. But just as conservative opinion-leaders combined to help Romney crush Gingrich in Florida after Newt dared to use Democratic talking-points, they’d almost certainly abandon Santorum if he went there. And more important, the math still wouldn’t be on Santorum’s side.
Of course, conservative Romney-haters won’t give up fantasies of some convention revolt against Romney, or of a misstep terrible enough to make voters and party insiders stampede away from him. But now, after Illinois, it’s extremely difficult to doubt that–to quote the old country song–it’s all over but the crying.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As Mitt Romney struggles, yet again, to nail down the Republican presidential nomination, a question keeps presenting itself: Is Romney’s team incompetent? The question was asked very directly by The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball last week, and the bulk of GOP operatives she consulted were extremely critical of Romney’s brain trust, throwing around words like “clumsy,” “oblivious,” and the damning-with-faint-praise “technically proficient.” A lot of the criticism of Romney, in Ball’s account and elsewhere, involves his chronic inability to rally “movement conservative” leaders into his camp, which might have denied a whole series of opponents the oxygen they needed. But is Romney’s campaign really to blame for this situation? I would argue that it is not.
To understand why, consider just how much the climate in the GOP shifted between 2008 and 2012. It’s easy to forget that the “movement candidate” in 2008 was none other than Mitt Romney himself. He was endorsed by the editors of National Review; by Senator Jim DeMint; by Bill Bennett; by the late Paul Weyrich; and by Glenn Beck and Herman Cain. Romney was even endorsed by Rick Santorum, as has been frequently noted this year. Aside from outright endorsements, Romney also benefitted from the tactical support of Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth, and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page–particularly in his struggle to marginalize Mike Huckabee, the evangelical Christian candidate with an unorthodox economic message.
This wasn’t because Romney espoused more conservative positions back then, or because his heresies were less known. All the aspects of Romney’s background that have supposedly made it so difficult for hardcore conservatives to accept him in this cycle–the flip-flopping on cultural issues, the country-club persona, the moderate record in Massachusetts–were entirely apparent in 2008. No, the reason Romney fell out of favor with many movement conservatives is simply that they have become a lot more right-wing–and a lot more demanding–over the past four years.
For the most part, Romney didn’t do a bad job of keeping up with the rightward lurch in his party. He embraced the Cut, Cap, and Balance budget plan, a more thoroughgoing commitment to high-end tax cuts and entitlement reform, an aggressively saber-rattling foreign policy, and, of course, the wrathful language toward Democrats that now makes John McCain’s occasional gestures toward bipartisanship and civility seem very quaint. But some of the shifts in the conservative landscape over the last four years would have been impossible for Romney to adjust to no matter how clever or smart he and his strategists were. Who would have guessed that Romney’s white-shoe corporate background would become something of a liability? Just four years ago, Mike Huckabee drew the concerted wrath of conservatives for suggesting that the laissez-faire economic policies of the Bush administration were producing less than ideal results from the perspective of middle-class Americans. Now, with conservatives suddenly suspicious of Wall Street, it’s Romney who is suffering for his image as a predatory capitalist, most notably at the hands of Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. What could he have possibly done about that, particularly since his business background was the heart of the otherwise empty claim that he was the candidate best equipped to heal a stricken economy?
The periodic threat to Romney’s nomination posed by Gingrich probably best exemplifies the radically different 2012 environment. Many of Mitt’s critics look at the field he has faced and think his struggles to overcome it are a sign of his weakness. As Jonathan Martin brutally put it in Politico last week:
[T]he establishment favorite needs to explain why, two-and-a-half months into the primary season, he can’t seem to put away underfunded rivals who are viewed by many in the party as general election disasters.
But turn that around: What does it say about the climate of opinion in the GOP this year that has-beens like Gingrich and Santorum, nobodies like Cain, and extremist figures like Bachmann and Paul have been able to mount serious challenges for the nomination? The one non-Romney candidate who would not have been laughed off the stage in 2008, Tim Pawlenty, was the first to be discarded. And 2000’s movement-conservative candidate, George W. Bush, is now routinely denounced as a betrayer of conservative principles, whose primary domestic policy initiatives have become anathema. The fact that Romney has managed to inch toward the nomination at a time when the dominant mood in the GOP is so partial to right-wing populism and extremism is arguably quite an achievement.
