Sen. Marco Rubio and former President George H. W. Bush have now both endorsed Mitt Romney. While Mitt racks up major nominations, Rick Santorum shows signs of fading…in Pennsylvania. That would be his home state.
The poll of 505 registered Republican voters, conducted March 20-25 in conjunction with the Tribune-Review and other media outlets, shows Santorum clinging to a small lead over Romney, 30 percent to 28 percent, within the poll’s 4.2 percent margin of error.
That’s a big change from February, when Santorum, once a U.S. senator from Penn Hills, held a commanding 15-percentage-point lead over Romney in the poll.
Newt Gingrich has shaken up his campaign staff, which really means that he has laid many off, and he has drastically scaled back his already lean road game. You’re unlikely to win where you don’t even campaign. The man behind his super PAC, Sheldon Adelson, is hinting that the cash line may be about to go away.
Sheldon Adelson, who with wife Miri, has given more than $15 million to the Newt Gingrich Super PAC Winning Our Future, said Monday he believes Gingrich is “at the end of his line” regarding the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
There are three primary contests coming up on April 3, in Washington DC, Maryland and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania comes up on April 24, when it is among five states going to the polls that day. Even if Santorum wins there, it can and will be dismissed as home state advantage, while Romney is likely to will all four of the other states: CT, DE, NY, and RI. And Romney could win PA too; the logistics favor him there. The very fact that April 24 features five states favors Romney’s larger organization.
Gingrich is for all intents and purposes out of the race, he just hasn’t come to terms with that yet. Santorum must win his home state with some room to spare and pick off something meaningful on April 3 and April 24.
fiddlestix, once again it’s all over long before California votes, not that I think California has any great insights on the matters, but it’s a lot of people and don’t we deserve to participate? Grrrrr.
Same with Texas. The biggest red state gets no say in who the GOP nominee will be.
On the other hand, if California and Texas had gone before South Carolina, Romney could have started out with 327 delegates and Big Mo in his pocket. Santorum would have been a blip on the radar, and Gingrich would still have self-destructed after Florida. Even now, I believe losing their combined delegates would be enough to reduce Romney to a plurality. California, of course, with its winner take all system, has always been the prize beyond all others.
When it comes the general elections, I more than sympathize with California Republicans, and say thank God for Texas, but if you want to cut the primary season short, and let the guy with the biggest machine roll over everybody else, I can’t think of a better way to do it than front loading CA & TX.
Now that it’s pretty much set in stone, maybe people can start telling me why I should be excited to vote FOR Mitt Romney without using the words Obama, inevitable, or electable.
If saying Obama is not good enough for you, why should anyone bother?
Urging someone that they vote for a candidate whose only real credential—according to his most fanatic supporters—is that he is nominally better than the worst occupant of the Oval Office in at least 100 years is the most pallid endorsement I can imagine.
When that’s clearly the only argument that will nominally win over Romney’s most “fanatical” detractors, why would Romney’s core supporters waste their time arguing anything else? If that’s not good enough to get them to actively support our eventual nominee, what is? If you want a better candidate, then maybe you need to figure out how to persuade a better candidate to actually run, for a change.
OK, how about this:
As lackluster and far from perfect as McCain is, I’m sure you’ll agree that we would be better off today had he won the 2008 election. 2012 is your chance for a Do-Over.
Oh, come now. Newt Gingrich is the candidate.
All the pundits told us so; they all said—breathlessly—that “no Republican in 30 years was ever nominated if he didn’t win South Carolina!” And Newt won it, handily. The other primaries? Romney’s vast cash reserves, his delegates, Rick Santorum’s brief Gong Show moment in the spotlight? A passing show.
“Gingrich is for all intents and purposes out of the race, he just hasn’t come to terms with that yet. “
Except for one stunningly heady moment of hope, crushed by Romney sooo cruelly, I don’t think Gingrich ever seriously expected be the party’s nominee. It was put up or shut up time for the perennially coy will-he-or-won’t-he CPAC favorite. What better way to refresh his status as GOP point man than a turn in the limelight as a presidential contender? He quit actually campaigning awhile ago, he just needed an excuse to stay on the stage as long as possible, et voilá, the Tampa strategy.
In a sad, but emblematic, irony, the loss that will keep on hurting is the likely demise of his own post-convention career as the truth-to-power conservative go-to guru, which his debate performances were well on the way to cementing for all time. What Gingrich needs to come to terms with, and never will, is that he’s shot himself in in his own foot in the same self-agrrandizing way he did as Speaker of the House. When he gets personal and petty, he is not a pretty sight. Every time he tries to the shift the blame, it’s his own credibility that suffers.