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.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mitt Romney’s strong performance in the second Florida debate deprived Newt Gingrich of his last chance to maintain the boost he got from his South Carolina victory. Unless something significant happens before January 31, Romney will beat Gingrich in the Sunshine State by a double-digit margin and regain his standing as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. After a quiet February, he’ll deploy his edge in money, organization, and preparation to defeat Gingrich the way Grant defeated Lee–by inexorably grinding him down. And when he does, the Republican Party will have dodged a bullet, because the evidence indicates that Romney would be a much stronger general election candidate. It also suggests that President Obama faces a tougher reelection campaign than many now think.
Consider a January 26 Quinnipiac survey of the Florida electorate, beginning with President Obama’s standing in a state he carried by 3 points (51-48) in 2008. Forty-six percent of registered Florida voters approve of the way Obama is handling his job, while 52 percent disapprove. Forty-seven percent believe that he deserves to be reelected, while 49 percent do not.
Given this terrain, whose contours are perilous for the president, the difference between the two main Republican contenders is dramatic. Obama holds an 11-point edge (50-39) over Gingrich but musters only a tie (45-45) against Romney. The crucial different comes among Independents, where Obama leads Gingrich 50-33 but trails Romney 41-42. Forty-three percent of Florida voters rate Romney favorably overall, versus 37 percent unfavorable; for Gingrich it’s 32-50. On the issue voters regard as the most important–the economy–Romney has a 50-41 advantage over Obama (51-40 among Independents) while the president leads Gingrich 47-45 (52-39 among Independents). On what historically has been a key presidential trait–strong leadership–Obama leads Gingrich 51-41 but musters only a statistical tie (46-45) against Romney. And the president’s modest 5-point edge (47-42) over Romney on trustworthiness swells to an astonishing but hardly inexplicable 22 points (57-35) over Gingrich. I could go on, but you get the point: in the largest swing state, Obama is the odds-on favorite to demolish Gingrich but could well lose to Romney.
And Florida is no outlier. An average of major national surveys conducted in January gives Obama a modest 2.3 point edge (47.2 to 44.9) over Romney. Against Gingrich, the president’s margin swells to an average of 11.7 points (51.3 to 39.6). Bottom line: while Romney may be able to take advantage of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities, Gingrich almost certainly can’t.
The conventional wisdom is that the Republican nominating contest has already damaged Romney severely. There’s some evidence to support that view. According to the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, Romney’s unfavorable ratings among Independents have increased by 20 points over the past two months, and Obama now leads him by 8 points in this crucial group. But it’s hard to find much evidence of that trend in Florida, a state whose voters have much more information about Romney, negative as well as positive, than they did two weeks ago, and far more than do voters nationally. Romney’s support among Floridians is identical now to what it was three months ago. Voters interviewed after his defeat in South Carolina viewed him just as favorably as did those interviewed before that contest. And even nationally, adults interviewed in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey give Romney exactly the same share of the vote as they did last November (or last June, for that matter). As of now, anyway, Romney may be bruised, but the primary fight has not administered anything like a knockout blow to his general election prospects.
The other side of the conventional wisdom is that Obama enters 2012 in a strengthened position. There’s something to this: Many key indicators have risen measurably from the lows they reached last fall. For example, the NBC/WSJ poll found that 30 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track, up from only 17 percent in October. But that increase just takes us back to the split that prevailed in June of 2011. This is something of a pattern for Obama. His job approval is up 4 points since October but only stands where it was last June. The same is true for his personal favorability ratings. Approval of his handling of the economy stands at 45 percent–exactly where it was last April. And so on.

Read more…

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Just when hardcore conservatives had seemed prepared to settle for Mitt Romney to avoid further exposure of intraparty divisions, Newt Gingrich’s unlikely recovery brought those divisions sharply and publicly into view. As Politico reported yesterday, conservative elites ranging from Tom Delay to Bob Dole have gone to the media en masseto warn voters of the perils of Newt. The Republican Party has rarely seemed more divided, and at the heart of those divisions is a disconnect between Republican elites and the voting base over the crucial issue of electability. Ironically, it is a disconnect that the elites are themselves partly responsible for creating.
