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.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mitt Romney–and, for the moment at least, the Republican Party–dodged a bullet yesterday as he narrowly won his native state. Of course, it shouldn’t be an afterthought that he also won Arizona by a landslide, capturing all the 29 delegates it’s rewarding this year. The last few days, though, were filled with growing talk in Republican insider-dom that a Romney loss in Michigan would provoke a serious search for a late-entry candidate. And whether or not these would-be kingmakers actually did come up with a White Knight willing to take the plunge, the discussion alone could have been fatal to the inevitablilty/electability house of cards on which Romney’s campaign relies. Now Romney is back on track for the nomination, for the fourth time by my count. But he’s not out of the woods quite yet, unless Rick Santorum handles his loss poorly or begins to lose his financial backing.
Next week’s ten Super Tuesday contests remain a bit of a trap for Romney. He should win easily in his home state of Massachusetts, and will only face Ron Paul in Virginia. But in Ohio, Santorum has built a robust and steady lead in recent polls. And in the South, where Newt Gingrich remains a threat, his super PAC seems to be spending its latest infusion of money from Sheldon Adelson on strident anti-Romney attacks ads rather than any effort to hold off Santorum. Romney’s biggest threat is if, as with the Arizona/Michigan primaries, all the media attention focuses on the competitive states rather than total delegates: He could win a plurality of delegates on Super Tuesday but still “lose” in media perceptions if he falls short in Ohio and the contested southern states. If Romney does lose significant states on Super Tuesday, the most significant factor will be whether the GOP elites panic like they did after Santorum’s three-state sweep on February 7 and his subsequent rise in the polls–or if, instead, insiders begin to look at cumulative delegate totals, bank balances, and the declining feasibility of a late entry and figure that Mitt is “inevitable” again.
Is there anything in the pattern of votes last night that illustrates the likely direction of public opinion in the GOP electorate? It’s hard to say, particularly since the Michigan vote was skewed by Romney’s native-state status–and Santorum’s sizable crossover vote, some of which was clearly tactical. (According to the exit polls, Santorum beat Romney 53-17 among the 9 percent of primary voters self-identifying as Democrats, and ran just behind Mitt among the 39 percent calling themselves “moderates or liberals.”) But one distress signal for Santorum is that he lost among his fellow Catholics in Michigan, which some pundits are already attributing to his ill-advised criticism of John F. Kennedy’s position on church-state relations.
Expect an unusually intense spin cycle over the next 48 hours over these results. Aside from polls (both national and of the March 6 states), there is actually another contest prior to Super Tuesday: a caucus-with-straw-poll in Washington state on March 3. There’s also a just-announced candidate “forum” (the format is unclear) that same evening on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show; Romney, Santorum and Gingrich have agreed to attend (no word yet on Ron Paul). A Public Policy Polling survey on February 21 showed Santorum with a healthy lead over Romney in Washington, with Paul running a relatively strong third. Don’t be surprised if whoever wins there calls it a harbinger for Super Tuesday.
So what can we learn from last night’s results? Romney’s wins banished the wolf from his door, and he again seems the likeliest nominee. It didn’t hurt that he won two major states despite a universally panned series of campaign gaffes (such as his Cadillac count) and mistakes (notably his decision to deliver a major speech at a nearly empty Ford Field). But he’ll only be free of the wolf entirely if he can win a series of primaries without another unexpected setback, and reassure his elite supporters that he won’t limp into the end of the campaign trail still begging the GOP’s conservative base that they can trust him to take on Barack Obama with the savagery and ideological rigor they demand.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There was, last week, a brief but thrilling moment in the GOP presidential contest: It seemed like, for the first time, a candidate would be attacked for being, not too liberal, but too far right. Back in the day, that wouldn’t have been too unusual, as when George H.W. Bush, in a remark that would haunt the rest of his career, mocked Ronald Reagan’s supply-side convictions as “voodoo economics.” This year though, in a fight universally described as among the nastiest in recent history, all the attacks have been in just one direction: from the right.
