Recently, the political interwoobs have coalesced into two distinct camps of thought with respect to the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination campaign. These thoughts are “Mitt Romney is going to win it eventually because nobody else can” and “Mitt Romney cannot win it because the base hates him.”
The pro-Romney argument (inasmuch as any of these arguments can be called “pro-Romney,” because most of the people advancing it don’t actually think that highly of Romney beyond “well, he’s not insane, I suppose”) is simple: the party elites are coalescing around Romney for lack of a better option so he will have the most money and, as in 2008, will be able to go the distance for as long as he thinks he can win, and Romney knows this is his last kick at the can because the GOP is not going to get more moderate any time soon. And to be fair to Romney, it’s not a terrible argument. He’s got about twenty to twenty-five percent of the primary vote, making him a leading candidate.
But I am more inclined towards the anti-Romney argument, based simply on polling numbers. With the exception of the Rasmussen poll which we can say is an outlier, Romney has never gotten more than 25% support in a poll. We have seen Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump and Rick Perry and now Herman Cain all top the polls and Romney has consistently been in second or third place. It doesn’t matter what happens: as each of these potential candidates implodes because they are crazy or inept or choose not to run, their support evaporates, but Romney gets none of it as the disenchanted GOP base abandons their hopes for Candidate A and moves on to whomever is next. (At this point, when Cain inevitably fucks up – and he’s come close a couple of times – I think they’re left with Rick Santorum.) These people simply do not want to vote for Mitt Romney.1
If you look at it like this, then Mitt Romney cannot win the nomination. If his support within the party is capped at 30% (and that appears to be on the generous side even if you include everybody still quixotically supporting Jon Huntsman), what has to happen for him to win is that the remainder of the vote has to be split at least three ways and preferably four for the majority of the campaign. But that’s not going to happen: candidates will drop out as they start running out of money, and those candidates’ support will bleed to other not-Romneys. At some point, and probably before Super Tuesday, a not-Romney will have more support than Romney does. At that point, Romney loses.
The response to this argument is “Rudy Guiliani John McCain 2008 nobody knows anything!” And it’s true: politics is weird sometimes, and nobody knows anything for sure, and Mitt Romney has a ton of money behind him and money can do a lot of things, and yes, John McCain won the nomination in 2008 with worse poll numbers at a comparable point than Romney has now. But McCain’s field was different: there was no presumptive anti-McCain movement in the base, and McCain won two of four of the “first four” states including an extremely conservative one (South Carolina) and a fairly moderate one (New Hampshire), making him all things to all people, and in 2008 the GOP base was less conservative than it was now.
And if you assume that whichever Republican wins Iowa will have an advantage in the following primaries, which they probably will, then that is bad for Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney is not going to win Iowa – he’s skipping the state and starting his campaign in New Hampshire, where he can win. The not-Romney that wins Iowa will drain support from the other not-Romneys,2 and stand an excellent chance of winning South Carolina (another early state in which Romney will probably do poorly), and if they win both will become the presumptive not-Romney. And Mitt Romney can’t win if there is a single triumphant not-Romney, because the GOP base doesn’t want to vote for him.
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Two thoughts on this:
“But that’s not going to happen: candidates will drop out as they start running out of money, and those candidates’ support will bleed to other not-Romneys.”
My thought was that all Romney has to do is finish second in the states that he can’t win. It’s not about winning states, it’s about winning delegates.
Furthermore, I suspect that as long as there’s a chance that a not-Romney might win, there will be someone willing to step up and throw money at him/her. I suspect we’re going to have a two/three/four-way race in the Republican party for a little while, a ramshackle race where the not-Romneys are running their campaigns on chewing gum and rubber bands.
There will be a search for some sort of knight in shining armor, some charismatic, inspirational not-Romney that no one has heard of yet. This will be about as successful as Fred Thompson was. In the end, everyone will fold their cards in disgust and it will collapse in a debacle of a Republican nominating convention. (Or at least, it does in my fever dreams.)
Romney’s probably still the front-runner, considering his resources and network.
