Santorum Strikes Back, But What’s Next for Republicans?

The Republican race between Mitt Romney and “oh please, not Mitt Romney” took another turn for the bizarre as Rick Santorum pulled off an improbable hat trick in three minor contests last night. What’s coming up next in the increasingly-wacky Republican contest?

As Shakespeare once wrote, “this looks not like a nuptial.” After blowout wins in Florida and Nevada, Mitt Romney wanted a leisurely February and a crushing Super Tuesday victory in early March, and his former chief rival, Newt Gingrich, looked totally ready to hand it over. By seriously attempting to contest Nevada, where Romney repeated his massive 2008 victory, Gingrich may have put another lid on his oft-ruptured coffin. This time, however, Rick Santorum was there to sprinkle garlic on it, and when the votes were tallied, Mitt Romney had lost three contests that an “inevitable frontrunner” should have breezed through… not to the sullen Gingrich, but to the former Pennsylvania senator whose persistence also snatched Iowa from Romney’s column.

Particularly damning was Romney’s loss in Colorado, a state that he won with 60% of the Republican primary vote when he ran in 2008. Back then, Romney was running to the right of the “moderate” John McCain. What last night showed was that his purported strength was based not on his likability but McCain’s dis-likability and the last-ditch desire for “anyone else” amongst the hard-right of the Republican electorate. Now that hard-right has taken over the party, particularly in places like Colorado, and Romney is the one left holding McCain’s “moderate” reins.

With that said, McCain still won the nomination in 2008. Unlike McCain, though, whose Florida primary win triggered a tidal wave of winner-take-all delegate victories on a crowded Super Tuesday in February that crushed his divided opposition, Romney got swept in a sort of twilight period that’s leading up to a more leisurely proportional-delegate-filled Super Tuesday in March. He needed to maintain that inevitable feeling to wash Gingrich and Santorum out of the race. Instead, he just made things harder for himself, exposing his weaknesses and robbing himself of the time he’s going to need to pivot to a general-election-tailored message.

So what happens between now and March 6, that all-important date when Romney’s backers will see if his extreme leads in money and organization pay off (spoiler alert: they probably will)? What can the spoiler candidates do to knock him off his ragged-but-still-standing high horse? Let’s go down the calendar. First, the CliffsNotes version, for ease of reference:

• Feb. 10: The Conservative Political Action Conference (“CPAC”) in Washington, D.C..
• Feb. 11: Maine caucus results partially announced.
• Feb. 22: Republican Debate #20 (in Arizona, on CNN)
• Feb. 28: Arizona and Michigan primaries.
• Mar. 1: Unconfirmed Republican Debate #21 (in Georgia, on CNN)
• Mar. 3: Washington Caucuses.
• Mar. 6: Super Tuesday: AK “district conventions”; ID & ND Caucuses; TN, VA, VT, GA, MA, OH, OK Primaries (WY begins voting too).

February 10: CPAC.

An evening of grandstanding in Washington D.C. for three candidates (Ron Paul isn’t gonna go). Expect big speeches, red meat, and generally more of the same from the candidates. All three will attack the President while making their pitches. The question will really be how much they decide to attack one another. Gingrich is the real wild card here. He’s mad as hell and needs press badly. If he goes atomic, I’d give the response 80% odds of being dismissive and 20% odds of being “angry Newt makes his five thousandth comeback.”

February 11: Maine caucus results partially announced.

Maine has adopted a leisurely voting system this year. Different counties have just been voting whenever they feel like it. On February 11th, the state party will announce all the results they have from counties who have voted so far. The only candidate who’s campaigned up there has been Ron Paul, and given the Far Northeast’s libertarian bent, he’ll probably do rather well. But it won’t even be a complete snapshot – the last caucus isn’t even held until March 3, just before Super Tuesday.

Expect some flutter if Santorum does better-than-expected up there, but realistically, Romney and Paul will dominate and no one will really pay attention beyond a news-blip alert the day the partial results are announced. The real next big event isn’t a voting contest at all.