This has obviously been the thrust of the endless criticisms of Mitt Romney, who has evolved from 2008’s movement conservative champion to 2012’s Republican in Name Only–even as his own policy positions have become increasingly conservative. But Romney has recently used the same tactics against his current rival, Rick Santorum. With Santorum roaming across the land like a firebug, suggesting that American liberty itself could not survive another Obama term, did Romney or his surrogates go after him for conservative extremism? Of course not: Santorum was blasted to hell and back for being a fiscal liberal or even for being in the “liberal wing of the Republican Party.” Suddenly his much-regretted endorsement of his Senate colleague Arlen Specter became a Mark of the Beast that obliterated his many years of service to the conservative cause; his votes (along with most other Senate Republicans) for George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit–understood at the time as central to Karl Rove’s master plan for building a conservative majority in the electorate–proved he was just another RINO.
This is the same pattern we’ve seen throughout the election: far-right politicians attacked for their lefty positions. When it became time for Team Romney to take down Rick Perry a peg or two, it didn’t go after the Texan for flirting with secession. No: The successful assault on Perry was all about his unconscionable sympathy for the children of undocumented workers. Similarly, Newt Gingrich never drew a bit of fire for his constant anti-Muslim demagoguery or his attacks on the moral fiber of food stamp beneficiaries. He first got into trouble for daring to question the political viability of Paul Ryan’s draconian budget proposals. Later on, Romney and Ron Paul led a joint attack on Newt for once expressing a belief in global climate change (and worse yet, appearing with Nancy Pelosi in an ad on the subject) and for allegedly criticizing Saint Ronald Reagan. When Gingrich rose from the dead yet again, he was definitively put down by Romney and his super PAC for the crime of receiving lobbying dollars from Freddie Mac, which, as every wingnut knows, conspired with ACORN and poor people to destroy the housing market and the financial system.
Even poor Herman Cain took flak for supporting TARP, and worse yet, for once serving on the board of a Federal Reserve Bank–the source, as Ron Paul taught, of all sorts of inflationary looting. And when Michele Bachmann was temporarily riding high back in the summer, none of her opponents took occasion to suggest she was a theocratic zealot who probably couldn’t carry five states in a general election. In the unwritten Code of 2012, it was simply impossible to be too conservative to be president.
Last week, though, it seemed like that dynamic might have finally changed. As Santorum’s attacks on the “false theology” of Obama and liberals gained press, sparking fresh attention to his past excommunications of liberal Protestants as outside the Christian fold, two opinion leaders on Team Romney opened a second front on the fiery Pennsylvanian. Matt Drudge put up lurid headlines and links about Santorum’s now-infamous 2008 Ave Maria University speech explaining American history as a “spiritual war” between God and Satan. And the designated conservative blogger at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, called Santorum a “reactionary” for trying to attack the use of contraception instead of sticking to the safer culture war ground of abortion and same-sex marriage. Could it be that the “fiscal liberal” Rick Santorum was actually looking too conservative for the GOP?
Not for long. At Wednesday’s candidate debate in Arizona, Romney (again, with assists from Ron Paul) was back to attacking Santorum as a big spender and Washington insider, who couldn’t be trusted to decimate federal spending or savagely confront the hated partisan foe. And if Santorum manages to win in Arizona or Michigan, we’ll likely be hearing less from Team Romney about his “spiritual warfare,” and more about his alleged fidelity to the “liberal wing of the Republican Party”–which might be more properly described as an amputated limb.

So as TDS readers know, I’ve recently taken on heavy blogging duties at The Washington Monthly. And by “heavy,” I mean coming within shouting distance of the insane pace of productivity set by my predecessor at the Political Animal blog, Steve Benen (who is now working for Rachel Maddow at MSNBC).
