Florida will be the next state to vote. That will be on January 31st. Watching it will probably be mildly interesting but, barring something unusual, Mitt Romney will likely win it handily. The most important reason is probably that Florida allows early mail-in ballots, and before the surprise in South Carolina, some some 150,000 people had already voted in that primary. Since Romney has been campaigning heavily there for many months, and poured millions into that market, and had workers chasing down voters and getting absentee ballots into their hands for some time now, we can probably safely assume that the lion’s share of those already went to Romney, with Ron Paul picking up a sizable contingent of whatever disaffected absentee ballots there were, with the others more or less evenly distributed between all the other candidates (including candidates who already dropped out). Romney likely goes into election day there already having a hundred thousand or so votes.
Furthermore, Florida’s primary is closed; Democrats and Independents cannot vote for or against Romney. They just don’t count. As Chris Stirewalt notes, South Carolina saw a surge in new primary voters last week; a huge swath of angry independents, disaffected Democrats, and normally-uninterested voters, of the “I’m mad as hell and I want change now!” variety, showed up to vote, and they did not go there to vote for Mitt Romney. Turnout was 35% higher than anything previously recorded in South Carolina, and those new voters seem to have mostly gone for whoever seemed most anti-establishment to them, and that happened to be Newt Gingrich. (Ron Paul supporters likely wail that he’s the true anti-establishment guy but everyone sane recognizes he really can’t win period.)
But something like that can’t happen in Florida. It’s a closed primary. If you are not already a registered Republican, you can’t vote in that primary no matter how energized or angry you are. If you aren’t already a registered Republican, you don’t get a say.
Florida Primary voters will therefore largely be people who already vote regularly in primaries, and mostly older voters who–angry or not–are “establishment” oriented. Most will have already been voting Republican for quite some time now, already know all these players thank you very much, and will tend to be more stodgy and less impulsive.
Between the closed primary, the extensive machine Romney’s already got in place, and the huge number of votes already cast, it appears that Florida’s in the bag. The only likely question is how much he’ll win by, not whether he will. The best any of his competitors can reasonably hope for is to show a strong second. Although a Romney loss there would likely cripple his campaign, it’s not likely to happen. The main question will be who comes in second place.
So what next? In February, there will be primaries and caucuses in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada. These are small states, and caucuses tend to be grueling affairs that only fairly committed and regular voters are likely to sit through. Whoever has the best ground game usually wins them. Missouri will be holding a primary, but, its results will be advisory-only, the real delegates won’t be chosen til a caucus in March. The biggest day to watch will be February 28, when both Arizona and Michigan hold primaries where anyone can request a Republican ballot, so newly-energized and independent-minded voters can easily crash the gates like they did in South Carolina. Of the them all, Michigan is by far the biggest prize, but Michigan and Arizona are both the most likely to set the stage for a Romney upset.
And there are reasons for Romney to suspect that despite being born in Michigan, he might not win there. (See discussion here.)
My prediction, for what it’s worth: Santorum comes in fourth in Florida and drops out. Gingrich comes in second, with Ron Paul in third. And the two remaining major candidates (Gingrich and Romney) start slugging it out hard in Michigan while getting ready for Super Tuesday on March 6.
(This item cross-posted to The Moderate Voice.)
*Update*: A look at polling data this morning (January 25) suggests I may be wrong about Florida being a lock for Romney. It may be that it’s a closed primary, and it may be that Romney has an edge with all those mail-in ballots already cast, but Gingrich is slightly ahead there at the moment. I believe a strong second place showing is all Gingrich needs to remain a serious challenge, but a win there would be a truly startling upset and would almost certainly propel a massive infusion of new cash and volunteers into Gingrich’s camp and add real teeth to the charge that Romney is not “most electable.” The question will be asked: If he can’t win in Florida, where can he win at all outside of New England?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 11 comments }
It boggles my mind how people consider Romney part of the “republican establishment” and consider Newt as some kind of outsider.
When it comes to Washington, Romney has always been an outsider, and Newt has always been a MAJOR player. Hell, he was the face of the party for years.
From examining the evidence of the first campaign debate in which Gingrich utterly bombed out, in Florida last night, I conclude that the 2012 Republican Party nomination process is still in play this week.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
No state is “the state to watch.” Ever. Well other than amusement or other interest: certainly not with regard to election outcome.