Sure, Team Mitt has made strategic mistakes, most notably the negligence that enabled Rick Santorum to re-emerge as a serious candidate after Romney’s decisive wins in Florida and Nevada. But there really isn’t much of a blueprint for a candidate in Romney’s position–unless you go all the way back to 1964, when a similar radicalization of the GOP occurred and conventional Republicans were similarly thrown off-balance. And if Mitt Romney wins the nomination in a year when his party seems to long for another Barry Goldwater, the last thing his campaign should be accused of is incompetence.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on March 15, 2012.
Jamelle Bouie has an important article, “The Other Glass Ceiling” up at The American Prospect addressing the dearth of African American elected officials in the age of Obama. Indeed, conservative advocates of eliminating section 5 of the Voting Rights Act often argue that it is unnecessary, since having an African American President shows that discrimination in voting laws are largely a thing of the past. As Bouie points out, however, Black Americans are still very much under-represented in our major political institutions:
…Since the momentous 2008 election, there has been no great flowering of black political life, no renaissance in black political leadership. In a year when the first black president is running for re-election, the only African American bidding for a top statewide office is Maryland state Senator C. Anthony Muse, who is challenging Ben Cardin–a well-liked incumbent–in a hopeless race for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. At most, by the end of 2012, two of the nation’s 150 governors and senators will be African American.
…If the number of officeholders was in line with African Americans’ share of the population–12.2 percent–there would be at least 12 African American senators and six governors. By contrast, the percentage of African Americans in the House of Representatives is nearly consistent with their share of the population–42 members, or almost 10 percent.
Bouie goes on to discuss plausible demographic and financial reasons for the shortage of Black candidates for these offices, as well as failed efforts by promising candidates, like Harvey Gantt’s bid for U.S. Senate in NC. He notes also the ugly racial stereotypes promoted in GOP ad campaigns designed to gin up irrational fears among white voters, such as GOP political consultant Alex Castellanos’s infamous “hands” ad, which helped Jesse Helms defeat Gantt.
Bouie stops short of exploring possible solutions, no doubt because there are not a lot of viable options available at the moment. Democrats, of course have done much better than Republicans in electing African Americans and other people of color, as well as women, to office. But there is no question that Dems have also failed to make much of an effort to achieve anything resembling proportional representation in terms of race and gender.
One thing that is needed is an active policy driven by a conscious commitment on the part of the national and state Democratic Parties to recruit, train and fund more African American, Latino and Women candidates. Some state Democratic parties do better than others, but there is enormous room for improvement everywhere.
Perhaps a special effort to recruit potential African American, Latino and women leaders from the ranks of organized labor and business would yield more viable state-wide candidates. But there has to be a real commitment to providing them with the needed financial and training resources.
One thing remains clear: The dearth of people of color and women candidates is an embarrassment to a party which bills itself as the hope of a more progressive society. All of the legitimate demographic and financial obstacles notwithstanding, Democrats must more forcefully address this issue at the national and state levels. In doing so, we just might find a pivotal asset in the struggle for a more permanent progressive majority.
The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo, where it was originally published on March 6, 2012.
Eight months before the fall elections, Republican strategists are in a dour mood.
The economy has begun to gain traction.
Their leading candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is universally viewed as an uninspiring poster child for the one percent, with no core values anyone can point to except his own desire to be elected.
Every time Romney tries to “identify” with ordinary people he says something entirely inappropriate about his wife’s “two Cadillacs,” how much he likes to fire people who provide him services, or how he is a buddy with the people who own NASCAR teams rather than the people who watch them.
The polls show that the more people learn about Romney, the less they like him.
The Republican primary road show doesn’t appear to be coming to a close any time soon.
