Romney

Seen at CNN:

Mitt Romney suspended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination Thursday, saying if he continued it would “forestall the launch of a national campaign and be making it easier for Sen. Clinton or Obama to win.”

So, will a pair of Huckabee announcements (concession and running-mate-ship) be coming soon, I wonder?

632-626 was the “pledged delegate” count between Hillary and Obama which I woke up to this morning, according to CNN.  (Throwing in the superdelegates, CNN has the tally as the still-close Hillary 825, Obama 732)

Wow.

I guess I need to add a few more primaries to my calendar.  Many of us armchair election-watchers quietly expected one candidate to come out of Super Duper Fat Tuesday with enough of a lead to be able to claim solid front-runner status….but that’s not the case.  The Dems’ race could very likely come down to the superdelegates and the squabble over the exclusion of Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates.

Meanwhile, over on the GOP side, CNN has the delegate count as McCain 615, Romney 268, Huckabee 169, Ron Paul 16.   (A count that is at least a little inaccurate, because it doesn’t reflect the Huckabee-Paul deal in West Virginia which netted Paul 3 additional delegates.)

I realize that McCain hasn’t yet hit the magic number of 1,191 delegates, but can we just go ahead and put a fork in the Romney and Paul GOP campaigns, and call them done?  Romney’s attempt to buy the nomination failed spectacularly in the south, and the revolution never materialized.  (Dr. Paul had a good night in Montana, and hit double digits in Minnesota as well…but the expectations that he could win Alaska didn’t pan out.)

Via The Hill, I found a statement from the Romney camp over their loss of today’s West Virginia caucuses:

“Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain’s inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney’s campaign of conservative change,” Beth Myers, Romney’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

In the first round of balloting, results were:

• Romney — 464 votes
• Huckabee — 375 votes
• McCain — 176 votes
• Ron Paul — 118 votes (eliminated)

Second ballot, because no candidate received a majority of the vote:

• Huckabee — 567 votes
• Romney — 521 votes
• McCain — 12 votes

It seems that a number of McCain supporters switched over to Huckabee, to block Romney from getting the win.

Thus, the sore loser statement above.

So, Super Duper Tuesday is almost upon us.  As you might expect, the media and the blogosphere is awash in polls.

Electoral-vote.com has a nice wrap-up, showing:

Dems

• Alabama: Hillary +3
• Arizona: Hillary +15
• California: Hillary +11
• Colorado: Obama +2
• Connecticut: Hillary +3
• Georgia: Obama +16
• Illinois: Obama +24
• Massachusetts: Hillary+15
• Minnesota: Hillary +7
• Missouri: Hillary +4
• New Jersey: Hillary +12
• New York: Hillary +22
• Oklahoma: Hillary +25
• Tennessee: Hillary +33

GOP

• Alabama: McCain + 19
• Arizona: McCain +20
• California: McCain +9
• Colorado: Romney +19
• Connecticut: McCain +19
• Georgia: McCain +1
• Illinois: McCain +11
• Massachusetts: Romney +27
• Minnesota: McCain +24
• Missouri: McCain +4
• New Jersey: McCain +19
• New York: McCain +31
• Oklahoma: McCain +18
• Tennessee: McCain +15

Of course, given the uniqueness of this primary season, I wonder about the accuracy of many of these polls.  However, I’m inclined to believe that McCain will be close to being the presumptive nominee for the GOP, thanks to the winner-take-all nature of the Republican primaries.

Over on the Dems’ side…it could remain interesting, given the proportional delegate allocation used (plus the superdelegates, plus Hillary’s desire to get her delegates from “boycotted” Michigan and Florida seated…)

In an earlier post, I made a snide remark about the expectation of Romney spending a lot of his own money in his battle with the McCain-Huckabee show (at least it sounds like Huck would be Veep if McCain gets the nod).

Perhaps McCain isn’t quite so squeaky clean on the ethical campaign front. From CNN’s Political Ticker:

The day before polls close in Tuesday’s critical Florida primary, some voters in the Miami area received automated phone calls in Spanish falsely accusing Mitt Romney of supporting an opening of relations with Cuban President Fidel Castro.

A key member of Romney’s Latin American policy team, Ambassador Roger Noriega, had been on local radio on Monday morning talking about Romney’s anti-Castro stance. “It was obviously a dirty tactic and strategy to rebut the efforts we made to let the [Hispanic] community know our position,” said Al Cardenas, Romney’s Florida state chairman.

Asked if he suspected rival John McCain, Cardenas responded, “Obviously it’s a camp of one of our opponents,” later adding “I can’t specifically state with certainty it is John McCain’s campaign, all I know is there are two campaigns making these calls, ours and his and these calls started immediately after our programming on that issue.”

I’m listening to the GOP debate on MSNBC, currently in the candidates-ask-each-other-questions phase, and unsurprisingly Giuliani posed a question on the concept of a national cat pool to to Romney (with McCain jumping in as his name was taken in vain).  Giuliani  posed his question to Romney,

A few thoughts:

• We just had more discussion on the concept than most MSNBC viewers have likely ever have been exposed to previously.
    
• Romney expressed “familiarity” with the problem via Massachusetts snowbirds.  I’m sure that folks living on Cape Cod and the Islands are feelin’ the love.  (Of course, considering what they think of the relative lack of capacity in that corner of Massachusetts…maybe he doesn’t want to associate with them.)
   
• I’m a little disappointed that the discussion didn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the expense involved (although McCain, in his rebuttal, at least raised the concern about lack of funding of current proposals).
   
• At least Romney did make a key point (looking beyond the Florida primaries) — that he didn’t want folks in Iowa to subsidize Florida risk.
   