Electability, of course, has long been Mitt Romney’s trump card, buttressed by a long series of general election polls showing him as the strongest candidate against Barack Obama. Beyond the polls, Romney best fits the entrenched Beltway conventional wisdom that candidates perceived as more moderate do best in close presidential elections. At the same time, most Republican opinion leaders think Gingrich could be a general election disaster, thanks to his long record of erratic public and private behavior and a personality that has often seemed unattractive to everyone other than stone partisans.

National Review‘s editors tried to make it plain two days ago:

Amid all the tumult of the last 18 years there has been this constant: Gingrich has never been popular. Polls have never shown more than 43 percent of the public viewing him favorably at any point in his career. Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.

But actual voters don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Exit polls in South Carolina showed that Gingrich beat Romney soundly (by a 51-37 margin) among the 45% of primary voters who said “can defeat Obama” was the candidate quality they valued most. The latest PPP poll of Florida, which gives Gingrich a 38 to 33 lead over Romney, shows the two candidates tied at 37 percent in terms of who has the best chance of beating Obama.
Rank-and-file voters, of course, do not typically spend time pouring over general-election polls, and likely they tend to view their own preferred candidate as most electable without taking polling date into account. (They also may not particularly trust polls, with the wild gyrations of primary polls this year perhaps proving them right.)
So something else may be going on to buttress broad-based assessments of Gingrich’s electability among non-elites. One theory, recently aired by Jonathan Chait, is that the regular drumbeat of conservative propaganda treating Obama as a national disaster and an ideological extremist (sort of a combination of Jimmy Carter and George McGovern) has convinced Republican voters that conventional electability is no longer relevant. What’s needed isn’t a reasoned appeal to undecided voters, but an assault against the forces conspiring to prop up Obama.
Gingrich doesn’t only benefit from this conviction–it’s at the center of his sales pitch.
A Newt-Obama debate would be a chance to expose the baleful realities of the president’s record and his un-American values. And voters would not be the only ones persuaded–one of Gingrich’s blogger fans suggested that even Obama himself might succumb to Newt’s powerful logic and communications skills:

[W]e need Newt as the nominee [because] he’s the candidate who has best been able to articulate just how bad Obama has been for the country. If he spent even an hour debating Obama, Obama would probably be convinced that his tenure has been a disaster.

This argument, unrealistic as it may seem, is in harmony with the conviction of ideologues everywhere that bold, uncompromising candidates have the power to conjure hidden majorities out of the morass of mushy-moderate politics. Indeed, some hard-core supporters of Howard Dean’s 2004 candidacy expressed similar views. What’s unusual is that such a baldly ideological argument has been wholly absorbed by the rank-and-file of a major political party, as evidenced by their decision to move further right in response to the two straight electoral defeats of 2006 and 2008. Of course, they were encouraged in this process by the explicitly ideological messaging of the conservative establishment, including media outlets like Fox News.
As a result, it is now a matter of fundamental faith among conservatives that the GOP went astray during the Bush years by betraying its conservative principles, competing with Democrats in the center, and blurring the differences between the two parties. The 2010 election results, which followed months of harsh Tea Party rhetoric in which virtually the entire GOP participated, seemed to confirm beyond reasonable doubt that lurching right is the way to win.
On the heels of that electoral success, the GOP rank-and-file is strongly disposed to project the move-righ-to-win doctrine onto 2012. In Gingrich some have seen a candidate who has positioned himself as the heir to movement conservative heroes from Goldwater on, and who has offered a very specific vision of how he will achieve that moment of national satori, when a conservative electorate finds its unapologetic champion. After the two Florida debates, it’s possible Gingrich’s case for being an invincible debater is now losing credibility; if so, his threat to GOP elites could lose steam as well. If not, the last hope of National Review and its co-conspiratorsis to convince Republican voters–who have spent the past four years hearing that far-right rhetoric–that a moderate Mormon is more electable than a strident ideologue. If they’re unsuccessful, they have no one but themselves to blame.

