In Tuesday’s primaries, the underdog had a couple of important wins, and the front-runner came in third. We asked our panel of experts what the results mean for the campaign.
Hunter Baker
Rick Santorum had a good night on Super Tuesday. He had a better one on March 13, as he walked away with wins in both Alabama and Mississippi.
Romney ended up getting swept in his self-proclaimed “away” games. The losses hurt because of expectations that are hard for Romney’s team to manage. Some observers saw the potential in poll numbers for Romney to win these southern states and hungered for a decisive blow that could have freed Romney to turn his attention to President Obama full-time. A couple of third-place finishes are a deflating alternative. Never mind that the three top candidates were tightly clustered in both races. There’s only one winner in the public mind. That’s the surging Rick Santorum.
Worse for Romney is that just as his effort demonstrates some weakness, many suspect Santorum’s campaign is just getting geared up — and staffed up. Foster Friess looks as prescient with his political investment in Santorum as he has in the smart choices that have made him a near billionaire in the business world.
Mitt Romney continues to rely on proportionate-delegate math as he trudges relentlessly toward the convention, but the sense of inevitability is gone. He could arrive at the convention as the victor on extremely unsteady legs. Or, though the odds are against it, he may yet face a late summer meeting where some serious work still has to be done. And by the way, there is absolutely no romance or music in delegate math. Romney’s team can repeat it ad nauseam, but don’t expect the voters to go gaga for it.
Gingrich performed adequately, with a couple of second-place finishes where he should be at his strongest, but Rick Santorum is taking all the air out of the room for him. The speaker’s win in Georgia kept him alive, but his tank is running low. The guy pushing the lunar base needed to win the state with a Huntsville struggling to find a future in an era of low support for NASA.
Finally, the biggest loser (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) is Mike Huckabee. His decision to quit serious politics for a low-impact, but probably well-paying, turn in political broadcasting looks pretty poor in the light of the Republican contest so far. The former governor of Arkansas was the original king of ringing up votes with low dollars. And his tongue weighs in with a lot more silver than Rick Santorum’s. Huckabee’s irrelevance to the process represents a major wasted opportunity.
— Hunter Baker, an associate professor of political science at Union University, is the author of The End of Secularism and the forthcoming Political Thought: A Student’s Guide.
JAY COST
I think the primary results in Alabama and Mississippi are not going to change the basic narrative of the race. However, I do think they are culturally significant.
Juxtapose these several items.
On one hand, we have Public Policy Polling — a Democratic outfit that is under contract with Daily Kos and the SEIU — publishing polls that confirm the supposed backwardness of the Deep South: Voters down there think Obama is a Muslim and they don’t even believe in evolution! Similarly, Bill Maher sent Alexandra Pelosi (the House minority leader’s daughter) down to the Deep South to ask people what they thought about the 2012 race, and she filed a video report full of the typical stereotypes of the Deep South.
On the other hand, a Catholic just won the Alabama and Mississippi primaries.
The untold story among liberal media elites — the story that they categorically refuse to tell — is the cultural, economic, and social transformation of the American South over the last 50 years. A half century ago, it would have been utterly unthinkable for Alabama or Mississippi to vote for a Catholic Republican, yet that is precisely what they did on Tuesday. And while one might be tempted to respond that they had no Protestants on the ballot down there last night (except Ron Paul), I’d point out that in 1960 a plurality of electors in Alabama and Mississippi were “unpledged” rather than for JFK or Nixon.
Instead, the liberal response to these obvious signs of progress is to argue that the old Southern prejudices have simply become “sublimated” or “symbolic.” This proves that, as far as the South is concerned, northern liberals have set up a “heads we win, tails you lose” attitude toward Dixie, one that obscures the true strides the region has made.
So you can bet dollars to donuts that tomorrow nobody in the MSM will pause to appreciate just how far along the South has come in the last 50 years, just as nobody noticed in November 2010 when a majority-white district in South Carolina elected an African American, Tim Scott, to Congress, something that has not happened since Reconstruction.
But I will sure be smiling tomorrow.