• Interesting transition to the question of global warming at the tail of the insurance question (using threat to beach property as a segue).  Probably not a question that Republicans like to hear…but a big hat-tip to McCain for his observation on his cap-and-trade plan — “if global warming isn’t real, we leave the world cleaner for our children” (paraphrase).

With the Michigan Democratic primary having been neutered by the DNC due to the state’s cutting in line, there are various ideas floating around about what Michigander Democrats should do on primary day.

Yesterday, I wrote about calls for Michigan Dems to come out anyway and vote “Uncommitted” if they wished to support Obama or Edwards (who withdrew from the ballot).

Then, we have the idea that Kos is floating:

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state’s Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes. In 1988, Republican voters again crossed over, helping Jesse Jackson win the Democratic primary, helping rack up big margins for Jackson in Republican precincts. (Michigan Republicans can clearly be counted on to practice the worst of racial politics.) In 1998, Republicans helped Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer — quack Geoffrey Feiger — win his Democratic primary, thus guaranteeing their hold on the governor’s mansion that year.

With a history of meddling in our primaries, why don’t we try and return the favor. Next Tuesday, January 15th, Michigan will hold its primary. Michigan Democrats should vote for Mitt Romney, because if Mitt wins, Democrats win. How so? [...]

[P]oor Mitt Romney, who’s suffered back-to-back losses in the last week, desperately needs to win Michigan in order to keep his campaign afloat.  Bottom line, if Romney loses Michigan, he’s out. If he wins, he stays in.

It’s evil.  I like it. 

Seriously, I do see a downside here — encouraging such sabotage will make it more difficult for folks like me, who advocate open primaries (assuming they’re operated by the regular state election mechanism).

It would be far more appropriate for Dems choosing not to follow the “uncommitted” path to vote for the “least of the evils” on the GOP side — a kind of “if I have to have one of these jokers for President, here’s who I’d chose” vote.

And, if you were going to cross party lines to cast a strategic vote, wouldn’t you want to vote for the candidate it’s easiest for your guy/gal to beat?   In that case, wouldn’t a vote for Huckabee be the most strategic choice?  (Presumably his evangelistic Christian stance would make it easier for secular moderates to be wooed over to the D column….)

A few thoughts:

• Conventional wisdom is that Thompson won the debate.  I’m not sure that I’d go quite that far, and I’d have to wonder how much of that assessment is Fox-generated hype.  Notwithstanding my reservations, however, he did come across as a straight-talking, good ol’ boy who should be doing far better than his recent polling would indicate.
   
• If Romney weren’t well-financed and if he didn’t have extensive ground operations in place, I’d say, “put a fork in him, he’s done”.  He’s coming across as either a candidate in search of a message, or a politician who’s trying to be all things to all people.  He seems to be having problems carving a viable niche in the spectrum of messages, with the more popular messages having been claimed by other candidates.
   
  If Romney could credibly communicate the idea that he’d be effective at cleaning up waste and advancing a reasonably conservative message in the face of a hostile Congress, allowing him to build upon his resume of Massachusetts governor and Salt Lake City Olympic reformer, he might have a shot.  However, that shot is waning as Giuliani solidifies on the “I’m most likely to shift the purple states red” message.
   
• I can’t decide whether Ron Paul was just his usual nutty self, or if Fox carefully worked to make him seem extra-nutty.   I’m leaning towards the latter, given how the questions he faced were more in the “one of these things is not like another / one of these things is not the same” vein, from which he struggled to shift to answering policy questions handed to others, and given how giddy the commentators were over Paul’s low reaction numbers from their viewer’s panel…but Paul comes across as  a nut on his own, even without Fox’s assistance.
   
  If Fox News were as fair and balanced as it claims, they’d have a reasonable sounding Paul supporter on to explain why Paul’s message is appealing to his supporters (sometimes in spite of Paul’s quirks).
   
  Sadly, the notion that a nontrivial portion of the American electorate craves a small-government, pro-individual-liberties candidate so much that they’d tolerate quirks in their candidate, seems to finally be getting lost in Paul’s nuttiness.
   
• I have to give props to Huckabee for deflecting criticism and the spotlighting of the unconservativeness / un-neoconness of his positions while still coming across as a nice, likeable guy.
   
• If anyone won the debate, I’d have to name McCain.  He might not have won the battle of the soundbites (a title that Thompson did earn), but he seems to be solidifying his framing as a Republican partisans might not like, but who is viewed as most electable by partisans.

Mmm….politics, stats, and maps….

The Boston Globe has a pair of nifty mashups to permit interested folks to see where the New Hampshire votes are coming from.  The Dems’ map is here, while the GOP map is here.

The Democratic map is far more interesting, I must admit.  The GOP map shows most towns in the state appearing to have gone for McCain.

So much for the wisdom of the polls.  From MSNBC:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won New Hampshire’s Democratic primary Tuesday night, pulling out a stunning victory over Sen. Barack Obama in a contest that she had been forecast to lose.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and climbed back into contention for their party’s presidential nomination.

My wife’s been in control of the TiVo remote tonight, so I’ve had to suffice with web updates

Naturally the GOP story of the night is that Romney’s hurting (although I would have expected him to do worse, from all the hoopla) but the GOP race remains entertaining at least until we see if Giuliani can salvage Florida.

Meanwhile, the Dems have shown not to take excessive polling too seriously.  The hype would have had you believe that tonight would be an Obama blowout.   Nevertheless, I think we’re safely down to a two donkey race.

The two most interesting comments I saw in random blog-surfing waiting for the declaration to be made are:

• Rumors of Clinton supporters forming a 527 to swift-boat Obama; and
• Speculation that Obama’s big lead may actually have depressed turnout a little.  (Although I wonder if it might be that some independents shifted parties to vote for a GOP candidate of their choice.)

Super Tuesday could prove to be most entertaining.