Some of you may have noticed that today I took over primary blogging responsibilities (at least during weekdays) at the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal site. It was a solid opportunity to have a greater impact on daily political discussions. But I wanted to let you know I will remain as Managing Editor here at TDS, which will continue to pursue its mission of promoting civil, empirically based discussion of strategic issues important to Democrats. We’ll have plenty of fresh content, particularly as this election year intensifies.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
After Newt Gingrich’s smashing victory in South Carolina on Saturday, here’s my wagering advice: You can still put your money on Mitt, but don’t bet the farm. Not this year.
The results for Mitt Romney weren’t pretty. After finishing a poor fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Newt carried all but three SC counties (including Nikki Haley’s Lexington County and Jim DeMint’s Greenville County), every congressional district, and every region of the state.
But the really bad news for Mitt is in the exit polls, which show that his support resides in precisely that narrow corner of the Republican electorate least in sync with the party’s conservative zeitgeist. Romney carried voters with postgraduate educations or incomes over $200,000; self-identified moderates and residents of core urban areas; opponents of the Tea Party and supporters of legalized abortion. And Romney’s past pattern of being a solid second-choice option for voters preferring someone else may now be in danger: Only 38% of SC voters said they would “enthusiastically” support him if he is the nominee, a number uncomfortably close to his actual 28% of the vote.
Romney’s vote in SC was also alarmingly concentrated among voters who made up their minds in 2011. In other words, he did not campaign very well in the state, despite a lot of advantages in terms of local party endorsements and money. (For all the talk of Gingrich’s SuperPAC expenditures in the state, Mitt’s SuperPAC at a minimum matched them, and overall pro-Romney spending on television ads probably just about doubled the pro-Newt air war.)
Everything about the dynamics of the South Carolina race suggests that Gingrich’s attacks on Romney as an out-of-touch corporate pirate meshed smoothly with weaknesses Romney himself exposed, in his clumsy handling of publicity about his missing tax returns, his offshore wealth, and his vast speaking fees. Meanwhile, the success Mitt had in Iowa (with a major assist from Ron Paul) in encouraging conservative doubts about Gingrich’s commitment to The Cause was obliterated by the former Speaker’s stunning ability to get conservatives to identify criticism of his record or of his personal life with the hated partisan and ideological enemy–the media elite. Some of this was perhaps fortuitous: Gingrich will probably never again enjoy such useful foils in televised debates as Fox News’ Juan Williams or CNN’s John King, and we are approaching another phase in the nomination contest with few scheduled candidate debates. But by luck or by design, Newt is beginning to build a Teflon shield around his stormy past, reminiscent of those old-time southern segregationists who were able to discredit questions about corruption or misgovernment by attributing them to the common enemy “up north.” Romney is not benefitting from a similar sense of partisan and ideological solidarity.
Yet even if Gingrich can continue to preempt–or as in South Carolina, exploit–criticism of his past, and can also continue to convince primary voters to ignore general election polls and imagine him vanquishing Barack Obama in debates, the landscape is about to get much more difficult. The Florida primary on January 31 offers him a chance to do some more lasting damage to Romney, and all but eliminate talk of Mitt’s “inevitability.” But it’s a very expensive state, and unless Sheldon Adelson can be talked into really loosening the purse strings, Gingrich will have no prayer of remaining competitive financially. Romney’s Restore Our Future SuperPAC has already spent $4.8 million in Florida, mostly for anti-Gingrich ads, and Mitt’s campaign has probably banked an early lead among the nearly 200,000 Floridians who have already cast absentee or early votes. Moreover, Gingrich will still have to contend with competition from Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, neither of whom are showing signs of getting out of the race (though Paul is likely to concentrate on small-turnout caucus states, and it’s hard to imagine Santorum raising the funds to compete seriously in Florida).
Will the surge Gingrich has already exhibited in national polls during the last week carry over to Florida? He better pray it does. Without an upset win in Florida, Gingrich faces a hiatus in the campaign that could prove deadly, as party elites become alarmed about the consequences of an extended contest, and the many skeletons in his closet threaten to burst into view. Newt is already looking at an almost certain loss on February 28 in Romney’s native state of Michigan, and is already in the hole for Super Tuesday on March 6, thanks to his failure to get on the ballot in Virginia.