— Jay Cost is author of the forthcoming Spoiled Rotten: The Story of How the Democratic Party Embraced Special Interests, Abandoned the Public Good, and Came to Stand for Everything It Once Opposed.
DAVID FRENCH
Late in the evening of Super Tuesday — moments after the networks called Ohio for Mitt Romney — I turned to my wife and said, “It’s all over but the agony.” In other words, the delegate math was too overwhelming and the primaries (particularly the big winner-take-all states) too stacked against Rick Santorum for him to win, but Romney’s victories weren’t decisive enough to drive Santorum from the race. Thus, we must still endure nights like last night, when narrow Santorum victories in heavily Evangelical states do exactly nothing to the delegate math but instead guarantee an even longer, more contentious primary.
Taken together, the races last night confirmed what we already knew: While Romney doesn’t win when the strong majority of voters are Evangelical, he’s still competitive. While Santorum is doing a lot with a little, his popular-vote and delegate totals lag dramatically. And Newt? Well, who knows? He could drop out, stay in, or stay in and call on his competitors to drop out.
It’s still over. Romney will march on to victory, but the day when we unite as a party and take on Barack Obama is kicked just a bit further down the road.
— David French is co-founder of Evangelicals for Mitt.
CHARLOTTE HAYS
What does one make of voters who say in the exit polls that they think Mitt Romney is the candidate most likely to beat Barack Obama, as half did last night, and then pull the lever for Rick Santorum?
I think the explanation is that Republican primary voters are giving way to their inner Democrat: They want a candidate with whom they can fall in love, who whispers sweet things to them. Rick Santorum was that man in Mississippi and Alabama last night.
And, speaking from Lafayette, La., where he was introduced as an honorary Cajun (not good news for “Grits” Romney), Santorum did deliver an excellent victory speech. Braced for braggadocio, I have to admit myself charmed. When he’s sunny, he’s good. His opener — “We did it again” — showed that great knack he sometimes has for the simple, just-right words to capture a moment. Romney had better hope that Newt doesn’t hate him enough to drop out of the race.
Although Romney will end up with about a third of the delegates that were up for grabs last night, he had a very bad night. It didn’t have to be that way. If it hadn’t been for a rumor that he had a strong shot at carrying Mississippi, he would have come out looking good. I have to admit that I fell for the rumor and was almost certain that Romney was going to carry my native state. There was a reason to think so: Unlike the rest of the country, Mississippi does have a Republican establishment; its heavy hitters had embraced Romney. But they didn’t get out the vote. Romney won a number of counties, and, if turnout had been heavier, he might have won Mississippi, proving beyond doubt that the guy from Grosse Point and Boston could win in the south, y’all.
Last night means that the nomination process will drag on. At this point, this can’t be good for a party that should be turning its attention and financial resources towards winning the big prize.
— Charlotte Hays is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
QUIN HILLYER
Rick Santorum has spent his whole career out-performing expectations. He did it again on Tuesday, with a big exclamation point. Yet on Wednesday, we’ll again start to see people finding reasons to write off his wins. Oh, look how many Evangelical voters there were! Look at the low turnout in some areas! Look at how small a dent he made in Mitt Romney’s delegate lead! And so on. The cognoscenti just cannot bear the thought that a sincere conservative can possibly be a real winner. They can’t understand what his appeal is, so they assume it must be nothing but a trick of ginning up overly enthusiastic knuckle-draggers. Or something.
Here’s what really happened in Alabama, where I attended events for all three candidates: Rick Santorum impressed people with his sincerity. He impressed people with his emphasis on the theme of freedom. And, as usual, he outworked everybody. Finally, here’s the real thing: People like him. They think he’s a good guy. And they identify with him. They don’t identify with either Romney or Newt Gingrich. Or, for that matter, with Barack Obama. This is Rick Santorum’s secret advantage. It means he has a real chance to win the White House — as an unabashed conservative.
— Quin Hillyer is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom and a senior editor of The American Spectator.
HENRY OLSEN
This double win by Rick Santorum reminds us of three things we already knew. First, Mitt Romney is being rejected by the GOP’s conservative base. Second, Rick Santorum is viewed by that base as either a more desirable or a more electable candidate than Newt Gingrich. And third, despite his continued victories, Rick Santorum is quite unlikely to win the nomination himself.
