Omnibus GOP Primary ThreadFollow

Ah, I misunderstood your point.

Yeah, every election has its opportunists that are in the race just for the media coverage and never take it seriously. This cycle just seems to have more of them taking the spotlight and front-runner status. Had Santorum treated this more seriously back in late 2007, he'd be in a much stronger position right now. But I doubt he ever expected to be in his position at all.

I don't know about that. It got pretty ugly. Far uglier than the GOP primary last time around.



Which could be interpreted a couple different ways though.



Huh? You're looking at opinion polls, not actual election results. Of secured delegates, Romney currently has twice as many as all the other three candidates combined (so he's won 2/3rds of the delegates). He's won twice as many states as the next closest candidate, and just under 2/3rds of the total (14 out of 23). He's got as many wins as the second place guy (Santorum) has wins and second places

At this point (by number of states, and not date), Obama and Clinton were neck and neck with Clinton having a slight lead. Coming out of super Tuesday (which that year was Feb 5th), neither of them had a huge lead. Compared to either of them, Romney is wiping the floor with the competition.


The shocking thing really is that the media still plays this like he isn't doing well enough.



Only if you assume that if one of them dropped out, their votes would go to the other. And even then, Romney would have a commanding lead. Certainly he has a bigger lead over both of their delegate counts 23 states in than Clinton had over Obama 29 states into the race last time around.

And let's be honest here. Santorum and Gingrich are on kinda distant edges of the conservative envelope. Santorum's faith and values folks aren't likely to all break for Gingrich, and Gingrich's balanced budget/small government supporters are vastly more likely to break for Romney than Santorum. Take either out of the race and Romney's lead likely grows, not the other way around.



I think that this is the talking point of the media recently. I don't think I agree with it. There was some brutal stuff that went on between Clinton and Obama last time around.



Measured how? I'm curious what source you're using because there's a lot of different ways to measure this. What's that number based on? Where do they get their base number?

It's just interesting to me because I keep hearing nothing but journalists and pundits talking about how unpopular Romney is, and how no one supports him, and voters don't like him, even while he turns in one of the most powerful open primary performances I've seen in my lifetime (maybe even the most powerful). It makes me suspect that a lot of that is perception being pushed by the media and doesn't match reality when people actually go out and vote.



Again, I think that's the story. And it's not a bad one. Suppose it gives the pundits something to write about.

Edited, Mar 7th 2012 2:54pm by gbaji

She's by far the most liberal Republican in congress. One would think she already caucuses with the Dems anyway.

Except that she voted with the caucus on EVERY whipped vote of her career. King wins that seat with token opposition, almost certainly caucuses with the Dems.

Olympia Snowe was the worst kind of faux moderate. Jon Chait nails what this sort of pretend wisdom looks like:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/olympia-snowes-strange-martyrdom.html


When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

Nowhere is the saying that "perception is more important than reality" more true than in the political sphere. A world where Snowe/Collins can be seen as moderates and where people take Paul Ryan even semi-seriously is a world of illusion. Like Narnia!

Hey, if you say so. Good luck in November

Actually, I will make one brief point: Your silly clinging to the "How come he has 60% then??" shows a bit of ignorance on your part. When the FL & AZ primaries (79 delegates) were winner-take-all and only Romney & Paul were on the VA ballot, percentage of won delegates does NOT accurately reflect public support. That should be obvious but, hey, again... good luck in November.

Edited, Mar 7th 2012 9:55pm by Jophiel

So you're saying that Romney isn't really doing as well as he's doing because he apparently understands the rules of the game better than the other players? But that's somehow a poor reflection on him?


You get that all but 2 states (IIRC) are also "winner take all" in the general election, right? Hopefully for you, Obama's re-election team is more aware of the electoral realities than you are.

Oh. And this bears direct response:



That is not a given. You are assuming it's true and that everyone who's voting for those guys are voting "against Romney". That's silly even for you. I know it's a popular perception tossed around by the folks on your TV, but that doesn't make it true.



Why? I asked you how many open primaries for the last 40 years had a single candidate with this large a delegate lead (or state "win" lead) this early in the process (early being in terms of the number of state contests). Instead of assuming that what I'm saying is silly, why not prove me wrong?

I've provided ample hard data supporting my claim. You've provided... laughter. Why laugh when you're wrong?

Given that the GOP radically changed its traditional delegate appropriation rules after 2008, it's a stupid question and one that reflects more your lack of understanding about the process than any wonderful action on Romney's part. That's ignoring the ever fluctuating state calendar order from election to election.