In any event, in addition to continuing to post original stuff when time permits, and cross-posting material from TNR, I’ll be periodically blurbing items from the Monthly that may be of particular interest to TDS readers.
Today I’d point to a brief analysis I wrote of a new study of Democratic and Republican ideological cohesiveness–and the political implications for both parties–by Todd Eberly published recently by the Third Way outfit. Here’s an excerpt:

[M]y main beef with Eberly’s take involves his conclusion:
“The real question for Democrats is whether liberal party activists will cede control of the agenda and allow the party to move in the direction of its moderate, non-activist voters.”
Do “liberal party activists” control the agenda of the Democratic Party? I don’t think so.
I must have missed the moment when the major Democratic candidates for president in 2008 (or for that matter, 2004) embraced the single-payer approach to universal health coverage that is undoubtedly popular among “liberal party activists.” I also failed to notice newly elected president Barack Obama supporting nationalization of the banks, or a multi-trillion dollar economic stimulus package, or reversal of Bush administration policies on surveillance, at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. Obama sure did go to the mats on behalf of the “public option” on health insurance–in itself considered a major compromise by “liberal party activists”–when the deal when down on health reform, didn’t he? And hey, Democratic congressional leaders most definitely saluted when “liberal party activists” demanded crackdowns on or actual expulsion of Blue Dog Democrats who were voting against major party legislation, didn’t they?
I could go on and on, but you get the point. A Democratic Party that could not bring itself to levy sanctions on Sen. Joe Lieberman after he endorsed and campaigned for the GOP candidate for president–which enraged even some “centrists” like me–is hardly in the grip of “liberal party activists.”

There’s more, and if you’re interested, just follow the link. The bottom line is that Democrats can and must manage ideological diversity, but it’s not a simple matter of demanding the submission of “liberal party activists.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When the Obama administration announced last month that religiously-affiliated institutions would be required to provide health plans covering contraception, there was widespread talk that a wedge issue was emerging. Several prominent Catholic liberals were quick to point out that Obama would lose the Catholic vote and seriously damage his re-election prospects. But as Republican politicians gleefully piled on, the evidence for such a dire development–and indeed, for the continued existence of anything you could describe as a “Catholic vote”–has diminished almost daily.
Of course, the White House responded to the Catholic Bishops’ furor with a deft maneuver that changed the political dynamics of the issue, offering a compromise that allowed the cost of contraception coverage to be borne by insurance companies, not the religiously-affiliated institutions themselves. This step won immediate praise from the leadership of the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. But the split among Catholic elites simply reinforced the more fundamental reality: American Catholics are hardly monolithic, even on issues supposedly touching on the Church’s authority and teachings.
Polling of Americans on the contraception mandate controversy has produced significantly varying results, often depending on when the poll was taken and question wording and order. But no survey has shown a significant difference between Catholics and other voters on this issue. (John Sides found some evidence of a drop in approval ratings for Obama among highly-observant and conservative Catholics, but conceded that these are largely already Obama opponents.) Among the many polls, the most credible is perhaps a Democracy Corps survey that formulates the positions of the administration and of the Bishops in their own words. The results show that Catholics support the administration’s position by a 49-42 margin–barely distinguishable from the full pool of respondents, who support the administration’s position by a 49-43 margin.
This should come as no particular surprise to anyone familiar with the history of U.S. Catholic lay attitudes on issues where the Church hierarchy has taken strong positions. The most thorough recent research on public opinion involving abortion and same-sex marriage–issues where the Catholic Church has clear, unambiguous positions that are frequently communicated to the laity via channels ranging from papal encyclicals to the parish pulpit–comes from the Public Religion Research Institute, which did a major survey examining the views of Americans of differing confessional backgrounds in June of last year. At that time, 56 percent of all Americans and 54 percent of Catholics indicated they thought abortions should be legal in all or most circumstances. Only 29 percent of white evangelical Protestants, however, support legalized abortion–another indication that the anti-choice base in American politics is now more Protestant than Catholic.
