Much has been made lately of the inevitability of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination for President. With one alternative after another rising to the heights and then descending into irrelevance, the assumption is that eventually Republicans will come to the conclusion that they must concede the race to the former Massachusetts governor.
The logic goes something like this: Even as Bachmann, Perry, and Cain each rose to prominence and thereafter declined, by the time of the Iowa Caucuses, even Newt Gingrich will have been found wanting. With the conservative vote divided, Gov. Romney will win the Caucuses boosting him to victory in New Hampshire and thereby ending all opposition to his nomination.
Romney could very well win Iowa. Certainly the caucuses are perhaps the most uncertain part of the process at this point. It is said that no Republican has ever been nominated for president who hasn't first won either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire Primary. But at the same time every Republican nominee has also won South Carolina. Even if Romney does win Iowa, he has been consistently either a weak second and frequently third in the state. If we assume he wins Iowa, the first and second runners up, believing New Hampshire to be a foregone conclusion, will skip to South Carolina. Are we to believe South Carolina voters will forfeit the nomination decision to Iowa and New Hampshire? In fact, Romney came in fourth there in 2008.
Now, this would be an upset for sure, by virtue of being unexpeted, but the race from that point could actually get pretty rough for Romney. Let's assume Gingrich is the winner in S.C.. Romney's political base in 2008 was actually quite limited. Though he did come in second in the most populous states to McCain, he came in 3rd in most of the South. He only won 3 primaries in the whole country: his father's state of Michigan, his home state of Massachusetts, and Utah, the HQ of his Mormon faith. The rest of his base consisted of a multitude of small state caucuses.
After South Carolina comes Florida. Newt is currently at almost 50% in Florida in several polls. If you look at the calendar this year, if Romney loses Florida he would be on the defensive for an entire month in states he carried 4 years ago. If Newt were to pick off a few caucuses, Romney would begin to look like yesterday's news. Texas and Virginia will be battlegrounds on Super Tuesday. If no candidate wins a majority in Texas, the delegates are allocated proportionally, so Romney could survive. If Newt gets a majority however, thereby winning all of Texas' delegates, Gingrich's lead could be insurmountable. Without a major win since New Hampshire, Romney might be finished at that point.
In fact, without winning Florida, Romney would have to do what no candidate has ever been able to do (not even Reagan in '76), which is win a come from behind victory in states currently towards the end of the calendar: Pennsylvania and New York in April, and California and Ohio in June. And he'd have to win all of them.
So the odds are, even if Romney wins in Iowa, whoever comes in second will win South Carolina and quickly gain a lead which Romney will not be able to overcome.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Strength from Disunity
In his piece for Real Clear Politics yesterday, Tony Blankley (Newt Gingrich's former Chief of Staff) made, for the one millionth time, a case for Conservative solidarity that is quite frankly specious. Not because unity isn't a necessity in winning elections, but because submerging the inherent conflict between the party's establishment and it's political base undermines it's ability to form a lasting, "insuperable," majority.
To understand the fallacy of Mr. Blankley's argument one has to properly understand the conflict within the party. Mr. Blankley and too many other conservartive pundits declare there is somehow a divide between what are termed "Social," conservatives and those defined as, "Economic," conservatives. Except within intellectual circles, as far as I know, this conflict does not exist. Not really. No, the divide is between the Conservative base (which is overwhelmingly so in a social as well as an economic sense) and the Republican establishment whose commitment to either strain is more rhetorical than real.
Caught in between these two factions are the Evangelicals. Americans who have come to be identified more and more exclusively with the Republican Party by the so-called, "Mainstream Media," but who as recently as thirty years ago were at least as likely to be Democrats voting for Jimmy Carter as Republicans for Ronald Reagan. In fact, if you read periodicals from the 1980 election (in which Republicans gained a Senate Majority) most of the GOP candidates for state and congressional offices that year downplayed the role of the so-called Moral Majority. They put them at arms length.
The origin of the social vs economic conservative myth started after Reagan left the White House. As it turns out, even though Reagan won a substantially greater portion of the Evangelical vote than his Republican predecessors, he didn't go much further than rhetoric himself in addressing their concerns.
So when it came time to nominate someone to succeed Reagan, Evangelical Republicans pushed for one of their own: Virginia televangelist, the Reverend Pat Robertson. Mr. Robertson did surprisingly well in the primary contest of 1988 coming in second in the Iowa Caucuses and actually winning in Michigan, before getting lost in the battle between Senate Leader Bob Dole and Reagan's Vice President and self-proclaimed heir-apparent George H. W. Bush (the father of 9-11 era George W. Bush). At this point the Vice President, with the help of his recently, "born-again," son, astutely cultivated Robertson's supporters and completely wiped Dole off the Super Tuesday map. He didn't win a single state and soon conceded the nomination to the man who would become President. Evangelicals were highly indebted to Mr. Bush for bringng them into the mainstream of Republican politics and flocked to the party in droves.