It’s not clear that he’s going to lose Iowa, as the anti-Romney vote there can be split by Cain, Bachmann, Perry and Gingrich. He could easily win with the same percentage of the vote he got in 2008. And if he wins Iowa, he’ll get a lot of publicity out of it.
Romney also seems to be the second choice for many voters. According to a recent Public Policy poll, while Cain beats Romney in a one-on-one match-up amongst primary voters 48-36, this is before Cain gets the scrutiny that Perry and Romney have had. Romney also beats Perry 48-38, where he lost 37-49 a month ago. It does suggest that Romney can beat a triumphant not-Romney.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/10/cain-leads-nationally.html
As for the McCain comparison, I remember from conservative blogs that there was an anti-McCain sentiment in 2008 (some didn’t like the idea of a maverick and saw him as too soft on immigration and other issues). While McCain eventually won South Carolina, he did it with just under a third of the vote.
Brokered convention time!
At this point, it’s going to come down to two things: how many candidates drop out before the first contests, and how many people have Romney as a second (or more realistically third) choice.
Romney is helped by candidates withdrawing only up to a point; fewer candidates means all of his PACs can start throwing negative ads at a smaller pool of opponents. Campaigns won’t go on the air in significant force until after the November elections, and before the media buys start polling is like throwing darts. Eventually he’s got to start picking up some support from people who drop out–people just aren’t going to vote for Huntsman, and there are some people who will latch onto any alternative to Herman Cain for some strange reason, possibly melatonin related. *cough* Also, I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone cut a deal for the VP slot or cabinet appointment in exchange for a well timed withdrawal and endorsement. Bachmann may not be a leading candidate right now, but her saying “President Romney will put me in charge of dismantalling Obamacare” will draw him some votes.
But if too many people drop out, particularly without some sort of deal, there is a chance for unified support behind an anti-Romney. I think four is his magic number going into Iowa, and three into New Hampshire. He may not be organizing much in Iowa, but he’ll still get some support even if its only a couple delegates (there’s probably some leftover Pawlenty infrastructure that will help him here), and I’d bet his agents are going to be throwing money around to make everyone else look bad.
He’s got an advantage in NH being so close to Massachusetts, but the NH Republican was kind of reactionary before the Republican party went bugfuck crazy, so it’s not as big an advantage as it could be. He needs someone to drop out between Iowa and NH, otherwise his win will be diluted too much to be meaningful. If someone wins Iowa decisively and takes second or third in NH, they’ll probably be in the delegate lead. Again, look for major media buys by “third parties” going hard negative on the rest of the field.
South Carolina is not friendly territory, certainly, but Nevada is pretty much locked up for him judging by past campaigns, so that should offset anything other than a disastrous (4th or lower) SC performance.
There are two minor wild cards and one major wild card out there. The first is the schedule: if Florida or someone tries to jump the queue ahead of SC, and the candidates don’t get bullied into officially “ignoring” it, the media narrative could change substantially.
The second is the structure of the contests. Most Republican contests have traditionally been winner-take-all; the RNC has been pushing for proportional contests before April, and the first four are going along with that. But other states are already flaunting the RNC rules; if a winner-take-all contest jumps up in the schedule, or follows right on the heels of Nevada, it could vastly change things.
The final wild card is Tim Pawlenty. He’s been making noises about how getting out when he did was a mistake; if he finds some money, gets back in, and recalls his supporters and staffers who mostly went to Romney, then he’s dead in the water in Iowa and has a major competitor in NH without the anti-Romeny appearing. I consider this a massively unlikely course of events, mind you, (and doomed to failure since his best staffers will have taken other jobs and won’t want to ruin their reputations by quitting) but it’s possible.
The thing is, Not-Romney is a position rather than a specific person, and they’re already running through the possibilities pretty quickly. Cain has no experience, Perry is Bush, Santorum is un-Googleable, and most of the other possibilities are merely crazy in one way or another. (Which is not to say that those candidates aren’t crazy as well, of course, but anyways.) At the current rate of fuckups, Cain, Santorum and roughly three more will have had their turn before the first primary. It seems improbable that Romney will still be in second place by then. To whom?
