1. CNN’s headline last night was “No knockout blow for Romney,”
which is true but misleading. While Mitt Romney didn’t dominate
Super Tuesday as completely as Bob Dole, who swept all seven states
in 1996, and all four candidates remained reasonably competitive in
states that played to their strengths, winning six out of ten
states is far from bad. John McCain, who was seen as the inevitable
Republican nominee after Super Tuesday in 2008, won nine states to
Romney’s seven and Mike Huckabee’s five.
2. Romney’s performance looks even better when you focus on
delegates won. He took all the delegates from Massachusetts, nearly
all of them from Virginia, and won delegates even in every single
state he lost. Although the popular vote in Ohio was close, the
delegate allocation was not. The delegate math for Romney’s
opponents has become daunting, to say the least.
3. Rick Santorum’s continuing strength leads to the inescapable
conclusion that a better funded and organized conservative
challenger would likely have mopped the floor with Romney. If
Romney wins the nomination and a.) loses the election or b.) wins
and fails to govern as a conservative, expect a lot of Rick Perry
recriminations. Some will regret that Perry didn’t campaign better;
others will be angry that fellow conservatives gave up on Perry so
quickly. In any event, Santorum has done a remarkable job despite
limited resources and not exactly fitting the Southern, evangelical
profile of the states most resistant to Romney.
4. Newt Gingrich is invoking his Georgia win as a justification
for staying in the race. But Gingrich didn’t finish better than
third anywhere else. Ohio was the only non-Southern state where the
former House speaker didn’t finish last. Santorum outperformed him
in most of the Southern or border states where they were both on
the ballot, and also in the caucus states. But Gingrich is still
not that far behind Santorum in total popular vote, and he is Newt
Gingrich, so I don’t expect any of this to influence his
thinking.
5. Ron Paul’s caucus strategy for delegate maximization clearly
isn’t panning out as hoped (even granting the Paul campaign’s
contention that conventional counts are missing a lot of the
delegates they are picking up behind the scenes). Given Paul’s
improved numbers almost everywhere, one wonders in retrospect if
they might have been better served by trying to gain momentum by
running up their popular vote in key contests.
6. What happened in Virginia is nevertheless a pretty good
example of what might have been for Paul: he was able to pull a
sizeable anti-Romney vote. As the second-best campaign
organization, it was not unreasonable to assume a Romney-Paul race
at some point, and perhaps one will still occur while a significant
bloc of delegates remains at stake. But super PACs and Gingrich’s
ego have kept other non-Romneys with higher mainstream movement
profiles and less divergent foreign policy views in the mix much
longer. Still, don’t expect Paul to drop out before the others
do.
7. If you couldn’t tell from my
column this morning, I think Romney is starting to piece
together a decent critique of President Obama’s record — one that
will resonate with both conservatives and moderates. Serious
questions remain as to whether he is the right man for that
message.
