Charleswaynect, I'd appreciate your evaluation of this post. It seems to make a very similar case to what you said earlier in the primary season about the second choices of some Santorum and Gingrich supporters being either Mitt Romney or Ron Paul.
I saw the analysis in the New York Times but have been waiting to see a conservative review of that analysis. We now have that. I now want to see Santorum supporters specifically review this case.
At an absolute minimum, deciding whether this analysis of the role of Gingrich in the race is valid should affect how we handle Gingrich supporters. More to the point, I believe this analysis should affect the decisions by the two candidates themselves.
Newt Gingrich is a historian. How many people besides him even know about the 1920 brokered convention that replaced Republican frontrunner Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood following a bitterly divided Republican race, leading to the elevation of an unvetted President Harding who plunged America into a series of scandals from which we were saved as a political party mostly by the integrity of Vice President Calvin Coolidge? I'm consistently impressed by his grasp of American political history, even though I do not believe he is the best candidate we have.
In any case, we need as much information as we can get right now. Time is drawing very short to stop Mitt Romney, and we have no room to make mistakes.
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When challenged by Brett Baier, Gingrich was unable to name a single state that he could win. Indeed, after playing hard as a “Southern Candidate” Gingrich has lost three straight Southern States including two deep South States near his home state of Georgia, so it's hard to imagine Gingrich winning elsewhere. Still Gingrich claimed a role in the race.
His argument for continuing is that he and Senator Rick Santorum are playing a “tag team” that is denying Romney the nomination. Gingrich argues that should he leave the race, his supporters will split between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney and that Romney will turn all of his considerable resources on defeating his remaining foe-Santorum.... The first argument is worthy of some consideration. The idea that the presence of two conservatives in the race has hurt Romney's progress is at least mathematically accurate. One can't take Newt Gingrich's total support and added it to Rick Santorum. Without Gingrich in the race, some of Gingrich's support would go to Romney.
Gingrich has certainly been the most rabidly anti-Romney candidate of the two. So it would make sense that his supporters would be unlikely to jump to Romney, or they would have abandoned Gingrich already because of his rhetoric against a candidate they might support.
Two candidates always draw more total votes than one; so he helps keep Romney down, so long as the only measure of success is a comparison of the popular vote; true for some of the proportional states, not so much for winner-take-all.
But as I’ve said elsewhere, the “status quo” is a Romney victory. We need some game-changer. Like a football team switching quarterbacks NOT because the other guy is better, but simply to change the dynamic.
We don’t just need Santorum picking up Gingrich votes, or Gingrich picking up Santorum votes. We need one of these two guys to get a couple of majority victories, and have some fundraising that convinces the much larger GOP population that the candidate has “made a move” and is now “a viable candidate”.
Most people aren’t voting to play games, or to “deny someone” a nomination, they want to pick a winner they can support, and be done with it. That is primarily perception, and we need to change that perception. The only way I see that perception changing is for one of the two conservatives to get a significant “jump” in the polls and in margin of victory.
So long as Gingrich and Santorum split the vote, they can come in 1 and 2, and it doesn’t change anything. Look at this week in the news. There is almost NO talk of Romney now being hopelessly ruined, even though he came in 3rd. Instead, he was “virtually tied” with the other two, like it’s a 3-man race and every one has the same support so it’s not clear which one should be chosen.
If instead of 33/32/30, the results were consistantly 55/45, people understand “majority”. Even if Romney was getting MORE delegates, people would say “hey, why would we keep voting for a guy who can’t get a majority, when the other guy keeps getting a clear victory”?
But you might notice that this is all “logical argument”, not a factual analysis. It’s all guesswork, nobody knows. And I think the likely result of Gingrich dropping out is a Romney victory, because I think the dynamic wouldn’t change enough at this point.
If there was a time for this, it was right after Super Tuesday. Santorum had a bit of momentum, Gingrich was pretty much done. If he had thrown with Santorum then, and Santorum then won Kansas more decisively, and took the next two states with a majority vote and almost all the delegates (giving Santorum a delegate WIN, rather than Romney getting more delegates), MAYBE, just MAYBE, the tide would have turned.
And anyway, I’m not calling on Gingrich to drop out. I still say candidates mostly are “dropped out” by the electorate, and I think that is happening here, maybe too slowly. But nobody likes when people force out a candidate — we needed Gingrich, or Santorum, to drop out freely and to be enthusiastic about the other guy.