Together, Bob Kerrey’s announcement that he will get into the Senate contest in Nebraska and the news that Olympia Snowe is retiring from the Senate in Maine, massively increase Democratic odds of holding onto the control of the Senate.
The Congress is viewed positively by fewer voters than at any time in modern history — and two-thirds think the Republicans are completely in charge.
Worse yet, the polling in most presidential battleground states currently gives President Obama leads over Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.
The one thing Republican political pros are cheering right now is the rapidly increasing price of gas at the pump and the underlying cost of oil.
The conventional wisdom holds that if gas prices increase, it will inevitably chip away at support for President Obama — and there is a good case to be made. After all, increased gas prices could siphon billions out of the pockets of consumers that they would otherwise spend on the goods and services that could help continue the economic recovery — which is critical to the president’s re-election.
But Republicans shouldn’t be so quick to lick their chops at the prospect of rising gas prices.
Here’s why:
1). What you see, everybody sees. The sight of Republicans rooting against America and hoping that rising gas prices will derail the economic recovery is not pretty.
The fact is that Republicans have done everything in their power to block President Obama’s job-creating proposals in Congress, and they were dragged kicking and screaming to support the extension of the president’s payroll tax holiday that was critical to continuing economic momentum.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell actually announced that his caucus’ number one priority this term was the defeat of President Obama. The sight of Republicans salivating at the prospect of $4-plus per gallon gasoline will not sit well with ordinary voters.
2). Democrats have shown that they are more than willing to make the case about who is actually responsible for rising gas prices — and the culprits’ footprints lead right back to the GOP’s front door.
Who is really to blame for higher gas prices?
The big oil companies that are doing everything they can to keep oil scarce and the price high;
Speculators that drive up the price in the short run;
Foreign conflicts, dictators and cartels — that have been important in driving up prices particularly in the last two months;
The Republicans who prevent the development of the clean, domestic sources of energy that are necessary to allow America to free itself from the stranglehold of foreign oil — all in order to benefit speculators and oil companies.
The fact is that the world will inevitably experience increasing oil prices over the long run because this finite, non-renewable resource is getting scarcer and scarcer at the same time that demand for energy from the emerging economies like China and India is sky rocketing.
Every voter with a modicum of experience in real-world economics gets that central economic fact.
That would make Republican opposition to the development of renewable energy sources bad enough. But over the last few months the factor chiefly responsible for short-term oil price hikes have been the Arab Spring and Israel’s growing tensions with Iran — all of which are well beyond direct American control.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on February 27, 2012.
Juan Cole blogs today on the uproar over the burning of old copies of the Qur’an at the US military at Bagram Base in Afghanistan, which has already claimed the lives of U.S. serivice men, as well as Afghanis. The tragedy is made more horrific by demagoguery on both sides amplifying animosity in Afghanistan and the U.S.
We can’t control bigotry in other nations. But when it is practiced by Americans, it should be called out, as Cole does:
Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum have slammed Obama for apologizing. Santorum called the gesture weak. (This stance is sheer hypocrisy from someone who has complained that Obama is ‘waging war on religion’ !)
No one should be surprised by the reaction of Muslims in Afganistan and other Arab nations, nor that their protests would escalate into violent protests. It’s right to condemn those violent protests, but it’s also important to understand its causes, in this case the perception of Muslims that their sacred scriptures have been disrespected by an occupying military force from half-way around the world.
There is no question in my mind that President Obama did the right thing in apologizing for the Qur’an burnings. A cornerstone of American values must always be respect for all religions — that’s the American way of our best ideals. Not apologizing for the burnings would the equivalent of insulting millions of people who belong to one of the world’s most widely-practiced faiths. It would also exacerbate animosity towards American troops in Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere.
The President did the right thing. But the most important lesson for the Obama administration would be that the longer we occupy Afghanistan, the greater the chances for such incidents to occur.
Meanwhile, Santorum, Gingrich and their Republican echo chamber enablers are playing a risky game for political advantage, and one which has the potential for endangering American troops. They should be held accountable by the media and the electorate.