February 22: The Great Debate.

There are two, count ‘em, two debates scheduled between now and Super Tuesday, but only one is confirmed, and only one is being held before Arizona and Michigan vote at the end of the month: this one. It’ll be in Arizona and moderated by CNN, who have hosted Newt Gingrich’s best (Second South Carolina) and worst (Second Florida) debates this year.

What does that paucity of debates mean? Well, for candidates not named “Mitt Romney,” particularly Newt Gingrich, it’s bad news. Free airtime is the way these candidates maintain momentum in the face of crushing advertising buys from Romney’s Super PACs. Everyone (except Ron Paul) will go onto that stage desperate to be called the winner.

For Gingrich, who has burned through his money and is now shifting to a Santorum style-strategy of campaigning in Ohio exclusively to keep his hopes alive, it’s do or die. Santorum, who showed himself to be pretty adept at a sharp elbow in the two Florida debates, will need to keep that up under increased scrutiny. Romney will need to turn in an above-the-fray/we-will-bury-you style performance as good as or greater than his last Florida outing.

In short, it’s going to be mutually-assured destruction up there, because both Santorum and Gingrich know that letting Romney breeze through as he did in the New Hampshire debates will likely result in him winning both Arizona and Michigan and getting “back on-track.” Ironically, this decision to go out fighting will make Ron Paul’s island-podium of calm and occasionally grandfatherly advice look more attractive to moderate GOP voters not eager to vote for any of these putative “front-runners,” but Paul will be focusing more on the Perot Country Super Tuesday states for him to see any real momentum-bounce.

February 28: Arizona and Michigan.

Two moderately big states that “jumped in front” of the Republican starting gun (following Florida’s example) will hold primaries on the same day, a week before Super Tuesday. Their fundamentals favor Romney. Arizona has a decent-sized Mormon population, a moderate retiree community, and hometown Senator John McCain (who endorsed Romney). Michigan is where Romney’s father was governor (and where he won handily in 2008 as a sort of “native son”). But beneath the favorable optics, real danger lurks.

Santorum said this morning that his target for this primary is Michigan. It may look strange, but that’s actually smart – Santorum has tailored his retail message for the Midwest, and his runaway victory in Minnesota seems to indicate that he can pull it off pretty well if he’s given the time. By contrast, forcing Romney to play defense in a state he thought safe will divert resources from Arizona, which may “pull a Colorado” and have its now-livid right-wing electorate revolt against the establishment choice.

But this will serve, as Florida did for Gingrich, as a real test of the sheer might versus plucky determination. The difference is that Santorum is a better on-the-ground candidate who comes off as less electable. Gingrich, master of the “grandiose ideas,” was able to puff up his record and rely on people calling him “Mr. Speaker” all the time to make the case that he, at least, looked presidential. Santorum does not look or act “presidential”–at his best, he’s sharp and folksy. At his worst, he’s petty, shrill, seemingly self-loathing, and, as I’ve said for every one of the almost-twenty debates I’ve watched, looks a bit like a puffy version of Nicholas Cage about to burst into tears.

That being said, Santorum is dogged in a way Gingrich is not–to the point where Gingrich has realized that he needs to learn from Santorum and hold fewer boring rallies and more keyed-in person-to-person appeals. That strategy works if you have over a year to win one small state (Iowa), or are given a commanding head start in others (Colorado, Minnesota). The test in AZ and MI will be: can Santorum do it in states where Romney will be barreling down on him like a ton of bricks and Gingrich will be staying out of the way? The answer is almost certainly “no,” but that makes for low expectations. Even if the networks can’t call the races once the polls close, Santorum will have an argument that he’s still the favored alternative candidate.

March 1: The Curtain Call (?) Debate.

