Rick Santorum’s surprise clean-sweep of three states on Tuesday certainly suggests that the battle for this year’s Republican nomination will go on a fair bit longer than looked likely after Mitt Romney’s win in Florida a week earlier. But it doesn’t change the fact that Romney will, most likely, emerge the winner. But where it once looked like he’d make a decent — if unexceptional — challenger to Obama in November, he’s starting to seem much less electable.
Just look at the slide in his poll numbers. At the beginning of the year, a Washington Post poll
found that 39 per cent of Americans had a positive view of Romney, against 34 per cent with a negative one — a net positive rating of 5 points. But in their latest, less than one-in-three
have a good opinion of him, while almost half have a bad one — his net rating has dropped to minus 18:
And his head-to-head polling with Obama tells a similar story. Rasmussen Reports, who had Romney leading by six points just before the New Year, have just released a poll with Obama up by ten. That’s three points more than
Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain four years ago. Of course there’s still a long way to go to election night — nine months in fact — but these trends threaten to
undermine Romney’s main selling point in the Republican primaries: electability.
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