Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (34 page)

BOOK: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America
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When the votes were counted on February 28, Romney squeezed out a narrow victory—41 percent to Santorum’s 38 percent. He won Arizona easily, as expected. The Michigan victory was what Romney needed, but not enough to knock Santorum out or, for that matter, to shut off talk about Romney’s weaknesses as a front-runner. Republican gossipers speculated that his vulnerabilities could open the door to a late entry by another Republican. As the campaign turned toward a dozen contests on Super Tuesday the following week, Romney still had work to do. His strategy was the same as always, which was to try to make himself the most broadly attractive candidate. He could divide and conquer as long as Santorum, Gingrich, and Ron Paul remained in the race indefinitely and split the anti-Romney constituency in the party. Or if the race truly was a two-person contest, as Santorum was saying, he could demonstrate his strength by starting to win majorities. It all came down to the same thing. To win the nomination, he had to keep winning primaries.

•   •   •

The weekend after Michigan and before Super Tuesday, I went to Boston to check in with Romney’s team. They were hunkered down—not out of concern that the nomination was suddenly in jeopardy; they were still confident of victory. But they were even more keenly aware that the rules governing this battle were conspiring to make Romney’s path to victory long and difficult. Russ Schriefer cited four factors that he thought made it impossible to end the battle quickly, despite what people had said after New Hampshire. One was the calendar and the rule change to proportional distribution of delegates. He pointed to the super PACs as the second factor. “If you go back to, like, the Democratic nomination in 2004, when Kerry wrapped it up so fast, if George Soros decided to give Howard Dean another $5 million, Dean could have gone on. Right? If some big donor decided to [give] Gephardt another $5 million, the race would have continued and Kerry wouldn’t have been able to wrap it up as quickly as he did.” Schriefer cited two other factors to explain why Romney had not been able to wrap up the race quickly. One was the role of the debates. He doubted that Gingrich would have won South Carolina without them. The other was the rise of social media and Internet fund-raising, something that had grown exponentially in just eight years, which he argued also elongated the process. Everyone had had a moment to challenge Romney. Santorum was the latest and, he hoped, the last. Donald Trump. Michele Bachmann. Herman Cain. Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich twice. Rick Santorum now. “The one thing that we saw was that over the course of the campaign these sorts of surges would last anywhere from three to five weeks,” Schriefer said. “And then things would start to settle down.” By
those calculations, Santorum’s loss in Michigan marked the beginning of the end of his time in the spotlight.

Matt Rhoades had a similar analysis that day, with one additional insight. “The way the media has changed, the new media and just the constant negative information flow that exists out there, those three things have completely changed the dynamics of the primary process,” he said. “That we’re still here and we’ll be going on past Super Tuesday is not Mitt Romney’s fault. Has our campaign made mistakes? Sure. But it’s not our fault that [the contest is] going to keep going. That’s how the process is designed, that’s what they intended it to do, and that’s how it’ll be.” Rhoades wasn’t finished. “One thing [that] happened since New Hampshire is everyone started believing that Mitt was going to, like, roll through everything, and I never thought that. But the perception got out there. And it was like, why didn’t Mitt win South Carolina? Why does Mitt lose any states? It’s an unfair burden people place on him—some of our own supporters, the D.C. crowd who know nothing about presidential politics, they start chattering and it builds and the media then builds. And then you have South Carolina and you have people saying it’s over. And then you have a great night [in Florida] and then Rick has a great night, and it’s like, ‘What’s wrong?’”