There are a couple of pieces up at the Washington Monthly that should be of interest to TDS readers who wrestle with how to respond to conservative calumny without losing one’s own balance.
First is my post on the suggestion that Democrats should just ignore “big lies” like the persistent belief the president is not who he says he is. Here’s an excerpt:
[A]t some point, you simply have to start challenging the lies, and trying to establish some common basis of facts on which liberals and conservatives can compete with their different opinions of what to do about those facts. If you don’t, then the lies become “opinions” and the lie-based “opinions” become facts (e.g., the non-existence of climate change) for vast numbers of people, and before you know it, you are having to argue with people over things like the religion of the president of the United States or his place of birth.
And then there is Paul Glastris’ dissection of a Richard Cohen column that appears initially to be about the pernicious influence of Sarah Palin, but then manages in the end to invent a whole new species of false equivalence by arguing that Democrats will eventually invent their own Palin.
Check these out for your own psychological well-being!
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The conventional wisdom as polls opened in Alabama and Mississippi was that Santorum would likely be the big loser by failing to beat Romney or snuff Gingrich. That scenario made sense: Santorum was not only flagging in the polls, but had a decided financial disadvantage in these two states. (His super PAC trailed Team Romney in media buys by a seven-to-one ratio in Alabama and a five-to-one margin in Mississippi; it also had fewer ads than Gingrich ‘s super PAC). But now Gingrich is toast, whether he immediately accepts it or not, and Romney has failed to seal the deal. It seems the long-awaited two-candidate race has finally arrived.
To be sure, Romney has probably won a majority of the night’s delegates (thanks to proportional systems in Alabama and Mississippi, and likely victories in the late-night caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa). But as on Super Tuesday, Mitt’s big problem was his failure to meet rising expectations. He managed to finish third in both Mississippi and Alabama, despite his advantages in money and endorsements–and his apparent momentum (leading several late polls in both states, and appearing to win Mississippi even tonight in early exit polls).
Romney’s night isn’t quite so discouraging if you look at demographics. Romney did relatively well among evangelical voters (who made up 80 percent of Mississippi voters and 74 percent of Alabama’s), and very well in terms of voters’ estimates of his superior electability (50 percent in Alabama and 49 percent in Mississippi said he was most likely to beat Obama). As in virtually every state so far, Mitt won in urban-suburban strongholds, carrying Jackson, Gulfport, and Biloxi in Mississippi and Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile in Alabama.
But Santorum outpaced both his rivals in rural parts of these states, carrying the pineywoods regions of North Alabama and Mississippi, while Gingrich did relatively well, as expected, in rural black belt counties–just not well enough. And Santorum very narrowly led Newt among “very conservative” and evangelical voters in both states, which helped put him over the top. In a distant fourth place, Ron Paul performed in the single digits in both states.
All in all, the results were within a few percentage points of virtually every projection. But the variations–giving Santorum two wins where he wasn’t supposed to excel, Gingrich two losses in his “base,” and Romney a pair of third-place finishes–provided a big feast for spinmeisters, particularly those hungering and thirsting for an extended contest.
The path ahead includes caucuses in Missouri next Saturday, where Santorum built high expectations with his virtually unopposed win in a non-binding “beauty contest” primary on Feb. 7, and in Puerto Rico on Sunday, where Romney should clean up. But the big high-publicity contest will be next Tuesday in the Illinois primary, where the argument that Romney is weak in Midwestern “Rust Belt” states will be put to one more test. If he survives until then, Louisiana on March 24 could provide Santorum with another belt of Southern comfort.
But the parallel battle, which has been raging since Romney’s victories in Florida and Nevada back in January (if not earlier), will be among Republican elites. By this point, GOP opinion leaders are either frantic to bring the contest to a close to let the “inevitable” and “electable” Romney marshal resources for November–or want to give Santorum one last chance to prove that the palpable anti-Romney sentiment of conservative activists can lift him to an unlikely nomination or convention bid.
