Everyone seems to agree that Romney is going to be eventual nominee but there is some discussion about whether the relatively long primary campaign is going to hurt him in the general.Obama also went through a long primary fight in 2008 but it seemed to help him and he ended up winning the general comfortably. Why does a long nomination fight hurt Romney if it didn’t hurt Obama?
Obama was less experienced than Romney is today. The long nomination fight helped to season his campaign and gave voters a longer look which helped reassure them that he was indeed Presidential material. Romney has been a national figure since 2008 and has an impressive resume already; he doesn’t need this particular benefit of a long campaign.
2)Obama’s opponent was widely considered a heavyweight politician who started off the primary season as the favorite with some big advantages. Standing toe to toe with Hillary in a long primary campaign and beating her thus added to Obama’s stature. This time it’s Romney who is the establishment favorite and he is facing relative lightweights like Gingrich and Santorum. Romney loses stature when he has to struggle to beat them.
3)In the general Obama faced a non-incumbent opponent who was short on resources. Romney will face a sitting President who has a big head-start in organization and funding.
Romney’s opponents are for the most part attacking him from the right. Romney is responding by trying to burnish his conservative credentials which may hurt him in the general on issues like immigration. This didn’t happen in 2008 and by and large Obama was pretty consistent in his arguments and positions between the primaries and the general.
Romney is a less skillful politician than Obama and less able to turn lemons into lemonade. A great example of this was the Wright controversy and the way Obama used it to deliver a widely praised speech which largely defused the race issue for the general. Romney could have perhaps done something like this with the Bain issue and delivered an impassioned defense of his work there and placed it in the context of his economic beliefs and policies for the future. Perhaps he has tried to do this but he just doesn’t have the chops to pull it off. Bain has become a running sore which will continue to hurt him in the general.
So the bottom line is a long primary campaign is a double-edged sword and can both benefit and hurt a candidate depending on the context. In 2008 it mostly helped Obama but this year it’s mostly hurting Romney.
One thing is that for primaries, you’re trying to get your party to like you. In the general, you try to get everyone to like you.
It seems to be a particular problem for Republicans, because they need to ‘work the base’ by appearing strongly conservative. Then once they’re nominated, they have to move toward the center to pick up undecided moderates. Today’s Republicans get drawn so far to the right that moving back to the center makes them look insincere.
Some of the things Romney has said to please evangelicals are hard to unsay, and are possibly not sounding good to the centrists.
Yes that is a good point which complements my point 4. The gap between primary voters and general election swing voters is greater for Republicans than Democrats which means the former should prefer shorter primary campaigns.
Which raises the question: why did the Republicans abandon a system of winner-take-all primaries which delivered a fast result in 2008? My understanding is they actually wanted a longer primary campaign which they thought helped the Democrats that year. They probably didn’t understand that a lot of that was because of the specific circumstances of Obama and 2008 and wouldn’t necessarily apply to their party in 2012. Certainly at the least they should have anticipated point 3, that a long primary campaign isn’t ideal when you are facing a well-funded incumbent President.
Another difference is that the Democratic primaries of 2008 were mostly positive campaigns (where the candidates were advertising how good they were), while the current Republican primaries are mostly negative (where the candidates are advertising how bad their opponents are). If one of your positive ads from the primary gets a lot of play during the general, well great, it still applies and does its job, and if one of your opponent’s positive primary ads gets play, it won’t matter. By contrast, if one of your negative primary ads gets a lot of play, it won’t do you any good, but if one of your opponent’s negative primary ads gets a lot of play, it’ll hurt you.
In addition Romney has the problem of having been a pretty moderate governor of Massachusetts in the past. In these primaries he’s been pushed to disavow many of his past positions rather vehemently and he’s already battling an image issue wrt having no real principles but just espousing whatever position is politically convenient. He’s is a really, really lousy position to shift back to the centre in the general election because if he does there will be legitimate, difficult questions about wtf he really believes.
Certainly it does to political junkies, and it allows the media to report ‘news’ without doing any work, and it can use up money for poorly-funded candidates.
But most swing voters make up their mind in the last week-10 days before the election. they’ve long forgotten the primary season, if they ever paid attention in the first place.
Swing voters aren’t the only concern. After a long and bitter primary campaign, there is a risk that disgruntled supporters of the losing candidate will sit out the general election. And this is a particular risk if they feel their candidate got screwed.
Especially when you have an establishment candidate knocking off an insurgent this is a potential problem.
Romney* is a second-rater who represents crackpot ideas that don’t have wide resonance, so his election prospects depend on whether he can spend enough to challenge an incumbent President. As the primary fight drags on, Romney’s ideas aren’t going to improve, the economy isn’t going to stop growing, and his funds aren’t going to stop shrinking.
None of these were the case in 2008… McCain wasn’t an incumbent, he didn’t have particularly deep pockets, and each day of the worsening financial crisis brought a painful new reminder of the ineptness of Republican dominated government over the last 8 years.