No time to bask in the Sunshine State
Another primary down, another win chalked up for Mitt Romney. And this time by a thumping margin — some 15 percentage points ahead of his main rival for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich. But with the Florida primary behind us, the campaign enters something of a lull — apparently there won’t be another televised Republican debate for three weeks. Oh, the horror. But there’s still plenty of voting to come. Within the next couple of weeks, the number of primaries and caucuses completed will have more than doubled — Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri and Maine will all go to the polls. But none of this is particularly exciting according to political analyst Jeff Greenfield. So, to keep himself occupied, he’s turned to the arcane rules that dictate the nomination process, culminating in the Republican convention (also to be held in Florida) in August.
The current race is particularly bitter, with Romney and Gingrich likely to continue their slugfest for months to come. Pundits expect that February will favour Romney, but that with a swag of southern states voting in March, Gingrich will score plenty of wins. Then there are the differences in what the primary or caucus results mean in each state. Some states (such as Florida) run a ‘winner takes all’ system — that is, the candidate who claims the most votes gets all the state’s delegates at the August convention. (The delegates, in turn, vote at the convention on who the party’s presidential candidate will be.) But in most states, the delegates are distributed more closely in proportion to the number of votes won by each candidate (though there are plenty of differences in how this is done). This means that lots of close contests will limit the capacity for any candidate to take a decisive lead. And at the same time, Romney’s landslide win in Florida doesn’t have any greater significance mathematically than if he’d won by a handful of votes. (That said, there will no doubt be an important psychological boost for Romney and his supporters from having ‘momentum’ on their side again.)
And then there’s the convention itself. The anti-Romney forces backing Gingrich and Rick Santorum (another conservative candidate) could yet wreak havoc at the convention. Greenfield suggests Gingrich backers might try and rewrite parts of the party platform, or force their own vice-presidential nominee. It’s worth noting that many predicted a bruising battle at the Democratic convention four years ago when a scrappy young fighter named Barack Obama rattled the party’s presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. But the race was well and truly over before then, and the Clinton forces graciously acquiesced. One of the leading Republicans might mount a similar retreat this time. Then again, Gingrich is not Clinton, and Romney does not inspire in the way Obama did. Better to keep the popcorn on standby.