All the TV pundit, online print and blog predictions makes me want to roll my eyes. To win the Republican nomination a candidate needs 1144 delegates and California with the most only has 172 ( a whopping 15 percent ).
The only thing to watch is the trends and outcomes, and then not until well into the primaries. Certainly not after 3 or 4 states.
Phrases like: “No one has won without [state name here] since [date or past election]” has little to recommend it.
Sandi: I agree with you completely that the “no one has won without winning state X” or “State Y has always picked the winner since…” are utterly meaningless. Yes, yes, every Republican who’s won South Carolina has won the nomination since 1980, but so flipping what? It’s a meaningless statistic, like saying, “The New York Yankees have not won an away game on the West Coast in July since 1997.” Who gives a damn?
HOWEVER: These early state primaries matter a lot. Mostly because of the challenges of organizing and fundraising. This is the reason why so many candidates dropped after Iowa, then New Hampshire, and why Santorum almost quit after South Carolina and almost certainly will quit if he doesn’t do well in Florida.
Furthermore, if Romney loses Florida–highly unlikely–you will definitely see his campaign hurt badly.
This is all about having the money and organization to stay the distance. Campaign contributions, and campaign staff, tend to follow candidates people believe can win. And that is why these early states matter. If you don’t amass enough professional staff, phone banks, organizers, and of course advertising cash, and set up shop effectively, you will NOT win in the places where most of the votes are. When you look at Super Tuesday, which is March 6 this year, any candidate who wants to compete will have to have raised tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and have spent weeks in building up organizing efforts to compete. And they’re only going to have those resources if they’ve done well enough early on to justify people spending time and money to help them.
Florida could deal a horrible wound to Romney if he loses. It probably won’t happen. If Gingrich comes in a strong second he will be able to convince donors and campaign staff to stick with him through Michigan and beyond. The same is true for Santorum. If Santorum gets a drubbing in Florida he almost certainly will quit. Gingrich on the other hand will probably stick it out no matter what after Florida, but if he gets his ass kicked in Michigan he too will likely drop and there’s a good chance no one will be left but Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney will simply win.
That’s how I see it anyway.
Jay: Perceptions are funny things aren’t they?
Dean,
I am not at all certain that losing Florida would kill Romney’s campaign. There are significant players in the Republican Party who are not all convinced that Gingrich can defeat Obama in the November national election. The winning candidate must be able to capture not only nearly all the votes of his own party, but a significant number of independent or otherwise politically unaffiliated voters.
The conventional wisdom — which is not always the incorrect wisdom in politics — is that Romney, as a fiscal conservative but not necessarily so much a social conservative, can better attract independent/unaffiliated voters than Gingrich or Santorum. Paul — truly a sui generis of American politics seems to be attracting some people from both ends of the political spectrum.
If the prime concern of the right and right-center is to defeat Obama in the presidential election, then these will be the most important considerations to be taken into account. And if this is so, there could well be machinations afoot to do everything possible to get a still-undecided campaign into the 2012 Republican convention, where the winner will be selected according to party rules. I understand that a lot of the votes are reserved for just that purpose. So it may not be inaccurate to say that if the party leadership and backers think that only Romney can beat Obama in November, they will resist Gingrich regardless of stunning successes in any primaries. Ann Coulter consistently has been backing Romney because of the considerations I have cited above. She is nobody’s fool, and is as right-wing as they come. Therefore, one should pay careful attention to what she has to say.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
You really thought Gingrich bombed out?
I thought Romney did much better in this debate. By comparison Gingrich was not the hands down winner, like in the two SC debates, but I thought Gingrich held his own in the end.
I guess it depends a lot on how seriously you take Romney’s charges about FreddieMac and Gingrich’s 1990s ethics scandals. If you know a lot about those charges, then Gingrich’s response was a little lame. If you are unfamiliar with them, then Gingrich’s response should have seemed ok.
Arnold was unimpressed, so maybe Gingrich did worse then I thought.
We agree, which is the reason for the “or other interest” in my post. Also in that light, who loses is the critical issue, not so much who wins the first and second slots, which odds say will be Romney and Gingrich.
I agree with Arnold too. Losing Florida would probably not kill Romney’s campaign. There are a lot of states where he is bound to still do very well.