So it’s do-or-die for Gingrich in the Sunshine State. And for Mitt Romney, it’s time to play error-free ball before the unlikely double-rise-from-the-grave of his unlikely rival begins to convince party leaders that he’s no better than zombie bait.

So the instability of the GOP presidential contest is now reaching epic levels. Just when Mitt Romney seemed to be on the verge of virtually locking down the GOP presidential nomination with a victory in South Carolina (and even as his national poll standings cleanly broke what had earlier looked like a “barrier” of about 25%), he’s by all accounts lost his lead in SC and is rapidly losing his lead nationally. And his “new” challenger is not the guy long expected to be the “viable conservative alternative to Romney,” Rick Perry (who has finally dropped out of the race), or the co-winner in Iowa, Rick Santorum (who is actually losing ground in SC), but none other than Newt Gingrich.
This is remarkable for a number of reasons. Newt had zero momentum coming out of Iowa or NH (he finished a poor fourth in both states). He is the ultimate known quantity in Republican politics, and has been left for dead in this cycle not once but twice (most recently when a barrage of negative ads by Ron Paul and by Mitt Romney’s Super-PAC demolished his support-levels in Iowa and drove his unfavorables into negative territory). Yes, he benefited from a big infusion of cash into his own Super-PAC, which quickly used them to buy TV time in SC for a savage attack on Romney, but the effectiveness of the ads was called into question when Newt was blasted by a variety of conservative opinion-leaders (notably Rush Limbaugh, and in more muted tones, SC’s own right-wing boss, Jim DeMint) for heresies against capitalism and complicity in Democratic talking points.
The only variable that really explains Gingrich’s revival is the return of televised GOP candidate debates–which were largely absent during the crucial run-up to the Iowa caucuses–where the windy former Speaker has excelled, typically by attacking panelists and “the media” for silent partnership with Obama. And this is puzzling according to the conventional “take” on the subject by political scientists, who have long scoffed at the tendency of horse-race pundits to overrate the impact of candidate debates.
It’s true that much of the “debate over debates” involves general elections, in which all sorts of fundamentals–particularly party identification and objective conditions in the country–make any particular “moment” in the contest less important than it sometimes appears. The growing number of nomination-contest debates in the last two cycles–along with such new phenomena as their sponsorship by ideological media like Fox News, with its intense “base” viewership–may truly indicate that the old assumptions are simply outdated. Or the close relationship between Gingrich’s debate performances and his poll standings may simply reflect an unusually uncertain Republican electorate that may ultimately “settle” for Romney, but isn’t there yet, and is still searching for signs of life elsewhere in the field.
If Gingrich does win SC, and gets a big bounce in Florida and nationally, it will represent a real challenge to how we all understand the dynamics of a presidential nominating contest. Certainly Newt remains vastly vulnerable to a renewal of the kind of attacks he sustained in Iowa (not to mention reminders of his personal history that he managed to bury, at least temporarily, by rousing conservatives in anger at John King in last night’s CNN debate), and Romney has the resources and the elite backing to bring holy hell down on his head. But for the moment, it’s surprisingly clear that any lead in this contest can evaporate at the turn of a well-televised phrase.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The political fumbling by Christian conservatives has been even worse this presidential cycle than it was in 2008, when their blood-enemy, John McCain, won the top spot on the Republican ticket. The Christian Right’s fatal failure this time was its inability to form a consensus behind a single candidate. Last weekend’s Texas conclave of religious conservatives, engineered by Family Research Center president and Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins, initially appeared to have generated a united front behind Rick Santorum. But almost immediately, Newt Gingrich supporters challenged the results, and the united front quickly crumbled. With polls indicating no surge for Santorum in the state, Perkins’ gambit looks likely to fail–catastrophically, in fact, since it mainly benefited Mitt Romney, the one candidate hardly any Christian Right leader supports.
But if it’s entirely fair to point out that the once-indomitable Christian Right has botched the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, it’s another thing altogether to conclude, as the esteemed historian Michael Kazin did earlier this week, that the Christian Right’s days of national influence have finally expired. It is true that they have been less conspicuous in this campaign, and less united in candidate preferences. But if they haven’t been able to pull their muscle behind a single candidate, that’s not a sign that they are on the wane–it’s a sign that, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, they have already won.
