The Illinois primary is today and looks like handing good news to Mitt Romney and poor news to reporters and pundits desperately trying to rustle-up fresh interest in a contest that has been dying for weeks now and certainly since Rick Santorum failed to make an apreciable Super Tuesday impact on Romney’s lead in both actual votes cast and delegates won.
This is annoying since Romney is duller than his rivals. No moon-bases or wars on contraception for him, more’s the pity. Romney’s victory will never be total (too much baggage, too much suspicion of his motives for that) but a 40% plurality in a race that has, so far, presented voters with at least four options is not a disgracefully weak performance even if, given his financial advantages and knowledge of course and distance, it’s not quite as strong a record as you might wish were you advising Team Mitt.
Nevertheless, much to the media’s disappointment, this thing is functionally over. In truth it has been for a while and the press has just been playing out the faux-drama in the hope that something might happen that really would change the fundamental dynamics of the race. Alas, again, a plurality of Republican voters have not lost their marbles and there is no something left to happen. Unless Romney suffers a live boy/dead girl type of problem and this, even his harsher critics might concede, seems improbable.
My chum Mike Crowley does his best to find some cheer in all this end-of-fun gloom:
To catch up, Santorum needs people to keep paying attention. The more they tune out, the more his chances fade. His only chance of compensating for Romney’s financial edge is through loads free media coverage of the sort that energized his campaign after he caught Romney sleeping and won three primary contests right after Florida last month. That free media will keep his followers committed and energized, delivering him not only votes but, in a virtuous cycle, new campaign contributions to give him still more momentum.
Sure, Santorum can keep losing marquee states like Illinois and still hang around for weeks to come, nipping at Romey’s heels, picking off a few delegates here and there. But that’s an extremely low-percentage strategy for winning a delegate majority, as Nate Silver has explained.
Isn’t it enough for Santorum to deny Romney a majority of delegates, and then snatch the nomination away at the party’s convention in Tampa? In theory. But if Romney holds a commanding lead all the way until August—and enjoys an attendant advantage in media coverage—it will be exceedingly hard for Santorum to storm into the convention and knock Romney on his butt. Especially if the former Pennsylvania Senator continues to lag in head-to-head polling against Obama.
The good news for Romney is that the next few weeks are looking rather dull. Santorum might win Saturday’s Louisiana primary. But that’s not so interesting: by now no one expects Romney to do well in the deep South. After that, the voting moves through several states where Romney should be much stronger, like New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia (where Santorum isn’t even on the ballot).
On April 24, Pennsylvania, which has a hefty 72 delegates, will have its say. A Santorum win in his home state would qualify as boring. But he did lose his last re-election race there by 17 points, and the state has plenty of the kind of upscale suburban voters who are keen to Romney. A defeat in his home state is not the kind of interesting outcome Santorum should be hoping for.
Well, quite. All this is all very well and good but marred by one telling problem: Santorum isn’t going to win. This race is over. Readers know this and so do journalists. There’s just a reluctance to admit that it’s over while there’s any speck of hope it might not be. Primary season is a habit it’s tough to break but at some point you gotta do it and admit that all the fancy ploys and plots spun to keep it going are so much hokum in a season already amply supplied with the stuff.
Comments