You obviously never accepted that strategy nor did Rick. My mistake was to believe that Santorum and his supporters might be trusted to do what was best for the Republic. I won't make that mistake from here on out.
Newt Gingrich isn’t giving up any votes he had any chance to get. That’s now how you run elections.
VOTERS play games. The candidates try to win every contest. Wouldn’t be real candidates if they didn’t.
The Voters aren’t really playing the game right either, but there’s no controlling the voters.
However, I will leave you with one REAL-LIFE example, as opposed to all the rampant speculation about what one candidate or another might or might not do, which have little resemblance to reality.
In 2008, Mitt ROmney was poised to win the West Virginia caucuses. He had a plurality of the vote in early polling. McCain was a distant 2nd, and Huckabee 3rd.
Huckabee, wanting to stop Romney at any cost, instructed his caucus leaders to tell all his caucus voters to switch their votes to McCain. They did so, and McCain eeked out a victory.
That actually happened. So we know that candidates can do that. Now, look at Alaska. It wasn’t a “winner-take-all” caucus of course. But there is a great psychological difference between winning and coming in 2nd, even if the delegate counts aren’t too much different.
And because it is a Caucus, you have complete control over the voters. They are all in the meeting, and you can tell a few of them, or the lot of them, what you want them to do.
If Gingrich had simply called his Alaska Caucus captains in the caucuses where he was weak, and asked them to throw their support to Santorum, just 426 votes, Santorum could have WON the Alaska primary. And likely, Gingrich wouldn’t have dropped enough to lose the delegates he got. Romney would have lost a couple of delegates though.
Now, I’m not saying GIngrich SHOULD have done this. He’s trying to win, trying to get delegates. He worked hard in Georgia to beat down Santorum so much that Santorum didn’t hit the 20% threshold — that got Gingrich 4 more delegates, and got Romney 4 more delegates, than they would have gotten if Santorum had 4000 more votes.
What I AM saying is that it is clear Gingrich is not doing “whatever he can” to stop Romney, because in the Alaska Caucus, we KNOW he could have thrown support to Santorum to stop Romney from winning — because Huckabee did so in 2008 — but Gingrich didn’t do that.
So, with all due respect, I reject your notion that Gingrich is playing some special version of the game and somehow Santorum is cheating by trying to win Alabama.
If Gingrich wins Alabama and Mississippi, Gingrich won’t win the nomination, but it will almost certainly mean Santorum won’t either.
And when it comes to the big later states, the voters aren’t going to vote to cause a brokered convention, they are going to vote to get it over, and they are going to vote for Romney, because neither Santorum nor Gingrich will have enough delegates to come close to winning.
Of course, that’s just my speculation. And frankly, I think we are at the tipping point now. But I’m not asking anybody to drop out, or to stop fighting. I’m just saying it’s absurd to attack Santorum for trying to actually win the nomination.