No candidates have committed to this putative twenty-first (!) debate in Georgia, hosted by CNN. If Romney does really well in Arizona and Michigan, he may simply say “no,” depriving his underfunded rivals of oxygen or forcing them to turn on each other. He’ll likely have to commit earlier than that, however, and so he may just take the stage regardless. If it’s right off the heels of wins in AZ and MI, this will be a curtain call debate.

Even if he’s still somewhat on the ropes, this will likely be the last debate the Romney team will want to participate in. They have the money to keep on going well past Super Tuesday, and given those primaries’ favorability to the candidate, stomping out national opportunities for his flagging rivals to get him to say something stupid will be very high on his priority list from then on out as he enters the doldrums of a very bad-looking month littered with hostile Southern primaries and one titanic battle in Illinois.

Once again, look for Santorum (and Gingrich much more this time) to play a dog-whistle game to the people who chose unelectable conservatives in the 2010 primaries. Gingrich is more bombastic about this than Santorum is, but Santorum is actually better on offense in fighting both Romney and Gingrich.

Then again, Santorum has never really been seriously attacked on things like his own lobbying, his pork-barrel spending, and (more than cursorily) his breathtaking 18-point Senate loss in 2006. Romney (or his Super PACs) will have brought all of those guns into AZ and MI ads. Santorum’s responses on this stage will determine if he’s able to recover.

March 3: Washington state caucuses.

Your guess is as good as mine as to who’s going to win this one. Ron Paul will obviously put a lot of effort in here, but given that caucus-goers have thus far been more conservative than primary voters (except maybe in South Carolina), keep an eye on Santorum’s numbers as a leading indicator for Super Tuesday in places like North Dakota, Idaho and Alaska. If Paul doesn’t come off at least as well as he did in Minnesota, look for his support to fade to true non-factor status in the coming contests.

March 6: Super Tuesday.

More like Sub-par Tuesday!

Sorry, just had to get that out of the way. As we get closer to the event itself, I’ll do a state-by-state analysis, but here’s what you need to know: only 10 states are voting (21 held Republican contests in the 2008 edition) and none of the contests are winner-take-all (many of them were in 2008, particularly in big states, allowing McCain to wrap everything up). The states are, once again, favorable to Romney. He’s going to win Virginia (where the only other candidate on the ballot is Paul), is almost certain to win Massachusetts and Vermont, and is going to play hard in Ohio and Tennessee.

Gingrich finally gets another state where he has natural strength today: Georgia. He has so much strength there, he reckons, that he can afford to currently be spending all of his time in Ohio, Santorum-style. If he wins there, he’ll have two fairly large states under his belt and will be able to punch his ticket into a string of smaller Southern primaries where he’ll do much better with some momentum on his side.

Even if he seems to have a better chance of picking up individual states on Super Tuesday than Gingrich does, Santorum’s way forward looks harder, since from there on out he’s really hampered by ballot access and Gingrich’s potential for tailwind in the South. Only if Gingrich drops and endorses him after today will he have a viable path to the nomination, which means he’s going to have to rely on whatever momentum he’s got from AZ and MI to win Oklahoma, North Dakota and maybe Idaho while also putting a huge stake down in Ohio. But if he keeps Gingrich to just Georgia (or maybe, in a momentum-shocker-to-end-all-shockers, denies him any states), he’s going to be the last anti-Romney standing.

In short, Super Tuesday currently looks like this:

Likely Romney: VA, MA, VT
Leans Romney: TN
Leans Gingrich: GA
Leans Santorum: OK, ND
Toss-up: AK, ID
Super-toss-up-playing-for-all-the-marbles-you-guys: OH

But it could look like anything in two weeks. From here to March 6, the game is all about whether momentum can overcome a weak-but-well-funded front-runner. If it can’t, the race will be over. (If it can… well, stay tuned for another article like this on March 7.)

More Faster News: Iran, Syria & Egypt
More Faster Politics: The Tragedy and Grace of Sgt. Willam Stacey
More from Chas Carey: History Says Republicans Will Lose Big Behind Gingrich; Bio/Disclaimer

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

Comments