Was Michigan a Crippling Blow for Santorum?

I think it really was but first, let me tell you all the reasons why you might think I'm wrong.

First, Romney's victory in Michigan was not a blowout and he had to employ some messy backroom dealings to win the most delegates. Furthermore, it is likely that Romney will lose badly in Georgia, the biggest Super Tuesday prize in terms of delegates. Indeed, when you look at the Super Tuesday map, there are a few other delegate-rich states where Romney will likely lose including Oklahoma and Tennessee. Finally, the latest polls seem to indicate Romney is still just a couple of points behind in Ohio. Romney will surely win more delegates in Ohio because of the ineptness of the Santorum campaign but a popular-vote loss in Ohio would really look bad. As for the delegates, I suppose one would rather win more delegates than not but (and I've argued quite a bit with Jon Keller about this) the delegate count is really irrelevant in just the same way that the Super Delegates really didn't matter in the end in 2008. There was simply no way the person "perceived to win" more states and more delegates was going to have the nomination taken away from him (or her) in 2008 because of elites in the party and it isn't going to happen in 2012 either.

In addition to all of that, there is the possibility that Gingrich will bow out of the race after Super Tuesday because he'll only win his "home" state of Georgia and won't be very competitive elsewhere. A little more than a month ago, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck posted some data to support their argument that Gingrich or Santorum dropping out would not help the other. In other words, they argue quite a bit of the "not Romney" vote would go to Romney rather than just coalescing behind the last "not Romney" standing. Nate Silver presented at least some data to contradict Sides and Vavreck.

So, that's a lot of reasons to think Romney has not quite locked down the nomination. But here's why the race for the nomination really is over.

1) The Narrative - The way Romney won Michigan was more important than the fact that he only won by 3 points. He was trailing in most polls (by a lot in some) until about a week before the primary. Because Michigan is one of Romney's "home" states, the race there became a key test of his campaign. So, expectations were set low (ie, "he may lose") and it was viewed as important (ie, "he has to win"). By winning, even by a little bit, Romney emerged with something a lot more important than delegates. He emerged with momentum and the sense that his campaign had exceeded expectations.

2) Organization - Ohio is not the only place the Santorum campaign's lack of organization has hurt them. Virginia votes on Super Tuesday and both Gingrich and Santorum failed to get on the ballot there. More generally, the Santorum campaign has been remarkably inept in its messaging. Santorum himself has a tendency to say things that are controversial. In some senses, this is what many of his supporters like about him. But it would help a lot to have a real campaign organization that would put the candidate's comments in context or put the right spin on them and it would help to have a campaign organization that can respond to Romney's criticism's of the candidate. These are all but absent.

3) Gingrich - Does Gingrich leave the race after Super Tuesday? My prediction is that he won't. Alabama and Mississippi vote one week later on March 13. I'm not a psychologist but Newt Gingrich's ego doesn't need much in the way of evidence to convince him America fundamentally needs him. His "big" win in Georgia might be enough and, if Santorum does even a little worse than expected on Tuesday, Gingrich will have even more reason to believe he is the alternative to Romney everyone has been waiting for. I know this is silly. But it is really how Gingrich thinks. He's silly.

4) Money - You may have heard that Mitt Romney is independently wealthy. Even with his fundraising troubles, Romney has the money to go on and the others simply don't. They can go on in the technical sense but they don't have much money and that gap is going to grow after Super Tuesday as fewer and fewer people believe there is a path to victory for Santorum or Gingrich. How bad is the money situation for Gingrich? To date, he's still raised less money than Rick Perry ... who quit the race for the second time before South Carolina and endorsed Gingrich. How bad is the money situation for Santorum? Even accounting for the $4.5M he's raised so far in the first quarter of 2012, he's still raised less money than Michele Bachmann and about the same amount as Jon Huntsman ... who quit the race after New Hampshire because nobody outside of New Hampshire supported him. The trickle of money Gingrich and Santorum were raising is going to dry up further after Tuesday.

I'm not saying Santorum (or Gingrich as I've stated above) will drop out after Tuesday. But the race is likely to be effectively over. And, when we look back, I think it will be the case that Michigan was where the race really ended. Before Michigan, Romney was in some trouble and there was a lot of discussion of whether someone else would jump in the race if Romney was defeated there. After Michigan, Romney has been viewed as back in the driver's seat and he followed up with a win in Washington where polls suggested he was losing just a week and a half ago. The worst-case scenario (losing Ohio by a small margin) on Tuesday still has Romney winning most of the states and the vast majority of delegates across all 10 states. There is simply not likely to be any more oxygen for Santorum or Gingrich.

Post-Florida

Nobody really ever comes back from Florida, do they?

Gingrich will lose in Florida, the question is by how much? It is a bad sign that the most recent poll to include cell phones in their sample (NBC/WSJ) has Romney up by 15. I still think it won't be quite that bad and Gingrich will lose by 9 points or so.

Gingrich has life after Florida. He seems to lead in national polls (I still don't trust Gallup very much) and he seems to be tied or leading in other states like Arizona, Michigan, and Minnesota. A win in one or more of those states could help him get to Super Tuesday when some southern states vote that Gingrich could win. So what explains the disparity between Florida and the rest of the country? I've never quite bought into the "debates" argument. Everyone thinks the debates made Gingrich in South Carolina and broke him in Florida. But his movement was underway before those debates in both cases. And, if the debates were driving this, why wouldn't his numbers be moving similarly in other states?

