No matter where you stand politically, you have to hand it to Mitt Romney. He blew the proverbial doors off the New Hampshire primary yesterday, in a win that even opponents would have to appreciate.
As a “next door neighbor” who ran Massachusetts for a time, and with a vacation home in the state, and having run a full fledged campaign in New Hampshire in 2008, the bar for a Romney victory was set fairly high.
But in a six-person field, Romney exceeded expectations, winning nearly 40 percent of the vote. In doing so, he surpassed John McCain’s 37 percent from 2008 and George HW Bush’s 38 percent from 1988, in multi-candidate fields.
In addition, Romney becomes the first non-incumbent Republican to win both Iowa and New Hampshire.
No small feat.
Perhaps more important than the size of Romney’s victory are the components of his win.
Ideologically, Romney scored 33 percent of the “very conservative” vote; 48 percent of the “somewhat conservative vote”; and 37 percent of the “moderate vote: winning in all three categories. He won almost 50 percent of the Republican vote and came in second with 29 percent (to Ron Paul) in the independent vote.
Perhaps most surprising, and potentially decisive going forward, Romney won the majority of Tea Party votes (40 percent). He also won in every age group, except for the 18-29 cohort (that went 2-1 for Ron Paul). Romney all won among all income groups.
At least by New Hampshire standards, Romney assembled a broad based, center-right coalition, appealing to the spectrum of age and income cohorts, based on a strong economic message and the consensus that he was the candidate most likely to beat President Obama.
The win places Romney in the most dominant position of any of the Republican candidates going into South Carolina and conducting the rest of the race.
New Hampshire was a hopeful disappointment for Jon Huntsman.
To his credit, Huntsman came out of asterisk obscurity to take third place in New Hampshire with nearly 17 percent of the vote. But to have credibility in the race ahead, Huntsman really needed a second place finish, or at least to have come close to the second place finisher, Ron Paul. The six point gap between the two weakens Huntsman’s claim to credibility.
Indeed, given his excellent resume and incontestable conservative accomplishments, Huntsman’s voting coalition in New Hampshire was dismaying and a real impediment to turning his New Hampshire momentum into a future win.
The majority of Huntsman’s support came from those identified as “moderate or liberal” (25 percent). Only 10 percent of self identified Republicans voted for Huntsman. And Huntsman won nearly 2-1 among those who do not support the Tea Party.
This is not the recipe for victory in the Party, and will not serve as the building blocks for success in South Carolina and beyond.
It wasn’t a good night for the “conservative alternatives” to Romney. Rick Santorum, who missed the top slot in New Hampshire by eight votes garnered only 9.3 percent, just behind fourth place finishing Newt Gingrich with 9.4 percent. Rick Perry, who only stayed in New Hampshire for the debates, received less than one percent.
Looking forward this morning, it is hard to envision a scenario where Romney doesn’t win.
Thus far, with Ron Paul locking down a reliable 20 percent of the vote (in open contests) and with the conservative vote fractured between three candidates, Romney has won plurality victories. This will serve him well in South Carolina where a similar situation launched John McCain to the nomination in 2008.
And in the process of winning, Romney has quietly moved back out in front in polling.
The RCP blended polling index shows Romney beating his closest competitor – Newt Gingrich – by ten points nationally. In the next primary in South Carolina, Romney leads Rick Santorum, 31-21 percent.
As I wrote in “Romney’s Strategic Plan”, unless conservative opponents of Romney can unite behind one candidate effectively in the ten days before South Carolina votes, Romney is on pace to roll up the nomination by January 21st, or at the latest, in the Florida primary on January 31st.
The plain fact is that the conservative opposition is going to have to win somewhere to establish the credibility that enables money and organization. Second or third place is not good enough. Time is running out for that to happen.
Should Romney prevail on this current, quick path to victory, he will have achieved a remarkable accomplishment; having locked down the Republican nomination with some 73 percent of the Party supporting other candidates, and, incredibly, with only 155 delegates selected, out of a total of over 2,000.
It would be a stunning outcome.
Which leads to a difficult conversation.
Conservative opponents of Mitt Romney have known about his pending candidacy for years. Even after Romney jumped in officially, there was time for a conservative-approved candidate to enter the race, but none did. The tier of social and fiscal conservative candidates that did join the fray have been uniformly unable to unite conservatives under a single candidacy.
Mitt Romney did not create this situation, but like any good candidate, he is taking full advantage of it, according the the rules that everyone has agreed to.
That is why, as conservatives – and particularly the remaining opposition to Mitt Romney – move forward in South Carolina, they need to carefully measure their individual messages against the overriding goal of the campaign season – defeating President Obama.
That doesn’t mean letting Mitt Romney off easy. Team Obama is going to unload everything including the kitchen sink on him, and if Romney doesn’t have good answers to the questions of nominal “friends” it will only get more complicating with Democrats. And, as previously noted, Romney has a record to defend and flip flops that will no doubt be fodder for ads in September. All of this needs to be on the table now.
However, the tone and subtext against Romney in the closing days of New Hampshire – and the apparent barrage of negative ads that await him in South Carolina – is rooted in a populist class warfare argument that serves only to muddle if not undermine the overall Republican message.
Specifically, to argue that any job loss created as a result of Bain Capital restructuring is proof of Romney’s failure, only serves to make Barack Obama’s case for a larger, bloated entitlement society.
This is no way to win an election.
Indeed, if debasing the Party’s central belief in an opportunity society is the only path to win an election, then Romney’s opponents need to carefully consider their continued candidacies.
A last word on Ron Paul.
He has done remarkably well in the two contests so far, in no small part because they are open to independents and Democrats. Unless Paul becomes the only remaining channel to express frustration with a Romney nomination, his support will drop as the primary season enters a period of contests closed to anyone but Republicans, and delegate allocation formulas that allow winner take all contests for the victor.
Still, Paul has the resources to go all the way to the end of the primary season. That will make Paul an established, if uncontrollable presence in the Party. As a result, there needs to be some form of concerted outreach to Paul supporters.
This is not about alignment – there is simply too much distance between Paul’s core ideology and the mainstream of Republican thought. But that is not to say that there aren’t areas of cooperation. Greater transparency for the Fed, opposition to future bailouts, addressing budget deficits and the national debt.
On the current path, that will have to be part of Mitt Romney’s to-do list for the period between March and August, in addition to a concerted outreach to aggrieved and disillusioned movement conservatives.
In a good sign, it seems Romney is on to this. His victory speech last night looked and felt more like a convention speech accepting the nomination. He trained his fire on President Obama and the Democrats and said little if anything about the Republicans in the race. It is a hopeful sign that Romney knows what is ahead of him, and is thinking through the plan to get there.
Pivoting from a year of wild preference swings in the Republican presidential race, 2012 has quickly brought clarity to the GOP contest, if not the results that many had hoped for.
Paraphrasing Rumsfeld, we don’t go to the election with the candidate we wish for, but the candidate that we have.
After everyone is done airing their grievances and the votes are tallied, its time to unite and get down to the serious business at hand.