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By: Elvin Lim,
on 3/6/2012
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By Elvin Lim
The clumsy elephant / J.S. Pughe. (Puck, 1908). Source: Library of Congress.
Mitt Romney had an ok Tuesday night, no better or worse than the ones he’s had so far. But it is still a story because Romney needed his wins in Arizona and especially Michigan. No news is great news for a campaign’s whose
raison d’être has consistently been “take whoever is the anti-Romney candidate down.”
And therein lies the weakness of Romney’s candidacy. He had his donors sweating yet again when news spread that Democrats in Michigan’s open primary were going to turn out to tip the state in Santorum’s favor. The result is that Romney’s three-point win there pales in comparison to his lead over the eventual nominee back in 2008, which was nine percent. In 2008 there was only one anti-Obama candidate by March. Romney faces not one, but three anti-Romneys this late in the game. Looking ahead to Super Tuesday, Newt Gingrich has a home field advantage in the biggest delegate prize so far in Georgia and Ron Paul is positioned to do well in the Alaska and North Dakota caucuses.
Rick Santorum, for his part, still has some momentum left in him because the Michigan results were partly masked by the fact that 184,000 had voted early and Santorum’s surge occurred only recently. The campaign will try to clinch a symbolic win on Sunday in Washington, which is a caucus state (but whose delegates will not be bound by the results). With or without Washington, Santorum has a real shot at victory in Ohio, where he polls well with blue-collar conservatives. All told, there are still not implausible ways out of the Romney nomination.
This is not all the candidate’s fault, however — bland and awkward performer he may be. If the RNC wanted to lengthen the nomination process and expand proportional representation (rather than winner-take-all) in the races, it should have waited until there was an open race on the Democratic side as well. In other words, Republican elders tried to mimic what the Democrats managed to do in 2008 and it is starting to blow up in their face. What compounds this strategic misstep is that in order to punish states who had moved their primaries up the calendar, the RNC, by stripping errant states for front-loading, made it even more possible for a slew of early contests to name a different frontrunner than in previous contests. Thereby they permitted more chaos when they should have known that this would occur alongside an incumbent Democrat with no challenge to his nomination. And of course there was the added wild card of Citizens’ United and the resulting superPACs that has made the survival of little-known candidates more likely than before.
Moving forward, the RNC will have to weigh the costs of controlling the primary calendar, because doing so has weakened the momentum of whoever emerges as the party’s nominee and shortened the time left for him to campaign as a general election candidate. For his part, Romney will be throwing everything but the kitchen sink in to sustain his air of inevitability; but the RNC has effectively determined by rules set in 2010 that the deal definitely won’t be sealed next Tuesday.
0 Comments on Romney’s double score in Arizona and Michigan as of 1/1/1900
By Elvin Lim
When the dust has settled on the electioneering frenzy of these final days, 2010, the third “change” election in a row, will better be read as an equilibrium restoring election.
In the Senate, Democrats are about to hand back just over half of their recent wins (5 seats in 2006, and another 8 in 2008) to the Republicans. Most predictions for the number of seats the Republicans will pick up in the House hover around 50 because there are currently 49 Democrats occupying seats in districts that voted for McCain in 2008, and they are about to relinquish these seats. Put another way, Democrats picked up 31 seats in 2006, and another 21 in 2008, and they’re about to return just about every one of them back to the Republicans.
This is not coincidence. It is the revealed majesty of the Newtonian system that the Framers of the Constitution set up, and our subliminal internalization of its logic. The Founders weren’t too fond of waves of popular passion, which is why they applied “a new science of politics” and created institutions arrayed alongside each other with the specific principle that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
The invisible constitutional hand appears to be working. Now that Barbara Boxer has pulled ahead of Carly Fiorina in California, as has Joe Manchin over John Raese in West Virginia, it is likely that the Democratic firewall will hold just enough to prevent a Republican takeover of the Senate. To take over the Senate, Republicans must take the seats in CO, IL, NV, PA, and WA. Indeed, because Republicans are polling ahead in each of these last 5 races, a nearly perfect partisan equipoise is likely to occur in the Senate. That means the 112th Congress which starts business on January 3, 2011, will likely see a slim Republican majority in the House, and an even slimmer Democratic majority in the Senate.
Another way to think about this election as equilibrium restoring is to observe the net neutral effect of the Tea Party movement. In some places, Tea Party candidates are giving seasoned politicos a run for their money. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul now look like shoos-in for the senatorial seats in Florida and Kentucky, and Sharron Angle is in a statistical dead-heat with Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada – which means, given the enthusiasm gap in favor of Republicans this year, Reid has a mountain to climb in the next two days.
Other Tea Party candidates, however, have turned out to be poor candidates. Principally, they don’t know how to handle the media and the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics. Some, like Joe Miller, think it’s OK to hand-cuff journalists; others, like Christine O’Donnell failed to realize that telling us “I’m not a witch” does not kill a rumor but sustains it. Others who have been inducted into office, like Scott Brown from Massachusetts, have long since forgotten their patrons. Like all third party movements since time immemorial, the Tea Party movement – now a flick of sunshine on a strange shore – is not likely to last more than one or two more electoral cycles.
All told, the Republicans are going to regain the seats they lost in 2006 and 2008. But, the electoral tsunami would most likely not be enough, as it was in 1994 or 2006, to flip both houses of Congress. And because of the truncated constitutional calendar, this year’s wave will stop short of the White House. The greatest prize of them all will stay in Democratic hands (a prize that will become especially valuable now that the Vice-president’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate will likely be activated in the months to come.)
A tsunami which converts half a branch is, arguably, no tsunami at all. For this to be a really significant wave that is more than equilibrium restoring, Republicans would need