Romney has now lost four opportunities (after wins in New Hampshire, Florida/Nevada, Michigan, and Ohio) to nail down the nomination, a record that should at some point begin to make his elite backers really take stock of his attractiveness as a candidate. And, having won the long-standing contest to become the “conservative alternative to Romney,” Santorum has his own decision to make: whether to double down on his culture-war-heavy, ideological true-believer message or begin trying to convince elites he can actually beat Obama.
I’m back with another brief review of some of the better stuff I’ve published at the Washington Monthly, this time on the broader context for understanding the Super Tuesday Republican presidential primary results.
Frankly, I thought Mitt Romney was a bit of a victim of the expectations game going into Super Tuesday–and perhaps even of the fact that a lot of “analysis” was written early on the evening of February 6 when Santorum was leading in Ohio and nobody had a clue who was going to win caucuses in ND and AK (Romney did):
[T]he bottom line is that Romney won Super Tuesday but seems to be losing the spin wars over its meaning. And for a candidate whose elite opinion-leader backing remains perhaps his most important asset other than cash, that matters.
There was also some questionable analysis of why the deal went down as it did. For the second week in a row, all sorts of pundits seemed surprised to learn that Rick Santorum had “lost” the Catholic vote in OH, and some wondered if recent publicity over his negative remarks about John F. Kennedy might be a factor. This was my reply:
[I]t’s worth saying again: in every state where there has been entry or exit polling, Santorum has “lost” the Catholic vote from the very beginning, and in fact, has performed more poorly among Catholics than among Protestants. The JFK thing may not have helped, but it was happening well before that.
In those same states, moreover, Mitt Romney has finished first among Catholics everywhere other than in SC, where Gingrich edged him out (in GA, for example, where Newt won big overall, Mitt beat him among Catholics 38/34, with Santorum taking 21%. Meanwhile, Newt won half the Protestant vote, with Santorum edging Mitt in that category).
Santorum’s voting base is white evangelical Protestants, a category that happens to overlap signicantly with three other demographics where he does well: “very conservative” voters, Tea Party supporters, and voters from rural and exurban areas. Romney does best among moderate and “somewhat conservative” voters, and urban/suburban voters, and best we can tell, Catholics voting in Republican primaries tend to be more urban and relatively moderate ideologically.
I’ve already crossposted my TNR column on another strange meme coming out of Super Tuesday–that Mitt Romney had to perform better in the South to win the nomination and/or win the general election.
I agree with Ruy Teixeira and many others that the current situation in the GOP is a great boon to Obama and to Democrats. But Obama still has a series of complex strategic challenges, particulary in terms of messaging. In a discussion of Paul Glastris’ new cover article in the Monthly, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama,” I had this observation:
First, while the President must of course explain and defend his record, too much dwelling on past accomplishments as opposed to future plans can reinforce the Republican strategy of making the 2012 elections a referendum not only on the president’s record, but on general perceptions of life during the last four years. Indeed, given the emptiness (on some subjects) and radicalism (on others) of the GOP agenda, you can be sure Mitt Romney will lift heaven and earth to keep the focus on the incumbent. If the president runs an entirely positive (as opposed to comparative) campaign, he could help the opposition turn the election into a de facto referendum and lose the opportunity to quite legitimately demand a choice between the two candidates’ visions and agendas for the future.
Second, while reminding Americans of the conditions he inherited from his Republican predecessor is always in order (and necessary, in fact, to any comparative effort to ask whether a return to Bush’s policies or a more conservative version of them is what voters really want), too much talk about that will sound defensive, backward looking, and when it comes to the details of the financial crisis, confusing.
It will require an unusually deft touch for Obama to simultaneously defend himself from attacks, explain his accomplishments (and their context), offer a forward-looking agenda, and also keep the focus on GOP radicalism. But that’s what he needs to do unless he just wants to hope that improving conditions in the country and Republican mistakes grant him re-election by default.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
After just barely pulling out a win in Ohio, Mitt Romney has “won Super Tuesday” by most media accounts. But even with his successes (wins in Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Idaho, and a decent shot in Alaska), you’ll likely hear some people echo a recent claim by Newt Gingrich: that Romney can’t be confident of the nomination if he can’t win anywhere in the South.