Even if Romney does win the nomination it’s still entirely possible that he will lose the general, due in part to a lack of enthusiasm by the Republican base.
If we look beyond the primaries this bodes ill for the general election.
Without a fired up base to come out and vote for him, and to be ringing doorbells and driving folks to the polls, it will be hard to win.
Then again Obama’s base is not exactly fired up after the last 3 years.
Will being not-Obama be enough to have the edge in enthusiasm?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to everyone who keeps saying that the delegates will be split and someone will have a lead, I thought that Republicans gave all the delegates to whoever won the election?
That is, whoever wins Iowa gets all the Iowa delegates, sim for NH. Did they finally change that, or no?
whoops, looks like i should read all the comments all the way through before I post. Ignore me.
The ironic thing is that Romney probably stands the best chance in the general, though he’s been linked so much to Obama (“Obamneycare” and all that) that even people who are angry at or disillusioned with the president and might actually be convinced to vote Republican probably see him as just more of the same. If Romney doesn’t get it, I’d Obama has another term pretty much locked up unless the Republicans double, no, triple down on their usual lock-step propaganda tactics, which I honestly think might finally be the breaking point for a lot of the folks who have stuck with the Republicans so far.
Another factor probably holding Romney back among Republicans is the fact that he’s a Mormon, who the hardcore right-wing fundamentalists see as a crazy cult. It’s a shame, but it’s definitely a case of the Repubs hoisting themselves by their own petard.
The nomination will hopefully come down to Romney or Herman Cain.
Neither of these will be able to garner the votes needed to beat Obama since the majority of the conservative base will not vote for either a Mormon or a Black person.
Mitt Romney is a pissant windbag that was pro-war but against sending his kids over to fight in it, but at least he believes in socialized health care.
Herman Cain is an ambulance chaser with the metaphoric rhetoric of a televangelist. First real interview he takes should expose this.
Absolutely worst fucking scenario is Rick Perry coming out of nowhere and getting the nomination. There simply aren’t enough extreme self-serving assholes in the USA to nominate Wrong Paul.
As crazy as it (and he) is, I would not be surprised if Cain does get the nod.
My scenario is that the Powers That Be decide this is not their year, so they use their resources to get even more house and senate seats. Cain gets to be the sacrificial candidate so the Republicans can go,”See! We’re not racist! We have one of them colored folk too!”
To get the nod, you need to win primaries. Cain will never win primaries.
Honestly, I see Bachmann taking the candidacy. Everybody else has significant primary dealbreakers. Bachmann’s a crazy idiot, but that’s a general election dealbreaker, not a primary one.
I honestly think Romney’s hopes rest solely on convincing the GOP voters that he, and he alone, can win the General. Because they don’t want to vote for Romney, but they’d rather have him than 4 more of Obama. He needs to highlight the (mostly obvious) weaknesses the other candidates will have with swing voters.
This rather assumes that people currently leaning towards individual representatives of the not-romney camp won’t shift over to Romney as their candidates drop out.
For instance, I can’t see Perry or Bachmann voters switching to Cain because of Cain’s interesting decision to fight a republican primary on the principle that he’s “blacker” than Obama, similarly Cain and Perry voters are unlikely to vote for a woman – it’s possible that Perry might pick up the spare Bachmann and Cain voters, but his tendency to actively argue against himself in debates might scupper that.
So we have three scenarios:
1) Rick Perry gets the not-romney votes after the other two drop out, winning the primary.
2) a three way not-romney split that leads to Romney picking up the majority of votes in enough states to win, but only barely.
3) The not-romney votes evaporate as the primaries go on and their particular candidates drop out, leading to Romney gradually becoming more powerful as the number of voters decreases, thereby making Romney the first homeopathic presidential candidate fielded by the republican party.
1. The Republicans have now switched their primaries to proportional delegates. That means even if Cain take 30% of Iowa and Romney takes 24%, letting Cain “win” Iowa, Romney still walks away with almost as many delegates as Romney.