I think it is the negative ads pounding Newton in Florida (and previously in Iowa) that are causing the movement there. Mitt can replicate this elsewhere. But it becomes harder to do on Super Tuesday.

All this is not to say that I think Gingrich can beat Romney in the long run. He can't. But he can make it last ... at least until baseball starts.

Newt-ered

The polling data suggests that Newt has not only peaked but he is almost certainly behind in Florida. Nate Silver compiles the data here.

This is not hard to explain. Newt was leading for a few days and took his foot off the pedal. He scaled back the attacks on Romney, he tried to Bruce Banner it at the debate, and he unveiled a ridiculous policy proposal to build a permanent lunar base. He got Newt-ered.

Thursday, Newt has a shot to get back to the red meat attacks on Romney (and, more importantly, the media) that helped him win South Carolina. If he plays it cool Thursday, he's going to lose Florida. Simple as that.

Get angry Newt. Get very angry.

Spoiler Alert

Newt's victory in South Carolina was good for the news media and good for Democrats who enjoy seeing intra-Republican squabbling, but not a sign that Gingrich will become the 2012 Republican nominee for president.

There are only two realistic possibilities going forward for the Republicans. Either they will nominate Romney, or they will nominate a moderate to be named later in a brokered national convention. The Republican Party is presently embroiled in a battle for control between its ideologues and its political establishment. Thanks to the new "wild west" campaign finance regime created by Citizens United the nomination process has become the battle field for this intra-party struggle. The key advantage of establishment partisans in nomination battles past was that their candidates could outlast the ideologues by using electability as an increasingly useful way to sap ideological candidates of momentum and resources.

In 2012, the ideological right can afford to push a candidate all the way to the convention. However, I don't think they can prevent the establishment from beating them, one way or another, at the convention. Nonetheless, Newt or Santorum will likely go all the way in hopes of forcing the nominee to give them something meaningful, like a Vice Presidential nominee.

Reviewing South Carolina and Previewing Florida

One way to look at the signficance of what happened in South Carolina last night is to look at my predictions for South Carolina, where they were off, and what that tells us about where the race is headed.

I pegged Gingrich at 37% and he got 40% of the vote. It seems those polls that were showing Gingrich still surging on Friday night and Saturday were correct. But to really understand the depth and meaning of this defeat for Romney, you have to consider that BOTH Gingrich and Santorum overperformed my prediction (and Nate Silver's for that matter). In other words, what I suggested might happen ("some Santorum voters may defect to Gingrich") to drive Gingrich to a bigger victory is NOT what caused the blowout. Instead, some conservative voters, tea party voters, etc., defected from Romney to both Gingrich and Santorum. I have seen many analyses suggest this morning that Gingrich won because conservative voters were "coalescing" behind Gingrich. That's not quite true. It is more accurate to say that conservative voters are coalescing "against Romney." Many are moving to Gingrich. But some moved to Santorum, who received 17% (I had predicted 15%, Silver had him at 14%).

In sum, South Carolina was more a rejection of Romney by conservatives than an endorsement of Gingrich. Among the 36% of South Carolina Primary voters who described themselves as "very conservative," Gingrich got 48% and Romney got 19%. But just imagine if these "very conservative" voters had, in fact, "coalesced" around Gingrich as some have suggested. What I didn't mention was that Santorum got 23% of these "very conservative" voters. Assuming those voters break out on a 2.5 to 1 Gingrich to Romney ratio as they were distributed if it were a head-to-head matchup, and Gingrich's lead is 62% to 26%. And guess what? Romney didn't do well among the 32% who described themselves as "somewhat conservative" either (Gingrich won 41% to 30% there).

Now take that math to Florida. Yes, Romney has more money and yes, some 200,000 voters have already cast ballots in Florida and that is an advantage for Romney. But Florida is a closed primary (unlike South Carolina) and, in 2008, 61% of Florida Republican Primary voters described themselves as "conservative." This is not too short of the 68% of South Carolina voters who described themselves as either "very conservative" or "somewhat conservative." The turf is a little better for Romney but not enough to make up for a deficit of the size we saw in South Carolina. Romney needs the deck to be shuffled. So what does he do?

This morning, Romney announced he will be releasing his 2010 tax returns on Tuesday. This is not going to be good for Romney but he doesn't have good options at this point on his tax returns. The right move for Romney would have been to release 10 years worth of his returns a year ago. He can't go back and fix that mistake now. The best thing now is to get everything out there that he can and take his lumps as soon as possible so that he can get past it as soon as possible. Why he's only releasing one year of returns is beyond me though. Better to get everything out there right away and deal with it. Also, releasing a flood of material will allow at least some of the bad details to get buried under the really bad details. A drip, drip, drip of releases only extends and highlights the narrative.

I had said a few days ago that Mitt Romney's campaign team was guilty of campaign malpractice. Last night, on MSNBC, one commentator suggested that Romney's team should have had a discussion and an answer on the tax returns question a year ago. Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign manager from 2008, chimed in that it was a discussion they should have had "FIVE years ago!" He's right.

Republicans are really in between a rock and a hard place right now. Mitt is the rock ... stiff, inflexible, sinking, and apparently unable to adjust. Newt is the hard place ... the nominee the very conservative wing of the Party seems to want and the nominee that would SURELY lose in the Fall and probably in a big landslide.

At a minimum, Romney is going to expend a lot of resources and has to find a way to win conservatives over. That will mean tacking more to the right and alienating independents at least temporarily. At worst, a Romney loss in Florida will lead to unmitigated panic in the GOP to find an electable alternative to Gingrich.