So the answer is to take Palin, Newt, Rick and Rick and even Cain and make ONE candidate out of the Conservative Collection. Have them agree to include them all in the Conservative Administration. Stop splitting the votes.
The best answer so this never happens again is for the Tea Party or others to start a movement to reform this broken voting system which does not work for multi-candidate elections.
There are different options to do it, but we need a way for voters to tell us which of all the candidates they like and which they don't, not just pick one name.
As it is now, they can 4 exact clones of Newt against 1 Romney and Romney can "win" with 21% of the vote if the other candidates split the vote equally. Obviously that is not a democrat result and it is not the will of the people. One way to fix it is to have a ballot where we can say which of ALL the candidates we like and which we don't. Then the 4 Newts would each have 80% support instead of 20%, and we would be able to see the people far preferred any one of those 4 to Romney.