No.
While I have no idea if he will or will not endorse, he will obviously support McCain as our nominee, because in the end the idea of “sending messages” is both unappealing and largely useless, since you are not “sending a message” to some person who will listen, but to an entire electorate who has no idea you are doing it.
I’m reminded of a Star Trek-TNG episode, where Data is on a planet trying to convince the inhabitants to leave before they are destroyed by the Cheliac cooperative.
They are talking about how they will stand and fight, even if they might lose, because their fight will “send a message”.
Data notes that nobody will ever hear their message, and they will have died in vain.
I’m not opposed in theory to the idea that at some point you have to send a message. I might have even bought it if we had picked Giuliani as our candidate.
But there’s nobody to send a message to. Only 40-60 million republican voters, the vast majority of whom don’t follow anything closely enough to know that there are messages, and who will not interpret a McCain loss as a signal to pick a conservative next time.
Conservatives need to get the message, not the moderates. We need to find our candidate early, and get behind him 100%.
I will note that while Huckabee was theoretically in the race, as were Hunter and Tancredo, and for a time Gilmore and Brownback, NONE of those candidates had ANY traction whatsoever. It’s not even that the 5 of them were splitting the 60% of the republican party that was conservative — they were collectively pulling 5%.
Romney was the ONLY conservative in the race that had ANY traction, and even he was doing poorly for the longest time, but he was there spending his own money and working his butt off and pushing conservative principles and platforms.
But that’s OK, conservatives didn’t want him either. My point is that as of last January, there was not a SINGLE candidate that the conservatives had any interest in “rallying around”. It was like we were just expecting that by complaining about Giuliani and McCain, they would dissappear and magically some conservative would ride to our rescue.
In the end, rather than support any of the conservatives IN the race, a lot of conservatives talked some OTHER guy into dragging himself into the race. But once he was here, the conservatives wouldn’t rally around him either. Remember that when he entered, HUckabee and Romney were still both below 10%, so it’s not like we had already committed to some conservative.
But the more Fred ran, the less the general conservative population was willing to jump to him. Eventually, they grew bored, decided he wasn’t the guy after all, and went looking again. Some finally started realising that time was running out (it was already too late), and they decided they better grab one of the existing candidates. Romney jumped in the polls, Huckabee jumped in the polls, McCain jumped in the polls.
Like it or not, at some point a good number of CONSERVATIVES decided they would back McCain. You can call them names, but they are conservatives and we need them. We didn’t give them another candidate WE would support, so they had no choice but to pick.
In the end, as reality set in Romney started looking better to a lot of conservatives, because he had the solid conservative platform (his problem was trust, not platform).
But it was too late. It wasn’t the conservative activists who failed, since they mostly jumped to Thompson, it was the conservative candidates and the general conservative population, each deciding that they were tired of “settling” and wanting to have a real say.
Just as the “conservatives” here are talking about setting out from the Republican party, the SoCons were talking about settting out from the conservatives because the conservatives weren’t giving them their due.
Meanwhile, the strong national defense conservatives jumped to McCain, and never really saw Huckabee or Romney as the best choice to run our military. So they weren’t hard sells for McCain.