To be sure, the same survey shows slightly stronger personal disapproval of abortion on moral grounds among Catholics than among the population as a whole. That attitude, however, is heavily concentrated among Latino Catholics. Forty-two percent of white Catholics consider abortion “morally acceptable,” compared to 40 percent of all Americans, while only 17% of Latino Catholics say the same. There is hardly a consenus Catholic position, even on personal attitudes towards abortion.
On same-sex marriage, again, Catholics are more likely to agree with other Americans than with their own leadership. An October 2010 Pew survey showed 46 percent of Catholics favoring legalization of same-sex marriage, as compared to 42 percent of all Americans. The hardcore resistance to gay marriage, on the other hand, is among white evangelicals (who oppose it by a 20-74 margin) and to some extent black Protestants (who oppose it by a 28-62 margin).
Conservatives often argue that support for the hierarchy’s positions is much higher among “real Catholics”–meaning those who attend Mass weekly. That’s true, but it’s not a phenomenon particular to Catholics. According to the PRRI survey, for example, support for legalized abortion varies inversely according to frequency of worship service attendance among evangelical and mainline Protestants, as well as among Catholics. Moreover, Catholics who disagree with the Church’s position on hot-button issues do not seem to be suffering from any misinformation about Church teachings (72 percent of white Catholics say they’ve heard about abortion from the pulpit) or from a bad conscience about their disagreements. Again according to PRRI, 68 percent of Catholics think you can still be a “good Catholic” while disagreeing with Church teachings on abortion, and 74 percent say the same about same-sex marriage.
The more you look at the numbers, the idea that there is some identifiable Catholic vote in America, ready to be mobilized, begins to fade towards irrelevance. In the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections, Catholics voted within a couple of percentage points of the electorate as a whole. It’s notable that both the Democratic vice president and the Republican Speaker of the House are Catholics–and that few Americans are likely aware of that fact.
This was not always the case, of course. From the days of Andrew Jackson to JFK, Catholic voters were considered a mainstay of the Democratic Party coalition. Irish and German Catholics were at home in the conservative Democratic party of the nineteenth century, and were supplemented by southern Europeans as the New Deal Coalition developed in the twentieth. While the Catholic attachment to the Democratic Party has persisted to a steadily diminishing extent in state and local elections, the disproportionate pro-Democratic “Catholic vote” at the presidential level abruptly ended in 1972 and has never returned.
To a large extent, that shift has simply reflected the broader ideological polarization of the two parties, which demolished traditional ethnic loyalties. Moreover, the upward mobility and suburbanization of previously urban white Catholics communities has naturally made them more susceptible to Republican economic and cultural appeals, a trend that among Catholics as a whole has been partially offset by the influx of Democratic-leaning Hispanics.
The idea that Catholics no longer behave self-consciously as “Catholics” on hot-button issues reflects the broader reality that they have become hard to distinguish from other Americans in their political behavior. And so whatever happens between the White House and the Bishops, it’s not likely to change the reality that the “Catholic vote” looks just like America.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
For all those waiting for the Republican primary to end, you’ll have to wait a bit longer: On Saturday Rick Santorum became the 11th Republican politician to lead a national presidential nomination poll during the 2012 cycle. And not just by a little–the Public Policy Polling survey showed Santorum with a 15-point (38-23) lead over Mitt Romney. According to PPP, Santorum was trouncing the field in the demographic categories that have looked difficult for putative nominee Mitt Romney from the beginning: Tea Party supporters, evangelicals, and those who call themselves “very conservative.” So is this the long-awaited consolidation of the party base around a challenger who can beat Romney? Or just another bump in a predestined road to victory for Mitt?
