How he responds will tell us much about him and even more about the larger battle looming in the fall. At his town-hall meetings in the run-up to Iowa, his political defects were vividly on display: the mirthless, digressive, painfully dull answers, replete with endless and pointless reminiscence, that fairly compel the application of the most deadly adjective available in American politics—senatorial. This is no small part of the attraction that some voters feel for Santorum: There is scarcely a shred of slickness or phoniness about him—something that cannot be said of his rivals, and, indeed, a quality that is the opposite of the perceived plasticity that disturbs many Republicans about Romney.
Back in , of course, Pat Buchanan beat the Establishment favorite, Bob Dole, in the Granite State, creating a precedent that Santorum is now trying to replicate: the stitching together of a coalition of economically stressed blue-collar voters and a smaller bloc of anti-abortion Catholics. The troubles with this plan are threefold, however. And third, unlike Buchanan, who artfully played down his culture-warrior side in New Hampshire, Santorum finds it impossible not to stray into heavenly territory.
Curdled-milky as talk like this goes down the throats of New Hampshirites, it will be swallowed smilingly, as if it were ambrosia, by many in South Carolina, where fully 60 percent of Republican primary voters in identified themselves as Evangelical. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote recently on this website , the goals of the Romney resistance appear to be twofold.
On the one hand, there are those who want mainly to force him to move to the right on matters of policy and politics and are disturbed that he has thus far been largely able to resist. On the other are those who believe he must be defeated, on the grounds that Romney in amounts to John McCain in —a man of no genuine conservative conviction who will fail to inspire the Republican base and then be thumped by the incumbent president.
For Obama, seeing Romney pushed far rightward would be a gift that keeps on giving—seeing him whacked entirely would be like a lifetime of Christmases occurring all at once. That the ABR forces will turn out to be all hat, no cattle.
Less than a week after delivering a fiery speech condemning Donald Trump and calling on the Republican Party to prepare for a brokered convention, Mitt Romney has begun executing his own plan to deny the G. CNN reports the Republican presidential nominee has made several get-out-the-vote robocall recordings for Marco Rubio and John Kasich that will run in Michigan and Idaho, which both hold their G.
Romney has ties to both states—his father, George Romney, was a popular Michigan governor, and Idaho has a large Mormon population—giving his bigamous strategy some traction. One popular interpretation is that this 25 percent represented a hard ceiling on Mr.
This claim made a certain amount of sense: as rivals like Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich gained and lost ground in the polls, Mr. The other interpretation — the one preferred by Mr. Romney, something for him to build upon. It is, obviously, easier to resolve this debate now, given that Mr.
Romney has made considerable gains in national surveys and now polls at well above 25 percent in most of them. Still, even without this evidence, there was reason to think that the interpretation offered by Mr. If you look beyond the top-line data in the polls, it becomes clear that nowhere near 75 percent of Republican voters have been vehemently opposed to nominating Mr. Romney an unacceptable nominee. These numbers have bounced around a bit from time to time and from survey to survey, but these results are fairly typical when questions like these are put to the voters.
What you really have, then, is something like this: about 25 percent of Republican voters are in Mr. And about 30 percent of the Republican primary electorate is truly opposed to him.
That leaves a swing group of about 45 percent of the vote. Romney — but they also consider him an acceptable choice, more or less.
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