3.07.2012

quick hits on super tuesday

--Romney still hasn't won in the south, except in Virginia where Santorum and Gingrich weren't even on the ballot. And there, he won with only 60% of the vote, which means he picked up at most half of the "not Romney vote" in the absence of the two Not Romneys. He is having the same problem in the more rural states of the midwest (OK, ND).

Evangelicals are not voting for him. It's the Mormon thing. I'm telling you, it's the Mormon thing.

--Ron Paul has hit his ceiling. The primaries move to winner-take-all now. What he does with his small, but significant and highly motivated block of voters will be his legacy. We shall see.

--I think either Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich could still steal the nomination (I'd put it at 3:1) if and only if one of them dropped out and fully supported the other, sometime this week. I'm pretty sure both of their egos will prevent this from happening.

4 comments:

Gino said...

romney is also not speaking in the evangelical code.

rick and newt do it all the time. so, thats part of it.

come the general, i think their dislike of obama will bring them out for romney.

Brian said...

come the general, i think their dislike of obama will bring them out for romney.

I think that's probably true.

I said many months ago (maybe even a couple of years at this point) that one cannot win the GOP nomination without the evangelical vote. Romney is likely to prove me wrong, but just barely.

It will be interesting to see how much this affects the general.

Gino said...

mc cain didnt have the evangelical vote last time around, huckabee did.

gotta keep in mind that the conservative-wing and the evangelical wing are not the same, but they overlap often due to a few shared principles.

besides that the evangelicals are not necessarily a monolith of their own either.

if perry and bachman were still around, you'd see them fractured.

Mr. D said...

I do think there's a Mormon thing, too, but in the end, Gino is right and there will be enough votes for Romney to win most of the Southern states. It's all going to turn on the economy, though.

And unless I miss my guess, if Obama wins, by 2014 he'll have wished he had lost. Second terms rarely go well and he's going to have a lot of tough things to deal with, with a lot less defenders, too.