This concern didn’t suddenly present itself: Mitt’s first real stumble in the race, of course, was in South Carolina, where he got righteously stomped by Newt. While he recovered nicely in Florida, he ran no better than even with Gingrich in those northern and northwestern Florida counties considered the authentically Southern parts of that very diverse state. And Romney continued to show Southern discomfort last night, losing Georgia to Gingrich and Tennessee to Santorum (who also won quasi-Southern Okahoma). Yes, Romney won Virginia, but Gingrich and Santorum weren’t even on the ballot there. Can Mitt win while losing every other Southern primary from here on out? The answer is that yes, he can–though perpetual weakness in any one region does theoretically reduce his margin of error.
Figuring out if he is indeed weak in this region, and how much it matters, gets into the always-difficult issue of how you define the South. If it means the eleven former Confederate States of America, then five states, accounting for 258 out of the national total of 2286 GOP delegates, have already voted. Mitt Romney is estimated to have won at least 115 of them. The six remaining states (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas) account for another 382 delegates. None of these six are winner-take-all states, which means that Mitt Romney is very likely to accumulate delegates even if he loses the statewide vote.
If “the South” is expanded to all former slave states, then you can add Oklahoma to the states that have already voted–which contributes another eight delegates to Romney’s totals. Down the road, that expanded definition would add Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia, and another 182 delegates (of those, only Maryland is winner-take-all). The expanded total of 564 delegates still on the schedule for “the South” certainly makes the region a big prize, but it’s only about the same number of delegates still to be awarded by the decidedly un-Southern California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, and Utah. And the bulk of winner-take-all states are outside the region: California, D.C., New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Utah, and Wisconsin, along with the Mitt-friendly “Southern” states of Delaware and Maryland. So long as Romney can keep raising money (or, in a pinch, contributing from his own pocket), he can certainly win the nomination while maintaining his current mediocre performance in the South.
But the frequent exclamation that “Romney can’t win without the South” isn’t just about delegate allocations. It’s often meant to imply that a GOP candidate who is weak in this “base” region will struggle to win the general election. So far, though, there are no indications that those Southern voters who are pulling the lever for someone else in the primaries won’t settle for Mitt Romney in a general election. In Georgia, for example, 81 percent of today’s voters said they’d “definitely” vote for the party’s nominee and another 11 percent “probably” would; a big chunk of the probables and the holdouts appear to be Ron Paul supporters, many of them not actually Republicans. Moreover, the Southern states where Barack Obama is likely to be competitive (North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware) tend to feature the kind of larger urban areas where Romney has done well throughout the country, and where his relatively strong appeal across party lines will be a bigger factor than whatever marginal discouragement is suffered by the “very conservative” voters he lost in the primaries.
The underlying reality is that there is nothing particularly mysterious about Romney’s relative weakness in Southern primaries. He’s doing well in the South among precisely the same kind of voters (urban-suburban dwellers, self-identified moderates and “somewhat conservative” voters, Catholics and other non-evangelicals) as elsewhere; there just happen to be more “very conservative,” rural and exurban, and evangelical voters in the South, especially the Deep South.
It is true, however, that if Romney exhibits chronic weakness in both the South and the Midwest, he could still, in theory, lose the nomination–particularly if Santorum and Gingrich can divide the states and avoid dividing their votes. I wouldn’t bet against Mitt even then, since he can continue to pile up votes from unpledged officeholders, the bicoastal states, and Western Mormons, while consistently picking up delegates in his “weak” areas (including some big hauls, as in Ohio and Virginia, where his superior organization gives him significantly more delegates than he ought to win based on his popularity).
At the moment, though, Romney seems to be in danger of eluding a third opportunity to nail down the nomination (the first after his strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the second after big wins in South Carolina and Nevada). And perceptions that he can’t win in specific regions of the country, or specific segments of the party, certainly won’t help. Unfortunately for Romney, those fears will continue to bedevil him until it’s clear that he can’t be mathematically denied the nomination.
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