•   •   •

Ten states held contests on Super Tuesday, March 6. The only one that really counted and was in doubt was Ohio, where once again Santorum was pitted against Romney in a head-to-head contest that neither candidate could afford to lose. It was, presumably, tailor-made for Santorum to spring an upset. Ohio was like Michigan, an industrial state with an older population hard hit by economic decline over a decade and more. Ohio bordered Pennsylvania—and specifically the part of Pennsylvania that was Santorum’s home area. Unlike Michigan, Romney had no direct ties to the state, no family connections, no history of doing well there. He had never been on the ballot there. Romney’s campaign team did not regard Ohio as an ideal place for a showdown with an opponent who was both more conservative and more blue-collar and who also had a message—at least when he was focused and disciplined—that was aimed directly at culturally conservative, working-class voters. At times during the campaign, Santorum had spoken with passion and eloquence about what had happened to the country’s manufacturing base and to the workers who once made good livings in the auto and steel and glass factories. He spoke from the workers’ perspective, unlike Romney, whose language reflected that of the entrepreneur and business owner. As important as Michigan had been, Romney’s advisers worried more about Ohio—and knew they would have only a week to make their case. He still had one big advantage. He could far outspend Santorum and did. Between his campaign and super PAC, Romney spent
almost $4 million on ads in Ohio. Santorum and his Red, White and Blue Fund spent barely $1 million.

The polls in Ohio had shown a pattern similar to those in Michigan. Santorum’s victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado turned the race around in Ohio, with his margin over Romney pegged at anywhere between seven and eighteen points in the two weeks after February 7. Then Romney began to claw his way back. After the victories in Michigan and Arizona, multiple polls showed Romney and Santorum in a virtual tie in Ohio. Romney, with guidance from Ohio senator Rob Portman, made a series of strategic appearances and stepped up appeals to working-class voters. Three days before the primary, he appeared before an enthusiastic audience at a factory outside Dayton. Nick Mangold, an All-America football player from Ohio State University who was now with the New York Jets, joined him. “If I were as big and strong as Nick,” he said, “this race would be over.” It was a near-perfect rally except when he got a question from the mother of a young woman serving in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. What would Romney do to end the war and bring the troops home? she asked. He did not have a coherent policy for the war. “We’re going to finish the job of passing it off to them and bring our troops home as soon as humanly possible,” he said. On the final day of campaigning, Romney and Santorum continued to bid for blue-collar voters. In Zanesville, Republicans who had turned out to hear Romney openly worried about the negativity of the GOP contest. “
We’re giving the Democrats
all the ammunition they need to fight us,” Shirley Labaki, an antiques store owner, told the
Columbus Dispatch
. “We’re doing all their research for them.” Santorum attacked Romney as a weak general election candidate and highlighted his own conservative credentials. “Liberalism is an ideology,” he said. “Socialism is an ideology. Conservatism is simply what works.”

Election night produced hours of agony for Romney. Of the ten contests that night, Romney won six, Santorum three, and Gingrich one. But it was not until well after midnight that the networks gave him Ohio. For a time it appeared that Santorum might pull the upset he needed to truly transform the race. Only when Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, reported its final numbers was Romney declared the winner. He won the state by just 10,508 votes, far less than his margin in Michigan the previous week. That night he also won Virginia, Vermont, Idaho, Alaska, and Massachusetts and a majority of the delegates awarded that day (hitting the goal his advisers had set out a year earlier in their analysis of how to win the nomination). But Ohio’s result came so late and was so close that Santorum’s victories in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and North Dakota, along with Gingrich’s in Georgia, left the distinct
impression that the Republican race was far from over. Rhoades described the scene inside Romney headquarters. “This is a night where [Romney’s] believing in his team,” he said. “Because if you’re watching TV, Mitt Romney’s losing Ohio. But if you’ve got our apparatus set where we’ve got all the phones coming in from all the places and all the counties and precincts, Rich [Beeson] is saying, ‘We’re going to win it.’ It’s a painful, painful night, and it’s painful to go through because Ohio was late and people love a horse race. The slog continues.”

