That’s the line he used Monday morning in an interview with CBS News. Here’s what he can’t say, but really means: The already slim chances of Santorum securing the 1,144 delegates required to clinch the nomination are rapidly decreasing. Mitt Romney routed him in Puerto Rico over the weekend and two polls out Monday show [...]
Primaries
“I’m learning to say ‘y’all’ and I like grits,” Mitt Romney recently told a crowd in Pascagoula, Mississippi. “Strange things are happening to me.” But has the Boston private equity executive turned Republican technocrat turned presidential front-runner, whom the latest polls shows running even with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich in Tuesday’s southern primary states, [...]
Imagine how crazy it would be if Michele Bachmann lost her House seat to a Tea Partyer even more conservative than she was—that’s the equivalent of what happened on Tuesday when three-term Rep. Jean Schmidt lost the Republican primary in Ohio’s 2nd District to political rookie Brad Wenstrup. The upset was big—just last cycle, Schmitt [...]
A week makes all the difference in the media narrative — and very little in the pecking order. Super Tuesday, a coast-to-coast flurry of democracy with 10 states and 437 delegates at stake, is supposed to be an inflection point of the Republican nominating fight. Instead, it is likely to produce a split decision that resurrects the old conventional wisdom by reaffirming Romney, the best-funded and best-organized candidate, as the inevitable nominee.
In baseball, a tie goes to the runner. But in presidential primaries, a tie goes against the front runner. In a matter of hours, America will discover if Mitt Romney can pull out a squeaker in his native state of Michigan. As of this morning, Nate Silver, the whiz-kid of poll-based projections, pegs the state [...]
In the early summer of 2006, then-Senator Rick Santorum was facing a tough reelection challenge, trailing Pennsylvania’s Treasurer Bob Casey by 9 points and struggling to shed his image as a Washington insider. So Santorum launched a statewide, 67-county push, raising twice as much money as Casey, hiring campaign-tested pollsters and ad-makers, and recasting himself [...]
Rick Santorum found himself in unfamiliar territory on Wednesday night: at the center of attention in a Republican primary debate. The CNN forum in Arizona was the first in almost a month, and the only debate held since upsets in Minnesota and Colorado put Santorum in the top-tier of contention with Mitt Romney. And while [...]
All politics is local, said Tip O’ Neill, the former Democratic Speaker of the House from Massachusetts. For years the adage shaped the tactics of campaigns, nudging candidates to tailor their rhetoric and platforms to the specific concerns of the constituents they hoped to represent. But it’s no longer true,
The morning after his three-state sweep of Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, Rick Santorum is finally getting a bit of credit. But for a guy who’s now won more nominating contests than any other Republican presidential candidate (if you charitably count Missouri’s meaningless pageant), Santorum stands to reap few rewards for his efforts. Botched counts, party rules [...]
I’m wondering if Tuesday night’s results in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri really were so atrocious for Mitt Romney. As Alex Altman noted last night, there’s one obvious upside: Rick Santorum’s big night complicates the anti-Mitt movement, ensuring that conservative opposition to Romney remains divided. Tuesday night’s results might have made Romney look weak and unloved, [...]
