PJ: The GOP race is tiring just like a nasty mini-series where you don't really like any of the characters. But unlike a fictitious TV drama none of these characters can change into something akin to a hero who you can cheer on. Sadly, none of them ever get written out either making this particular series one of the worst in US history.
The Economist
Mitt Romney dodges a bullet
A TRICKLE of Democrats arrived to vote in Michigan’s Republican primary yesterday, as permitted under the state’s “open” primary rules. They came to defeat the presumed Republican front-runner, Mitt Romney, whom they perceive as the most dangerous opponent to Barack Obama, and boost Rick Santorum, a social conservative who they think would be easier to beat. In what became quite a nasty contest, with plenty of mudslinging all round, Mr Santorum encouraged the ruse.
Despite it, Mr Romney snagged a modest victory in Michigan, beating Mr Santorum by 41% to 38%, as well as romping home in Arizona, by 47% to 27%. A loss for Mr Romney in Michigan might well have been terminal. Not only did he grow up there, his father was a popular former governor. But Mr Romney also badly needed to demonstrate his appeal to the Midwestern voters who will be crucial in any general election. Scoring such a narrow victory means that he failed to do so very convincingly.
Michigan is a big and diverse place, with everything from the kind of rich suburbs that Mr Romney grew up in to grim, distressed industrial cities such as Flint, Pontiac and Detroit. Little wonder then that it is a vital swing state, with a useful 16 votes in the electoral college that actually chooses the president. On the face of it, Mr Romney’s stronger economic credentials might seem to commend him to voters looking for a turnaround for America. But matters are more complex in a state where the car companies are crucial—and where many voters believe that Mr Romney wished that their industry would simply go bankrupt, rather than get money from the government.
Exit polls showed that Mr Romney’s Michigan voters were older, wealthier and better educated, whereas Mr Santorum won poorer voters without a college education. In other words, when Mr Santorum called the president a “snob” for wanting to send everybody in America to college, he was making a naked, and rather successful, appeal to class resentment.
While Republicans more usually divide on social issues, says Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, in Michigan the election saw a strong class divide. Factors that played poorly for Mr Romney included his great wealth and low tax rate, his inability to connect with ordinary voters (including a gaffe about his wife’s “couple” of Cadillacs) and the fact that he comes from a more predatory side of the business world—the part that buys up companies and lays off workers. His decision to hold one of his main rallies in a vast stadium, in which the paltry turnout looked even paltrier, did not help either.
Mr Romney now heads towards March 6th, when ten states are due to vote, in better shape than he was a couple of weeks ago, when he was facing the prospect of a loss in Michigan on the back of a triple-state loss to Mr Santorum on February 7th. But he is far from being in the commanding position he originally hoped to occupy by now, and he had to spend a lot of cash to hold on to a state he would once have expected to win easily.
Of the ten Super Tuesday states by far the biggest prize is Ohio, Michigan’s next-door neighbour, with its 18 electoral-college votes and a reputation for being the great presidential bellwether. The fact that Mr Romney had to struggle so hard for such a modest victory in Michigan is a real worry for him here, where the demographic make-up is similar.
Other problems loom, too. Even more than Michigan, Ohio is home to a sizeable evangelical Protestant movement and also to many Catholics, two groups to whom Mr Santorum, with his firm views about such mortal perils as contraception and homosexuality, can easily appeal. And, just like Michigan, it has a lot of fed-up blue-collar workers and ex-workers, in the gritty north and east of the state, to whom Bain Capital, which Mr Romney used to run, is not an object of affection.
Mr Romney’s “Rolls-Royce” organisation is also a bit of a myth, in Ohio at least. His team did not open their headquarters in Columbus, the state capital, until February 24th, and he only has a dozen paid workers there (more than his rivals, admittedly). He is also at loggerheads with the Republican machine that surrounds the state’s governor, John Kasich, after he failed to support Mr Kasich’s plans last year for reforms to public-sector pay. Mr Romney’s recent trip to the state was a damp squib, and Mr Santorum is comfortably ahead in the only two recent Ohio polls, by 7% and 11%.
Even if his superior ground-work and funds for TV advertising allow Mr Romney to eke out a narrow victory, Ohio, like most other states voting at this stage of the proceedings, is awarding its delegates on a complicated partly-proportional basis. Because of the way such mechanisms work, Mr Santorum may have got as many delegates in Michigan as Mr Romney did, despite having “lost” there.
Mr Romney’s difficulties in Ohio, though, are as nothing compared to the drubbing he can expect on March 6th in the South. Three of the Southern Super Tuesday states—Oklahoma, Tennessee and Georgia—are likely to be a straight fight between Mr Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. (No-one will pay too much attention to the fourth, Virginia, because neither Mr Gingrich nor Mr Santorum was sufficiently well-organised to get himself on the ballot there.)
Ron Paul is the fourth candidate in the race. But his pacifist-tinged libertarianism plays poorly in the South, as does the north-eastern patrician conservatism of Mr Romney, who is failing to make an impression in Southern polls, despite a host of impressive endorsements from Republican establishment figures there.
Mr Gingrich, who represented suburban Atlanta in Congress for 20 years, enjoys a slight lead in Georgia’s polls, while Mr Santorum has a commanding one in both Oklahoma and Tennessee. That may change, though not to Mr Romney’s advantage. Mr Santorum has not yet won a Southern state; Mr Gingrich is an exceptionally skilled retail politician down South, who triumphed in South Carolina one angry speech at a time. After weeks of attacking Messrs Romney and Obama, Mr Gingrich has only recently turned his fire on Mr Santorum, calling him a “big labour Republican” (unions have a strong presence in Mr Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania). Mr Gingrich embarked on a two-day bus tour of Georgia this week.
Tony Shipley, a state representative who is chairman of Mr Gingrich’s Tennessee campaign, says he may do the same in his state. Mr Santorum’s rise in Tennessee’s polls, like his rise nationally, has been steep but shallow, and it remains to be seen next week whether he can survive a full-court Southern press from Mr Gingrich.
Primaries in Alabama and Mississippi follow Super Tuesday by a week; but whether it is Mr Gingrich or Mr Santorum who prevails there, an unpleasant geographical split looms for the Republicans. Mr Romney runs most strongly in coastal states, such as Massachusetts, which votes on Super Tuesday but which Republicans are unlikely to win in a general election, and in states with heavy Mormon populations, like Nevada, which he won handsomely. (His triumph in Florida on January 31st is an exception to this rule.) He does poorly in the Midwestern heartland and in the Republican stronghold down South, even though he will presumably win Virginia next week by default.
So all the indications are, increasingly, that the nomination contest will be a long and bitter affair. That can only benefit Mr Obama, whose approval ratings continue to rise. This is mainly due to a steadily improving economy: but the way that the rise of Mr Santorum has forced Mr Romney to talk about contraception instead of jobs, and both of them viciously to attack each other, has not helped either.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/republican-race-0
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