Romney continues to receive small shares of the vote from the GOP’s most loyal backers, garnering about 20 percent of very conservative voters, one-quarter of strong Tea Party supporters, and 28 percent of white Evangelicals. It’s likely that most of these voters will still back Romney in a general-election contest, but it’s also clear they would prefer that someone else carry the party’s standard.
Santorum surprised many observers yesterday by besting Newt Gingrich in the Deep South. Given how poorly Santorum had fared in South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida, this can only be taken as a sign that southern GOP base voters have now, narrowly, settled on Santorum as their preferred choice. Since Santorum has consistently bested Gingrich by large margins among base GOP voters in recent non-southern primaries, and since Gingrich has failed to win a congressional district or break the proportionality threshold in any non-southern primary, it’s now clear that Santorum is the only chance very conservative and Evangelical voters have.
Nevertheless, that chance remains quite slim. Santorum won these states because their electorates are much more religious and conservative than most of the other states remaining. Over 40 percent of voters in each state called themselves “very conservative”; that figure rarely breaks one-third outside the South. Over 70 percent were white Evangelicals in each state, but that figure rarely tops 50 percent in any sizeable remaining state. Even states that are more Evangelical, such as Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas will not have Evangelicals accounting for anywhere near 70 percent of their electorates. As I’ve written in my post-primary NRO blog posts for the last five weeks, the path to the nomination runs through the somewhat-conservative voter, and Rick Santorum is just not attracting that person. Even in Tuesday’s races, where somewhat conservatives are much likelier to be Evangelicals, Santorum received only 31 percent of their votes. In Michigan and Ohio, Santorum lost these crucial voters by a sizeable margin to Romney, and thus lost two close races despite overwhelming support from the base. Romney will lose many more states before this is over. Santorum won’t drop out any time soon, and Tuesday’s victories are likely to encourage more donations to keep his effort afloat. But despite the blows he’s taking, Romney still looks to be well on course to winning the nomination by the end of the primary season in mid-June.
— Henry Olsen is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s National Research Initiative.
JOHN J. PITNEY JR.
So is Gingrich going to withdraw? After his defeats in Alabama and Mississippi, it will be harder for him to raise money and enlist volunteers. (It would be particularly damaging if Sheldon Adelson decided to stop funding the Gingrich super PAC.) As it stands now, he is becoming a mere spoiler candidate. If his goal is to beat Romney, it would make sense for him to pull out and endorse Santorum.
He could eventually decide to go that way, but there are reasons to stay in for now. Unlike Mike Huckabee in 2008, he doesn’t have to worry about making a living. For another thing, he craves attention. Even as the third-place candidate, he is getting far more media coverage than he would as a former candidate. (Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain no longer have to worry about media gaggles.) And most important, he has never seen himself as a mere candidate, but as a transformative figure. In the 1990s, he foresaw playing the role of the “advocate of civilization,” the “definer of civilization,” and the “leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.” Compared with saving civilization, saving Santorum’s challenge to Romney may seem like small potatoes.
— John J. Pitney Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.
LARRY SABATO
The most important thing anyone can do on a primary night is to remember the calendar — not the primary schedule but the general-election date. The two Deep South primaries appear critical, yet they will be long forgotten by Labor Day, much less November 6. Barring a massive, difficult-to-fathom shift in this contest, Mitt Romney has a better than 80 percent chance to be the GOP nominee. No amount of wild tapping on CNN’s magic wall will alter those odds. But what kind of nominee will Romney be? We have all witnessed Romney’s weak performance as a candidate. Yes, he’s constructed a solid organization, but it cannot hide Romney’s unappealing inadequacies. Maybe a bad economy will elect him anyway, but without pure luck tossing the White House into his lap, he needs Rick Santorum’s challenge. Santorum is forcing Romney to earn the nomination every step of the way, and maybe, just maybe, he’s making Romney face up to his severe shortcomings on the campaign trail before it is too late to do anything about them.
— Larry J. Sabato is director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.