This is where the myth got its start. Having more to do with the lack of cultivation under Reagan than any philosophical difference with Reagan supporters, the myth of Evangelical exclusion came to be used by the party establishment to regain control of the GOP as Reagan accolytes failed to stake a claim to his mantle.
There really is no philosophical contradiction between the Evangelical faith and Reagan conservatism and there is no evidence in recent history that competition within the Republican Party over philosophy or the purity of it's commitment to Reagan's principles has endangererd the party or been the cause of its recent defeats, starting with Mr. Bush's loss to Bill Clinton.
It wasn't Pat Buchanan's culture war (which Mr. Bush didn't really subscribe to) that doomed his re-election. Only a year before, the President had successfully executed the defeat of Sadaam Hussein in Kuwait and presided over the ultimate demise of the 70-Year Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Polls in 1991 put him so far ahead, all the Democrats' leading candidates for President declined to run. Consequently, it was left to the man from Hope, Arkansas to make their case. No, it was Mr. Bush's failure to articulate a compelling conservative vision for his re-election, now that his skills as a Cold Warrior seemed no longer required, that determined his defeat. (This sheds a little light on why America returned to Iraq so soon after leaving it.)
Those, like Mr. Blankley, would insist, that disunity caused by opposition from Mr. Buchanan and then Ross Perot cost Mr. Bush his re-election. That if only democracy had been curtailed, he'd have beaten Mr. Clinton. While this would have been convenient for the former President, America doesn't work that way. At least not yet. And the lack of compelling conservative candidates decades since belies the accusation that conservatives at the base of the party are the cause of its woes.
To understand the fallacy of Mr. Blankley's argument one has to properly understand the conflict within the party. Mr. Blankley and too many other conservartive pundits declare there is somehow a divide between what are termed "Social," conservatives and those defined as, "Economic," conservatives. Except within intellectual circles, as far as I know, this conflict does not exist. Not really. No, the divide is between the Conservative base (which is overwhelmingly so in a social as well as an economic sense) and the Republican establishment whose commitment to either strain is more rhetorical than real.
Caught in between these two factions are the Evangelicals. Americans who have come to be identified more and more exclusively with the Republican Party by the so-called, "Mainstream Media," but who as recently as thirty years ago were at least as likely to be Democrats voting for Jimmy Carter as Republicans for Ronald Reagan. In fact, if you read periodicals from the 1980 election (in which Republicans gained a Senate Majority) most of the GOP candidates for state and congressional offices that year downplayed the role of the so-called Moral Majority. They put them at arms length.
The origin of the social vs economic conservative myth started after Reagan left the White House. As it turns out, even though Reagan won a substantially greater portion of the Evangelical vote than his Republican predecessors, he didn't go much further than rhetoric himself in addressing their concerns.
So when it came time to nominate someone to succeed Reagan, Evangelical Republicans pushed for one of their own: Virginia televangelist, the Reverend Pat Robertson. Mr. Robertson did surprisingly well in the primary contest of 1988 coming in second in the Iowa Caucuses and actually winning in Michigan, before getting lost in the battle between Senate Leader Bob Dole and Reagan's Vice President and self-proclaimed heir-apparent George H. W. Bush (the father of 9-11 era George W. Bush). At this point the Vice President, with the help of his recently, "born-again," son, astutely cultivated Robertson's supporters and completely wiped Dole off the Super Tuesday map. He didn't win a single state and soon conceded the nomination to the man who would become President. Evangelicals were highly indebted to Mr. Bush for bringng them into the mainstream of Republican politics and flocked to the party in droves.
This is where the myth got its start. Having more to do with the lack of cultivation under Reagan than any philosophical difference with Reagan supporters, the myth of Evangelical exclusion came to be used by the party establishment to regain control of the GOP as Reagan accolytes failed to stake a claim to his mantle.
There really is no philosophical contradiction between the Evangelical faith and Reagan conservatism and there is no evidence in recent history that competition within the Republican Party over philosophy or the purity of it's commitment to Reagan's principles has endangererd the party or been the cause of its recent defeats, starting with Mr. Bush's loss to Bill Clinton.
It wasn't Pat Buchanan's culture war (which Mr. Bush didn't really subscribe to) that doomed his re-election. Only a year before, the President had successfully executed the defeat of Sadaam Hussein in Kuwait and presided over the ultimate demise of the 70-Year Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Polls in 1991 put him so far ahead, all the Democrats' leading candidates for President declined to run. Consequently, it was left to the man from Hope, Arkansas to make their case. No, it was Mr. Bush's failure to articulate a compelling conservative vision for his re-election, now that his skills as a Cold Warrior seemed no longer required, that determined his defeat. (This sheds a little light on why America returned to Iraq so soon after leaving it.)
Those, like Mr. Blankley, would insist, that disunity caused by opposition from Mr. Buchanan and then Ross Perot cost Mr. Bush his re-election. That if only democracy had been curtailed, he'd have beaten Mr. Clinton. While this would have been convenient for the former President, America doesn't work that way. At least not yet. And the lack of compelling conservative candidates decades since belies the accusation that conservatives at the base of the party are the cause of its woes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)