To answer this question, let’s start with the things Santorum has going for him. If his surge in national polls can be attributed to any one factor, it’s the familiar murder-suicide scenario: The Romney-Gingrich cage match of Super-PAC-driven negative ads in South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada left Santorum as the only candidate with strongly positive personal ratings. PPP’s favorable/unfavorable ratios for the four remaining candidates certainly reinforce this interpretation, showing Romney at 44/43, Gingrich at 42/44, Ron Paul at 35/51–and Santorum at 62/24. With Santorum now dominating the very voter categories Gingrich was winning prior to Florida; with no life-giving televised candidate debates on the immediate horizon; and with Sheldon Adelson showing no signs of writing another gigantic check for his Super PAC, Newt may have run out of steam for the third and final time.
But what’s to keep the Romney Death Star from training its guns on Santorum just as it did on Newt (and before that, on Rick Perry)? That’s easy: The very conservative opinion-leaders who helped Mitt take down Newt–and whose support he ultimately needs–don’t want him to. Already the air is full of public and private pleas to Romney that he go easy on Rick, who unlike Gingrich has not spent several decades alienating powerful conservative leaders one at a time, and doesn’t have the glaring marital history and Freddie Mac baggage for opponents to exploit. And any temptation in Romney’s camp to go after Santorum with a clawhammer is also inhibited by Mitt’s own sinking favorability ratings among both primary and general-election voters. He can’t afford much more blowback from going nuclear on an opponent.
Amidst all this bad news for Romney, another PPP survey released on Monday showed Santorum’s new national lead spreading to Michigan, a February 28 primary state where Romney, as a local native, was assumed to have a big advantage. Rickymania may also have spread to the other state holding a primary that day, Arizona, where Romney was also thought to be in the driver’s seat (in this case because of AZ’s sizable Mormon population).
In the end though, Mitt’s money may come to the rescue. Even if he doesn’t go heavily negative, Romney can use his heavy money advantage to saturate the airwaves in these two states; Santorum can’t possibly match that unless his top Super-PAC donor, Foster Friess, drops an unimaginable amount of money on him. And if Romney does stage a February 28 comeback, the road gets much rockier for Santorum. Gingrich is likely to make a final stand on Super Tuesday in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and certainly Georgia, which will make a conservative consolidation for Santorum difficult. Rick won’t win Mitt’s own Massachusetts and isn’t even on the ballot in Virginia. His best shot then would rest on a breakthrough in Ohio–but that’s only possible if the money is there.
Perhaps the Pennsylvanian can navigate this series of landmines and slug it out with Mitt until the bitter end. But the qualities that made uber-conservative voters prefer almost everybody else at one point or another have not gone away. He’s still the guy who got waxed by 19 points in his 2006 Senate race; he’s still the social-issues zealot whose presence on the ticket would mobilize pro-choice and gay-rights activists more than anyone this side of Pat Buchanan; and he’s still the one-time would-be Beltway power broker whose intimate connection to ongoing scandals like the K Street Project has barely been mined. Even if Romney can’t go nuclear on him, Democrats can–to the point where the supposedly dominant economic issues of this general election could become secondary for many swing voters. That prospect should put plenty of doubt in the minds of Republican primary voters if Santorum ever appears to have a real shot at winning the nomination.
The best indication that the Santorum surge could turn out to be fleeting came on the same day as his startling national survey results, when the annual presidential straw poll at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference was won by none other than Mitt Romney. Even as the CPAC audience cheered Santorum’s culture-war zingers, the secret-ballot went to Mitt. Conservatives may talk like they want another Barry Goldwater, but in their hearts, they’d settle for another Richard Nixon.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Another week, another set of primaries–and soon enough, undoubtedly, another cascade of speculations about the prospect of a brokered convention. Predictions of an unpredictable fight-to-the-finish have become an unfortunate refrain–not to say, cliché–of our presidential election campaigns.
Enough! I hate to be the one to have to break it to my fellow political junkies, but the truth must be told: Not only isn’t there going to be no brokered convention this year–there probably isn’t going to be a brokered convention ever again.