As the primaries were playing out, one of Romney’s advisers sent an e-mail taking issue with the criticism of Romney as a weak candidate: “When looking back at this campaign, it will seem very odd that the guy who was winning—and most likely will win—was the guy who was constantly criticized the most. Politics is a perfect marketplace. You are worth what you are worth in votes. That’s it. Nothing more or nothing less. . . . There is a Green Room culture, which has come to dominate political coverage, which is dedicated to examining what’s wrong with Romney every hour. That’s fine. But when one reads this stuff in a year or two years or five years, I do think it will seem odd that everyone spent so much time asking themselves why the guy who was 500 yards ahead of everybody else in the mile run was running so slowly. Okay, sure, he could run faster. But the guys behind him are running slower and it would seem not illogical to spend more time asking what was wrong with everyone else that they can’t even beat such a slow runner like Romney. Except that Romney isn’t slow. The media tend to look at Romney the way that Republicans looked at Clinton. Sort of mystified that he could be winning. But he was and did. Which is not to say that we don’t have lousy days as a campaign. Sure, all the time. But Romney is about to win a Republican nomination without a natural base in the party and that’s a credit to his pure candidate skills and intellect and personality. Ask yourself—when is the last time we saw that happen?”

•   •   •

In reality, the Republican race was now over. For all the ups and downs, the twists and turns, the seeming strength or weakness of Romney at any given moment, the battle followed a rigidly predictable pattern. Santorum could win some states after Super Tuesday but had no realistic chance to win the nomination unless he could expand his coalition. Romney and Santorum were prisoners of demographics and the divisions within the party. It didn’t really matter where they went or what they said or what kind of ads they ran; the rest of the contests were virtually fixed in their outcome, as had been the case since the first votes were cast in Iowa.

The fault line was most easily understood by one single category of voters in the exit polls from all the major states that had voted or would be voting. If
evangelical Christians accounted for more than 50 percent of the primary or caucus electorate, Romney lost the state. If they accounted for fewer than 50 percent, he won. The pattern from Iowa through Super Tuesday showed no variation. Romney had won New Hampshire, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Ohio—all with electorates in which evangelicals accounted for between 22 and 49 percent of the voters. He had lost Iowa, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia. Evangelicals made up anywhere from 57 to 83 percent of the voters in those contests. Romney was criticized through the primaries for his seeming inability to win over the conservative base of the party. In reality, where he found resistance was primarily among those who described themselves as very conservative, not conservatives in general. The only states where he won a plurality of those voters were, generally, states that were more moderate or less socially conservative. Among the roughly one-third of Republican voters who described themselves as “somewhat conservative,” he was an almost universal winner, as he was among those who said they were either “moderate” or “liberal.”

After Super Tuesday, the race continued for another month. Santorum still believed there was a way for him to win, if he could get beyond the next month of primaries that generally favored Romney. But he needed three things to break his way: He had to win Wisconsin on April 3; he needed Gingrich to drop out; and he needed Texas to make its late primary a winner-take-all contest. None of which happened. Gingrich clung to the fanciful hope that Santorum would crumble and that the non-Romney voters would turn to him again in a last effort to block Romney’s path. Advisers to Santorum and Gingrich talked briefly about joining forces, but Gingrich later told me it was never a serious proposition. Santorum won four more states—Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Romney, however, won where it counted most: Illinois and Wisconsin (as well as Maryland and the District of Columbia).

By the weekend before the April 3 Wisconsin primary, Santorum was under mounting pressure to quit. After a lunch in West Bend that included the state delicacy, cheese curds, Santorum was asked again whether he planned to continue. “I’m not talking about this anymore,” he said impatiently. Two days later, Romney won an easy victory. Santorum came out of Wisconsin defeated, exhausted, and out of money. Compounding his problems, his daughter Bella was taken to the hospital again three days after the primary. That weekend, he began talking seriously about getting out of the race. His wife, Karen, wanted him to keep fighting on, but his time was over. On April 10, after losing Wisconsin and facing a likely embarrassing loss two weeks later in his home state of Pennsylvania, Santorum announced he was getting out. Gingrich, for
reasons only he could explain, stayed on a few weeks longer. He dropped out on May 10, as he had assured Romney the week before in a private telephone call. Only Ron Paul remained. Romney turned his focus to the president and the general election.

The Republicans had provided the country with a political spectacle, a roller-coaster nomination battle with more bizarre plot twists than anyone could have written in advance. But the nomination contest also highlighted the party’s weaknesses—the degree to which its conservative base was pushing the party beyond the mainstream. The primaries turned out not to be good for either the party or its nominee.

BOOK: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America
10.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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