Tell me, did the "60%!" talking point sound good when you first heard it and that's why you decided not to think it through?

Ok, so would you agree that Given that the GOP radically changed its traditional delegate appropriation rules after 2008, it's pretty moronic to judge the relative performance of a candidate by assuming no change had occurred?

Cause isn't that what people are doing when they say that Romney isn't winning fast enough, or completely enough, or whatever? If the objective is to win delegates, and Romney has 3 times more delegates than the next ranked candidate, then isn't he winning? Not just a little bit, but overwhelmingly?



Oh... So you're comparing Romney to Reagan? Great! If we go 24 races in (one more than we're at so far), Reagan had 17, and Bush had 7. So Bush did about as well as Santorum. Take a couple races from Gingrich and give them to Romney instead and he's doing pretty similarly well. Good job finding an equivalent comparison there Joph!

Edited, Mar 8th 2012 7:45pm by gbaji

A few pundits have noted that Romney is trying too hard to pretend to be a southerner and coming off looking more and more robotic as a result.

Edited, Mar 12th 2012 11:29am by catwho

They're not? Then by what standard are they saying that Romney isn't doing well? I mean, other than a bunch of pundits saying that over and over, the actual results of the actual primaries and caucuses seem to indicate a near landslide for Romney so far.



Er? As of Super Tuesday, the count was 23.

Romney has won: New Hampshire, Florida, Nevada, Maine, Arizona, Michigan, Wyoming, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Vermont, and Virgina. That's 14.

Santorum has won: Iowa, Colorado, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. That's 7.

Gingrich has won: South Carolina, and Georgia. That's 2.

Paul has won nothing.


As of today, Santorum has won Kansas, so his state total is up to 8. Romney has won Guam, North Marianas, and the Virgin Islands, so the totals have shifted slightly. But he's still well ahead. And if we look at delegate count (now, since I don't feel like subtracting the totals from this weekend), Romney has 393, Santorum has 133, Gingrich has 110, and Paul has 24. Romney still has more delegates than all the other candidates combined and then some. He's still sitting at about 3 times as many delegates as the second place opponent.

I'm still curious how you can objectively think that he's doing poorly. If you had heard nothing from anyone in the media about this race, and I just presented those numbers would you conclude that Romney wasn't doing well?




Romney's performance is already pretty impressive Joph. I was illustrating how little difference there is between his performance and Reagan's back in 1980. And also addressing the claims about how Santorum would be doing better if Gingrich wasn't in the race. I think Romney would be doing better if Gingrich wasn't in the race, but that's a side issue.



Up at the top. I'm just pointing out the massive difference between the reality of the actual primary election results and how they are being reported to the public. You're looking at the media coverage. I'm looking at the results.

He's doing "well" in that the guy everyone assumed would win might possibly have enough delegates by June to beat a couple knuckleheads too disorganized to file for state ballots or full slates of delegates. To the extent you want to consider that a "powerful performance".

He's not doing well enough to push an early end to a bruising primary that has been damaging his favorability and chances in the general election.

But as you alluded to (and I've pointed out myself), the GOP deliberately changed their primary schedule and methodology so as to avoid an early win scenario. It doesn't mean that Romney is doing more poorly, but that it's taking longer to nail down a win. Again though, that was by design, so it's somewhat silly to fault Romney for this.



But that's an unfair assessment. There's no way to push an "early end" to the process. That's by design. Even if Romney had won 100% of the delegates so far, he'd still have only 660 right now, less than 2/3rds of what is needed to win the nomination. As to whether that's damaging his favorability, that's speculative at best. It's damaging while the process goes on, but also gets him a hell of a lot more media time. How much the negatives today will hurt him during the general is hard to say. In any case, the GOP made the decision after 2008 to shift things later in the year specifically so that they wouldn't have a case where one guy wins by early Feb, no one pays attention to him for the next 4 months, then there's a convention, but no one pays much attention to that, and now he's got an uphill battle to fight for media recognition against the guy who's been in the media (good or bad) for the entire time.


We can debate whether this is better or worse in the long run, but that was a deliberate choice made by the GOP. So it's pretty strange to somehow say that this is "wrong", or that it somehow reflects poorly on Romney.

So a major delegate state like Texas having its primary schedule pushed back because the GOP failed to prove their original redistricting map didn't discriminate against minorities was a deliberate change? Those cunning bastards.