2. Cain doesn’t just have vastly less money than Romney (half his current fund is a personal loan he made to his own campaign), he has almost no nationwide campaign staff. He doesn’t have ground staff and won’t have much beyond the first few primaries. Between money and staff he will be steamrolled by Florida, which at this point could be as early as January 31.
3. The 9-9-9 plan is ludicrous, unfeasible, laughable when examined with anyone with an economics degree and possibly stolen from SimCity.
4. In all likelihood, Cain isn’t angling to be president to begin with. He’s a businessman with no political electoral experience whatsoever and is smart enough to see how well it paid off for Palin and Huckabee. This isn’t about “Cain for President,” it’s about “Cain for lucrative talk show on Fox News.”
5. The media is simply bored and needs to find a story. And they can’t say that they’re just killing time for eight more weeks until Romney clearly takes the nomination. And Fox News won’t get good ratings having roundtable discussions about how upset their lunatic viewership faction are about this inevitability.
i) The United States has two choices: national universal healthcare; or national bankruptcy.
ii) Being the party that was against national healthcare is proven electoral poison for a generation or more.
Therefore, blah blah socialism whatever, the GOP needs to find a way to be backed into universal national healthcare.
It’ll be Romney. You think that it’s an accident that his critics haven’t made “RomneyCare” stick?
This. We are seeing a repeat of the ’08 primary shuffle and there’s a big question as to how the GOP will handle rogue states that try to leap frog each other. Democrats sanctioned Michigan delegates and that made a real mess of the vote-counting process at the end, as well as imperiling a swing state. Will Republicans just let Florida jump over everyone else? What will that do to Iowa or New Hampshire voters? Can Romney win Florida, and if not how will that affect his credibility? Will South Carolina move up it’s own primary?
Depending on which state goes first and which candidate is primed to win each state, this could have a heavy impact on Romney’s chances. If he gets the NH primary and FL and SC, he’ll be a lock. But if some screwball wins a big state because the anti-Romney vote comes out in force, he’ll look weak and that will kill his support down the road.
I mean, money twists a lot of arms. I’m betting Romney just buys the primary outright. But I’ve been wrong before.
I had a dream last night that I was at a sleepover at one of my coworkers’ homes. Usually ladies in their 30s don’t have sleepovers, or if they do I guess maybe it’s an oddly anachronistic code word in these slightly sexually liberated times. Anyway, about the time I took my my contacts out so I could get so sleep, I guess you were invited, and you started making fun of how thick my glasses were. Not cool, man, not cool. Eventually, instructors from the college we work at were bringing their whole classes to the sleepover. I’m not some weirdo internet stalker or anything, I only mention it because it sucks that you make fun of my glasses, and all I get in return is a post about Romney, basically reminding me of how he’s for sure going to win my state at least because even though we’re not nuts about Mormons here we love us some Romneys. Throw me a bone here. How about an alignment chart of kittens?
Cain now plans to ignore both Iowa and Florida. Also known as the states where every presidential candidate in modern history has had to win at least one of to secure the nomination.
Be glad you didn’t place any bets.
It’ll be Romney. The money boys and political operatives who run the party will look at him and see that he’s the only one who holds a hope in hell of beating Obama in the general election (everyone else Obama holds double-digit leads over) and they’ll throw their weight behind Romney…
And when they do, the long knives come out. Remember 2000, when the GOP establishment decided that Bush was their boy? By the time McCain came out of South Carolina, he was the father of an illegitimate black child that he’d had with a crack whore, and that was the closest they came to the truth. Nothing gets ugly like a Republican primary, and the “outsider” candidates will quickly find that it’s not just a case of the money drying up, it’s a case of the opposition researchers making them look like a combination of Dahmer, Manson, and Hitler’s love child with Karl Marx.
Personally, I agree with the other posters who think that 2012 will be the Republican version of 2004: The nominee will be a completely bland Establishment Product candidate (2004: Kerry, 2012: Romney). The GOP plan is to take the inevitable loss, let the shit fall on the winner, and then roll up in 2016 all “hey! We are not responsible for any of the bad stuff that happened! Therefore you should vote for our guy!” They see four more years of pain happening and they don’t *want* to have an “R” next to the President’s name for them.
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