Look at the potential nominees: Unlike 2008, no candidate in the field is pro-choice by any definition. Only Ron Paul seems reluctant to enact a national ban on same-sex marriage. Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum. and Herman Cain have been vocal in fanning the flames of Islamophobia; again, only Paul has bothered to dissent to any significant degree.
Mitt Romney, of course, has a history on cultural issues that instills mistrust among many on the Christian Right. But his current positions bring him entirely in accord with social conservative priorities, and if he were elected, he would enter office more committed to Christian Right goals than any president in history. And if he is the nominee, he will likely choose a running-mate (and potential successor) who will, like McCain’s in 2008 (after social conservatives essentially vetoed his first and second choices), delight the Christian Right.
But regardless of its residual power within the Republican Party (which he acknowledges), Kazin believes the Christian Right is on the wane because it is increasingly out of touch with public opinion, and on the wrong side of generational trends. And when it comes to same-sex marriage, Kazin is probably correct: Although majority support for same-sex marriage rights remains a distant prospect in some states, the positive direction of public opinion is clear and–given the close direct relationship of age and likelihood to oppose same-sex marriage–irreversible.
But on the issue most important to the Christian Right’s foot soldiers, abortion, it’s not at all clear the Christian Right is losing. Kazin cites the 2011 defeat of the Personhood Amendment in Mississippi as a sign of anti-choice weakness. In fact, it’s remarkable that such an initiative–which would ban not only all abortions, but Plan B contraception, intrauterine devices, and arguably oral contraceptives–did as well as it did (a similar amendment was crushed by nearly a three-to-one margin in Colorado in 2010). More illustrative of the current state of play is the passage by seven states, (with legislation pending in many others, of so-called “fetal pain” legislation essentially banning abortion after twenty or twenty-two weeks of pregnancy.
Even more significantly, none of the major national reproductive rights organizations have gone to federal court to challenge these laws, which clearly violate Supreme Court precedents. Why? Because they legitimately fear that the Court would not only validate these laws, as it did with respect to so-called “partial-birth abortion” statutes in 2007, but would use the occasion to partially overturn Roe v. Wade and other the other decisions that establish and protect the constitutional right to choose. And that’s with the current Supreme Court. There is zero doubt that the next Supreme Court opening filled by a Republican president will produce a Justice who will be at least as hostile to the right to choose as George W. Bush appointees Roberts and Alito.
Aside from fetal pain bills, anti-choicers, particularly after the 2010 elections, have succeeded in many states in enacting restrictions and conditions on abortion providers that have seriously eroded reproductive rights, particularly for poor women. In general, the anti-abortion movement is showing a degree of sophistication that indicates it has evolved beyond the days of bloody fetus posters and physical assaults on abortion providers.
And on abortion, unlike same-sex marriage, there are few if any signs that generational trends will greatly move public opinion in a more progressive direction; voters under thirty are at most only marginally more likely to be pro-choice than their parents, and evangelical conservative youth are, if anything, more devoted to the anti-choice cause than their elders. The right to choose remains fragile, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
That brings me to a final argument of Kazin’s: that the Christian Right is literally dying off, via the aging of its leaders and followers alike. You could, of course, argue that this is true of the entire Republican Party, which now relies disproportionately on older voters. Perhaps in the long run the future does belong to the progressive forces that showed such strong support among young and minority voters for Barack Obama in 2008. But it’s cold comfort in the short run, in which older voters remain significantly more likely to vote.
Yes, the warhorses of the Christian Right are showing their age, but a younger generation of culture warriors, some more radical than their elders, are just beginning to come into view. The Christian Right has been buried many times by secular observers since its advent as a powerful political movement in the late 1970s. It’s far too early to write yet another obituary.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Sorting out cause and effect in political campaigns is not always simple. Some people look at John McCain’s nomination in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s success in Iowa and New Hampshire this year and see highly fortuitous demolition derbies. Others look at the same facts and intone “next-in-line” or some similar Iron Law of presidential politics.