For starters, there’s a reason it hasn’t happened in either party since the advent of the modern nomination system in 1972. With virtually all delegates being selected in scheduled primaries and caucuses, there are no longer any blocs of uncommitted or “favorite-son,” or machine-controlled delegates who can prevent a front-runner from accumulating a majority well before the convention. All the great “smoke-filled room” conventions–including the classic 1920 GOP session in Chicago which gave America a Harding administration, and the 1924 Democratic convention that required 103 ballots–occurred when primaries were marginal events that mainly consisted in influencing the party bosses who controlled a sizable majority of delegates.
The only way to produce a “deliberative” convention now–barring some cataclysmic event like the death, disability, or disqualification of the putative nominee–is via an extended primary season in which multiple candidates remain viable to the bitter end. Sure, it could happen, but only theoretically. Candidates on the edge of elimination often say they will stay in the contest until the bitter end (as noted in my last column on Gingrich’s actual odds of victory), but they typically don’t, because they quickly realize they’ve lost the media attention and the financial donors that they need to win primaries and delegates in significant numbers.
One element of confusion that has entered the conversation this year is the supposed adoption of “proportionality” in Republican delegate allocation rules, which, it is argued, will make it harder for front-runners to lock down a majority of delegates. As Davidson College’s Josh Putnam has explained repeatedly, while the first-ever intervention in state delegate selection systems by the RNC this cycle is a big deal, the actual changes in these systems required in 2012 are actually pretty small: states holding binding primaries and caucuses prior to April 1 cannot award delegates according to statewide winner-take-all procedures. But they can award (and one state, South Carolina, has already awarded) delegates by congressional district winner-take-all rules, which are a long way from “proportional” representation at the convention. Moreover, after April 1, the rules are exactly the same as before. In short, there hasn’t been any procedural revolution that has made a “brokered convention” more likely.
Another largely false issue is the scenario whereby a “late entry” candidate jumps into the primaries and hoovers up delegates in sufficient numbers to deny Romney a majority. Primary filing deadlines have now passed for nearly all the primaries before mid-April, with new deadlines popping up every week. As the failure of Newt Gingrich to get on the ballot in Virginia has shown, even well-established candidates often struggle to meet complex filing conditions. There is nobody out there who is going to jump in late and have enough general support to leap the barriers to entry; all the “white knights” usually mentioned–Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc.–didn’t run for very good reasons (Bush’s surname; Daniels’ “truce” insult to social conservatives; Christie’s various ideological heresies, from abortion to gun rights).
Finally, it’s worth examining the actual resistance to Mitt Romney’s nomination that is the essential premise for most of the “brokered convention” scenarios. Certainly he is not the ideal candidate for most conservative activists. But it is remarkable how few of them have failed to pledge allegiance to him if he does win the nomination. And he remains relatively popular among GOP voters: a NBC-Wall Street Journal survey of Republican voters taken well before the Florida primary, showing Gingrich leading Romney nationally, also showed Mitt with a better favorable/unfavorable ratio than Newt.
And even if you buy my learned TNR colleague Walter Shapiro’s idea that Gingrich could yet make a comeback and smite Romney in later primaries, that’s not the same as suggesting a “brokered convention” is likely. Should Newt somehow romp in February, March and April, then he might well romp all the way to the nomination, leaving Romney in the dust.
As still another TNR regular, Jonathan Bernstein, has noted, a “brokered convention” depends on “brokers.” Party leaders have a lot of ways to influence the selection of delegates in the primaries, but beyond that, their powers are limited. In the extremely unlikely event no winner heads to Tampa with a majority of delegates, we are looking not at a “brokered” convention, but a “deadlock” where the actual delegates, once their legal and moral commitments are discharged, can do what they want. “Brokering” is much too tame a metaphor for what would take place in that scenario. It would be a lot more like herding feral cats. Fortunately, it probably won’t–no, it definitely won’t–come to that.