Rank-and-file Republican voters aren’t giving mainstream Republican professionals what they want — a blessed end to the primary season that threatens to stretch into the early summer, more than a year after its absurdly early start.
Those who live and breathe politics every day might have prefered Rick Santorum to win 80 percent of the vote in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, breaking the back of the Mitt Romney campaign — simply because it would change the storyline and introduce some novelty into the proceedings.
With a true momentum shift in which Romney suddenly began to emit the unmistakable stink of a loser, Santorum conceivably could’ve swept north with a claim to have seized the party’s heart and soul.
Instead, everything is pretty much the same as it was. Santorum got the satisfaction of beating Mitt Romney in two states. Newt Gingrich got to speak for a while on TV. And in the end, Romney got more delegates than Santorum on Tuesday — and remains the overwhelming favorite for the nomination, though he sure looks worse than he did on Monday.
Even if Romney and Santorum had changed places in Alabama and Mississippi with Mitt winning both and Rick losing both (which would only have taken a shift of 23,000 votes), the overall delegate math wouldn’t have changed much in Romney’s favor. But the world would be saying that Mitt had dealt a knockout blow, the party was coming together, the GOP was looking ahead to November . . . yes, just every cliché you could imagine emerging from the mouth of David Gergen.
What Santorum and the anti-Romney forces in the GOP want now is for Gingrich to drop out to give Santorum a “clean shot” at Romney. Perhaps that would be a useful exercise.
The presumption is that Gingrich voters would naturally slide over to Santorum, that Republicans who aren’t voting for Romney (about three-fifths of the vote total so far) are voting against him, rather than for the candidate they are choosing.
But the picture is a bit muddier. The exclusively not-Romney voter is probably more likely a Santorum guy than a Newt guy.
Remember: Gingrich staged his comeback in the fall because Republicans were entranced by his debate performances and his broad attack on President Obama. He faded after winning in South Carolina owing to weak debates in Florida and Arizona, but his voters may remain enthusiastic about Gingrich himself. If he drops, they may be more up for grabs than Santorum thinks.
For example, Tuesday night’s exit polling shows peculiarities in Gingrich’s support that Romney may be able to exploit. Strikingly, Gingrich won overwhelmingly in Mississippi and Alabama among voters who said “the right experience” was the most important quality to them.
What does “right experience” mean? It means they remember and like Gingrich from the 1990s. It also may be a signpost of a kind for age — Gingrich is the oldest of the three candidates and won the over-65 vote in Mississippi. Perhaps Santorum comes across to some voters as not mature enough to be president.
Anyway, “experience” is a card Romney can play. He has less political experience than Santorum, who had 16 years in Congress. But he has his private-sector experience to trumpet as he seeks to craft a message going forward.
And we’re headed to states in which the very conservative part of the Republican coalition won’t be the overwhelming majority of the electorate. In next week’s Illinois contest, for example, a plurality of Republicans lives in the famously moderate suburbs of Chicago and not in more rural downstate. Romney goes into that race already having 20 percent of the delegates in his pocket, because Santorum failed to file delegate slates in a few districts.
Santorum obviously gains if Gingrich leaves the race, but it won’t necessarily change the overall dynamic. For as the contest moves on to far more populous states, his weaknesses as a national candidate grow, and Romney’s advantages strengthen.
The rest of us are just along for the ride, with no off-ramp in sight.