So it’s not surprising there might be serious differences of opinion over the latest unlikely set of events in the 2012 contest: Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital, and the apparent revival of the former Speaker’s campaign in South Carolina.
The basic data points are all reasonably clear: immediately after finishing fourth in New Hampshire, Gingrich (with Rick Perry as his wing-man) starts blasting Romney as a job-killing corporate predator. His SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, infused with a fresh $5 million by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, put out a lurid trailer for a “film” about Bain Capital’s alleged atrocities against companies and workers with the evocative title: “When Mitt Romney Came To Town.” (The documentary is also dubbed in accompanying publicity material as “King of Bain.”) Said film, a 28-minute masterpiece of invective, was put up on the web, to the glee of Democrats astonished at this gift to their own general-election talking points. The conservative commentariat came down on Newt (and to a lesser extent Perry) like a ton of bricks, accusing him of treason against capitalism. Gingrich danced this way and that, at first seeming to regret this line of attack, then continuing it. Winning Our Future began airing 30- and 60-second snippets from its film in South Carolina, as part of a $3.4 million ad buy. Fact-checkers tore into the film, accusing it of various slurs against both Romney’s role in Bain and the specific accusations against the company’s practices.
What came next was surprising: New polls came out showing Gingrich with rising support in South Carolina, at the expense of both Romney and Iowa co-winner Rick Santorum. Then Gingrich suddenly announced he was asking his SuperPAC to edit or take down the film, and perhaps its ads, too, if they also prove to be inaccurate. (He also demanded that Mitt rein in his SuperPAC, which did untold damage to Newt in Iowa and is now heavily buying up ad time in South Carolina.) Winning Our Future dragged its feet on complying, saying it won’t act until Romney enumerates any inaccuracies and also answers some new questions about his relationship with Bain. As of this writing, the film is still up on the internet, and Winning Our Future has moved on to a new round of attack ads against Romney in South Carolina, focusing on his own dubious claims of job creation at Bain, and his “moderate” record as governor of Massachusetts.
One key imponderable is the extent to which actual South Carolina Republican primary voters have absorbed the back-and-forth maneuverings. Few have probably seen the full Winning Our Future film, which is the source of the most controversial accusations against Romney and Bain, and of the elite conservative backlash against Gingrich for countenancing it. And it’s not clear those who do see or hear about it will fully identify with its Michael Moore-ish message (though it’s not entirely the sort of thing a lefty would produce; it’s loaded with xenophobic flourishes in addition to “corporate-raider” bashing). Complicating the picture even more is that the most likely receptive audience for this message of anger at Wall Street predators are downscale white voters in the Piedmont and Pee Dee regions of South Carolina, who also harbor lots of Christian Right/Tea Party sentiments–that is to say, anti-Romney tendencies.
The crosscurrents in South Carolina are probably best illustrated by oracular comments from the king of Palmetto State conservatism, Senator Jim DeMint. DeMint (who has said he is not endorsing a candidate) joined the chorus of criticism of Gingrich for his supposed anti-free-enterprise message, and predicted a Romney win in his state. But within the same 24-hour span, he also, in the course of saying nice things about Ron Paul, suggested there is no room for “moderates” in today’s GOP.
Need still another complication for figuring out what’s going on? A group of Christian Right leaders convened in Texas by Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins has just endorsed Rick Santorum, after a multi-ballot vote in which Gingrich seems to have done initially well, while Perry–who hosted many of the same worthies in a highly publicized event over the summer–was largely dismissed as yesterday’s news.
So did Newt’s mini-surge in the polls result from his attacks on Romney, the SuperPAC’s vicious artistry, or perhaps just an inevitable consolidation of right-wing opposition to Romney’s nomination? And of equal importance, how much of the eventual outcome of the primary will be attributed to this saga? There remains another week of campaigning, and a televised debate. But regardless of the result, the attacks on Romney could play a major role, whether it’s via damage done to Romney or to the growing anger of conservative opinion-leaders against Gingrich for raising this toxic issue in the first place. So important lessons will be learned from this strange phase of this strange nomination contest. But which ones?