He did. In both his case and Gingrich’s, they failed to submit enough valid signatures to get on the ballot.
I’m going to call Ohio for Romney. The only large groups of votes still out are in Cuyahoga and Montgomery counties, both of which are healthily going for Romney.
I understand in the technical sense how it happened. I just don’t understand why Gingrich and Santorum didn’t devote the resources to preventing it. Sure they have limited resources but so does Paul and he managed it.
And Virginia has its weird split delegate assignment, which makes it important to run a multi-candidate race. Let’s say that Gingrich had gotten on the ballot with Romney and Paul. And let’s say that Romney got 40% of the vote and Gingrich and Paul each got 30% (a 19-15-15 delegate split). Romney would have still won but by keeping him below 50% the others would have denied him the full slate of 49 delegates.
I’ll stop short of calling them incompetent, but it is incontrovertible proof that they suck at managing their campaigns.
Idaho was called for Romney.
Santorum is 7K in the hole in Ohio with 93% reporting. Like Frank, I’m going to say it’s over and call it for Romney.
A big part of it is that believe it or not Romney has by far the most professionally ran campaign. The reason I’ve always thought the repeated “not-Romney” cycle from Bachman, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum (I forget anyone who had a run at it seriously?) would peter out is because all of them were basically relying on this idea that some moment of fame would bring in enough money that they’d be able to compete nationwide on the fly.
It’s not an impossible feat, but Romney’s campaign was essentially working nationwide from day one, and didn’t need all the circus act stuff to make it that far because he had deep enough support on a national level.
That being sad it’s a sad indictment of the current crop of candidates that Romney really is the best candidate organizationally and even on electability.
In truth though if I were a prominent GOP politician I probably wouldn’t have ran against a Democratic incumbent President (let alone Barack Obama who has a strong organization) unless the country was in total cluster fuck Jimmy Carter mode (we may have been there early on in Obama’s first term but most people were willing to ascribe it to Bush back then, and things are on the up now.) So it makes sense we have the real dregs.
To me the only interesting thing out of this year’s election cycle is what sort of direction the GOP collectively decides to head in after losing the general.
If Romney’s the nominee, which I believe will be the case, then the Republicans will double-down on the crazy, shrieking that Romney lost because he wasn’t a real conservative.
MSNBC just called Ohio for Romney.
A fairly lucky escape for Romney in Ohio which it looks like he will win by a point. It wouldn’t have mattered much in terms of delegates but even a small loss in Ohio would have been terrible optics. And Ohio is perhaps the last state where optics matter much; i.e. there is a big difference between a one point loss and a one point win regardless of the delegates. From now on the focus is increasingly going to be on the delegate count.
That’s okay. I’m all right with Barack Obama being a successful Not-Romney come November. 
I’m hearing that Dennis Kucinich lost his primary race against Marcy Kaptur.
Yep. You know who it looks like her opponent will be in November don’t you?
Joe the Plumber.
Seriously.
The basic fact of this race seems to be that Romney can grind out a win in any state that really matters. He has done it thrice in a row now; Florida, Michigan and Ohio. A loss in any of these states would have been a major setback. In each one he was behind but orchestrated a systematic demolition job using attack ads, surrogates and his superior ground game. He crushed Newt in Florida but Santorum did hold his own in Michigan and Ohio. The latter is proving a lot tougher than the other contenders that Romney has disposed of. I think he could become a real threat but only if Newt drops out soon and throws his support to Santorum. Newt’s ego is probably too big for that but OTOH he does seem to loathe Romney…
Yea, in an amazing job of gerrymandering Ohio Republicans combined Marcy and Dennis’s districts with only a 100 mile long corridor between Toledo and Cleveland. Honestly, I don’t feel too bad for Dennis. While he was making his presidential runs Marcy was serving her constituents. I would have gladly voted for either of them in the general but speaking as someone from Dennis’s old district, I voted for Kaptur.
We’re not talking Donald Trump and Herman Cain. Gingrich and Santorum know how to win elections. So I’m surprised they dropped the ball on this one.
No. Intrade currently gives Obama a 60% chance of victory, up from the high 40s in September and October. Moreover, if the economy seizes up, the Republican wins. Last fall, it appeared that Europe would continue with austerity indefinitely. Lately though they’ve rediscovered textbook economics, so we have probably dodged that bullet. But oil prices could spike following military action in Iran this Spring. Or the recovery could merely peter out: state and local governments are expected to continue to slash spending for example.
Obama could still win big – we have a lot of excess capacity so the economy could roar as well. But as of a year ago, it was certainly reasonable for an ambitious Republican politician to challenge Obama.
No, the reason why the dregs are running is structural: to garner Republican support in a primary you either have to be crazy or simulate a crazy. Romney is a simulator. Huntsman tried without success to run as a neurotypical and never received even the smallest bump in national polling. The problem with acting crazy is that serious people usually find it demeaning and even when they don’t, they have trouble doing it well. Romney will say anything to get elected and it shows. So would Gingrich, but few can demagogue as well as he can. So we are left with reality show contestants, fringe candidates and unconvincing serial fabricators like Mitt Romney.
I noticed Ron Paul got 40.5% in the two-way Virginia contest. Romney got 59.5. That’s interesting, because Paul has in the past faced a ceiling of 25%, while Romney has had trouble climbing above 50%. I think Paul’s accomplishment is more noteworthy, as he beat the baseline by 15.5 points to Romney’s 9.5 points. Nonetheless, the party establishment has cooked the rules fairly effectively: Romney will collect 43 Virginia delegates to Ron Paul’s 3. More generally all but one of the remaining large statewide winner-take-all contests -Maryland, Wisconsin, California, New Jersey and Utah- are friendly territory for the Massachusetts twister. And I certainly wouldn’t call Wisconsin hostile. So methinks the fix is in place.
Well, the educated and literate loser won the Democratic primary for my new congressional district. I was afraid it would be the (seemingly) marginally-literate loser. At least the one I picked will lose with dignity. And the Walmart in the neighboring town had its proposal to sell wine on Sunday rejected; I’ve never seen that happen before. Also, a lunatic got the Republican nomination for the board of commissioners. I’m hoping he’s lunatic enough that the other guy will win. (He won’t, because the voters in this county are also lunatics, but I can dream.)
There’s been a few threads now where you cite things like intrade as though you have some sort of absolute factual basis for making election analysis. That just isn’t how it works, and I’m not terribly interested in arguments along those lines.
I think your structural analysis is deeply flawed. The GOP electorate isn’t dramatically different than it was in 2000, 2004, 2008. In 2000/2004 we nominated a candidate who won, and in 2008 we nominated a candidate who did the expected right ward shift he had to do in order to get nominated but he wasn’t a dreg of a candidate. McCain was leading in the polls and then the economy turned sour and people blamed the Republicans.
You can’t deterministically ascribe absolute causes to election outcomes based on studies of trends that follow the election results. That’s a fine way to develop actuarial type predictors but it isn’t actually how you explain real election results in real time.
Each State is different, so variation from baseline isn’t terribly interesting. There were different realities at play in Virginia than anywhere else. For one, of the major candidates only Romney was on the ballot there.
The “fix is in place” is ludicrous, the rules were adopted long before anyone knew who would be in position to take advantage of them and they were designed to make it harder and harder for anyone to come from behind as the race progressed. This is by design to minimize the length in which the nomination is competitive.