Mike & Sandi,
I like Gingrich, and I think he would provide the country dynamic leadership in ways that would put the records of Bush 41, Clinton, G W Bush, and Obama all to shame by comparison.
On the flip side, Gingrich as a policymaker frequently comes across as a loose cannon. Some of you conversant with European history might well compare him with Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And that kind of national leadership has not played well in western civilization since the same Hohenzollern monarch mentioned above gave a fatal ‘green light’ to Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Franz Josef one very unfortunate day in late July 1914 to go ahead and force a war over Serbia, thinking possibly that it could have been localized.
Times obviously have changed and we have issues today that put Central Europe 98 years ago almost into a different universe. One thing that Romney could certainly offer is the likelihood of a steadier and calmer hand in managing the country. And yes, countries — with their intermix of public and private economies — can be seen as the most complex of corporate bodies, requiring the most sober, careful, far-seeing and thoughtful of managements.
The more I think about all this, the more I think Gingrich makes the Republican Party leadership nervous indeed, perhaps because and not in spite of his obvious support from the Tea Party movement. As a CEO, Gingrich is the sort of manager/leader that corporate boards of directors try quietly but firmly to replace.
I probably sound as though I were fence-sitting on this one. Perhaps I am. There really is so much at stake now for the USA.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288989/gingrich-republican-clinton-rich-lowry
Everybody reading today’s edition of Dean’s World ought to use the above-cited link to the National Review, where Rich Lowry, the managing editor, has published a high-quality critique of Newt Gingrich as the Republican Bill Clinton. Possibly my earlier comparison of Gingrich with Germany’s unfortunate Kaiser Wilhelm was a stretch. Mr Lowry’s comparison is no stretch at all, when you think about their backgrounds and their relationship of power between the President of the United States and the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
————————-
Mike, my comment about Gingrich bombing out at last night’s debate was based on the fact the Brian Williams, the NBC moderator, gave careful instructions to the audience to keep quiet and enable the contesting candidates to make their points strictly on their merit and not on reinforcement by a partisan claque taking over the show from the audience.
Gingrich performs best in the manner of the old time vaudeville entertainers. A silent audience more or less shuts him down. But that is exactly the set of rules that Gingrich will face in the presidential debates this autumn, if he is the candidate. I was reminded by Lowry that a single, sneering audible sigh from Algore at one of his debates with G W Bush in 2000 provided the mass millions in the television audiences more or less the same bad impression. Possibly that was just the margin W needed to tie up the Florida counts that cost Algore the election.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I suppose my use of the term “cripple” may be excessive, however, a loss in Florida would be an enormous blow to Romney because of just how much in time and resources he’s already put into it and given that he goes into election day with probably 80-100,000 votes already in his column from those mail-in ballots his workers have been busy helping people fill out. His advantages there are so big that a loss would call into serious question his ability to manage a campaign and rally voters to him. It would also likely be such a shot in the arm to whoever beat him that the entire race would start to look like a Rugby match.
I say all this while repeating that I believe a Romney loss in Florida is so unlikely as to be barely worth considering; he more than likely will win it no matter how much “momentum” Gingrich or anyone else has.
The most reasonable place for anyone to hope for a major upset before Super Tuesday is Michigan and to a lesser extent Arizona. On the other hand, if Romney wins Florida (which he almost certainly will) and then wins both of those firmly? You can expect any and all upstarts to have the wind knocked out of their sails, as their ability to garner further funding and support will be seriously hampered, and their ability to compete on Super Tuesday will be similarly hampered, and they will almost certainly fall further and further behind.
I believe that Michigan/Arizona day will be huge simply because if Romney convincingly wins both of those, then, it’s going to be very very very very very hard for anyone to beat him. But a major upset, particularly by Gingrich, would keep the race in serious doubt for some time longer; it could wind up looking a lot like the battle Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fought for the Democratic nomination in 2008.
And have heart, Republicans: Democrats had a MUCH rougher primary season in 2008 than Republicans did, and they still won. The idea that your candidate can’t win after a tough primary is just false. Anyone who wins the Republican nomination may win the Presidency–period. Although for the record I do think Romney’s the more likely to beat Obama myself, I also maintain that to underestimate Newt Gingrich is always foolish.
For the record, it is still my plan to vote to re-elect the President. So you may take this all with whatever grain of salt you wish.
A look at polling data this morning suggests I may be wrong about Florida. See my update.
Comments on this entry are closed.