UK: The GOP race continues

The Economist

The Republican nomination
No end in sight
There was something for all the contestants to hang on to on Super Tuesday. But Mitt Romney still looks like the eventual winner

“WE’RE counting up the delegates for the convention, and it looks good,” declared Mitt Romney on March 6th—“Super Tuesday”—the biggest single day in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. And so, up to a point, it did: Mr Romney, the front-runner, won six of the ten states holding primaries or caucuses, including a narrow victory in Ohio, the most fiercely contested. He performed just as well in terms of delegates to the Republican convention in August, where the nominee is formally selected, securing over half of those on offer. He now has well over twice as many delegates as his closest rival, Rick Santorum, and is over a third of the way towards the 1,144 needed to prevail. And yet it was still a lacklustre night, in many ways, for the presumed but unloved nominee.

Super Tuesday provides the leading candidate with a chance to deliver a knockout blow to his rivals. So it was for the Republicans in 2000 and 2008, at any rate, when George Bush and John McCain squared away the nomination. And so Mr Romney had hoped it would be again. Yet in the end the other three candidates all found reason to celebrate and persevere.

Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and Mr Romney’s main rival, won three states—North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee—and came within a percentage point, less than 11,000 votes out of 1.2m cast, of Mr Romney in Ohio. Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives who was once seen as the gravest threat to Mr Romney, won his home state of Georgia, the largest single prize of the night. And in Virginia, where bureaucratic obstacles kept all Mr Romney’s rivals off the ballot save Ron Paul, the laggard in the field, Mr Paul managed to win 40% of the vote.

Mr Romney prevailed in a creditable array of states, from Idaho, which is fiercely conservative, to Massachusetts, a liberal bastion where he served as governor for four years. According to exit polls, he won a clear majority of voters who were looking for the candidate best placed to win the general election and of those whose chief concern was the economy. His victory in Ohio is especially significant, both because Mr Santorum would have been massively bolstered by a win there and because it is a big swing state, with 18 electoral-college votes, that will be pivotal in November. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, and no Democrat has done it since Kennedy in 1960.

But the exit polls suggest that Mr Romney continues to struggle with supporters of the tea-party movement, with evangelical Christians and with those who describe themselves as “very conservative”. He has not yet won any Southern states, bar Florida and his notional ascendancy in Virginia. He seems to have done well in conservative spots in the West more out of religious than ideological affinity: a big share of Republican primary voters in that part of the country are Mormons, like Mr Romney. In short, Mr Romney has not yet won over the heart of his party.

Mr Romney’s limp performance was all the more striking because he and his backers outspent his rivals by a huge margin across the board. Mr Santorum claimed to have spent only one dollar for every 12 of Mr Romney’s in Ohio. That sounds like an exaggeration: most observers put the ratio at something more like four to one. Either way, though, Mr Santorum was fighting an uphill battle yet still nearly triumphed.

Perhaps more embarrassing, Mr Romney’s camp spent far more than Mr Santorum in Tennessee, but still went down to defeat. He even outspent Mr Gingrich in Georgia, yet he lost there by over 20 points. The gulf in spending, chiefly on negative advertisements, has allowed Mr Romney’s critics to argue that he is winning not by selling himself to voters but by using vast amounts of cash to smear his rivals over the airwaves. If he wins the nomination, they point out, he will not be able to repeat this trick since he is unlikely to enjoy such an overwhelming financial advantage.

The other candidates, rehearsing such arguments, all say that the race is far from over. They all gave defiant speeches on the night, trumpeting their achievements and vowing to fight on. Mr Santorum immediately began campaigning in Kansas, which is the next state to vote, on March 10th. Mr Gingrich has set his sights on Alabama and Mississippi, which vote three days later. None of these states looks like fertile territory for Mr Romney. Mr Paul, for his part, not only says he is staying in the race until the convention, but has never categorically ruled out running as an independent.

Please go to this link for the rest of the story:
http://www.economist.com/node/21549937