If Mitt Romney is going to be the Republicans’ nominee for president, he’s going to do it through Establishment support. The fact that he can raise $10 million in a single day is an indication of his popularity within the Establishment, but he’s getting no love from some important quarters. For example, in 2007-08 the National Review supported Romney’s campaign, but now they are openly mocking him. Somehow, the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act has become one of the biggest campaign issues for the Republican base. Newt Gingrich was for the mandate on Sunday when he appeared on Meet the Press and against it the next day when he released a video of him opposing it in uncompromising terms. Romney decided last week to defend his health care bill in Massachusetts that has an individual mandate. He won’t be able to flip-flop on that stand, and that position will dog him for the remainder of primary season.
I think Romney is in a similar quandary to the one Joe Lieberman faced in 2004. Lieberman had a strong claim to the nomination because he had been on the ticket in 2000 and had actually received more votes than either George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. But he had to campaign in a Democratic primary while supporting the fiasco in Iraq. There was no way that Lieberman was going to win any primaries in the 2004 cycle because he was on the wrong side of the most important issue to the Democratic base. No amount of Establishment support could have changed that.
I honestly think Romney is in the same position. Electorally speaking, he’s a dead man walking. What’s interesting is that enough people have not come to this conclusion yet that Romney can still reel in huge hauls of campaign cash. I would expect that to stop overnight if Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gets off the pot and announces that he’ll be a candidate.
If Daniels opts against a run, I expect Establishment support to move to either Pawlenty or former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman (or some combination of both). My guess is that one of the more conservative and unrealistic candidates will win a small plurality of the delegates in the Iowa Caucuses. I expect Romney to get trounced there and then again in the New Hampshire primaries. He’ll have no chance in South Carolina. And, as a result, the Mormon community in Nevada will opt for Huntsman over a clearly dead-duck Romney.
I think the odds are actually high that the first four contests will produce four different winners, and that Romney won’t be one of them. Because the GOP has done away with winner-take-all primaries for all the early contests, no one will be able to wrap up the nomination until very late in the game. It could take until June, or even possibly go to the convention. The more candidates that stay in early and accumulate delegates, the more likely a brokered convention becomes. Will Ron Paul win any early states? Will any of the seriously socially conservative candidates like Bachmann or Santorum win any early contests? These are the things to look for.
The most likely scenario for a brokered convention is that the delegates from the early contests get split rather evenly among three or four candidates and then someone new emerges late in the game to win some of the winner-take-all contests. That would set up a situation where no one has a majority of the delegates heading into the convention.
It’s more likely that late winner-take-all contests (perhaps in California and New Jersey) will decide the contest, but that assumes that those contests will go to someone who has already accumulated a lot of delegates.
