Thoughts on Super Tuesday and Beyond

The Super Tuesday results pretty closely met expectations. In some ways the next couple of weeks are likely to be more interesting, as Newt Gingrich seems likely to come face-to-face with elimination.  Here are a few thoughts on what happened yesterday, and what's coming up next:

1) A good day overall for Romney -- Ultimately, the primary process is about winning delegates, and Mitt Romney won nearly half of the 466 delegates up for grabs in the eleven states that voted yesterday. (All totals courtesy of the delegate tracker on Nate Silver's Fivethirty.com blog.)

	Gngrch	Paul	Romny	Sntorm	Unallocatd
Alaska	3	6	8	7	3
Ga.	46	0	13	2	15
Idaho	0	0	32	0	0
Mass.	0	0	41	0	0
N.D.	2	8	7	11	0
Ohio	0	0	35	21	10
Okla.	13	1	13	14	2
Tenn.	8	0	10	25	15
Vt.	0	4	9	4	0
Va.	0	3	43	0	3
Wyo.	0	1	5	0	23
Totals	72	23	216	84	71

So far Romney has captured 415 (55.7%) of the 745 delegates that have been awarded to date. That puts him on pace to wrap up the election before the convention, though he may not cross the 1,144 delegate threshold needed to secure a guaranteed first-ballot nomination until fairly late in the process.

2) Organization matters -- Rick Santorum failed to get on the ballot in Virginia or to file a full delegate slate in Ohio.  Those two issues probably cost him dearly. He might've netted anywhere from 10 to 50 delegates from Romney's total if his campaign had just had its administrative issues together.  Successful campaigns take more than just a few speeches and some ads.

Super Tuesday is the point at which the campaign scales up from a single state or two at a time to become a truly national campaign. Administrative issues may seem to be a minor point, but one of the things the primary process does well is to judge a candidate's fitness to organize a national campaign. Romney's 2008 experience and resources are going to serve him well over the next couple of months. If Rick Santorum is to successfully compete for the nomination, he'll need to avoid any further unforced errors.

3) The Fat Lady is practicing her Newt Gingrich aria -- Gingrich managed to win his home state of Georgia, but fared poorly in the other 10 states, where his best results were third-place finishes in Tennessee and Oklahoma, the sorts of states he would need to win to have a real chance at the nomination. At this point he has won only two of 22 states that have voted. His path back to relevance included capturing Southern states, especially Texas where he was endorsed by Texas Governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry.  Unfortunately for the Gingrich comeback strategy, Texas had to move its primary all the way back to May 29 due to problems in settling redistricting questions.

A loss in Georgia would have finished Gingrich. Winning several states in addition to Georgia would have put his campaign back in business. Now he is going to have to sweep the next couple of Southern contests (Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, March 13) to even make it out of the next week as a viable candidate. But the writing on the wall seems clear to everybody outside the Gingrich campaign.

4) What next? -- The most important question over the next two weeks by far is whether Gingrich departs the race in time for Santorum to reap the electoral benefits. Will Santorum be the only remaining "Anybody But Romney" in time to stop Romney from piling up enough delegates to win the nomination outright? Santorum may be able to force Gingrich from the race by beating him in either Alabama or Mississippi, and might possibly consider putting a lot of resources into those two states to force a resolution.

Gingrich's fading chance at the nomination disappeared when a substantial comeback failed to materialize in yesterday's voting.  Going forward, all he will accomplish by staying in the race is to make it more likely that Romney wins the nomination.  Ultimately, this is going to come down to Newt Gingrich and what he really wants to accomplish, as well as whether billionaire Sheldon Adelson will continue to bankroll Gingrich's SuperPAC.

The calendar over the next few weeks is not particularly favorable for Mitt Romney, so there is still time for the "Anybody But Romney" vote to coalesce around Santorum if he's the only option left. Here's the calendar for the rest of March:

Saturday, March 10 -- Guam (9 delegates), Kansas (40), Northern Marianas Islands (9), Virgin Islands (9).
Tuesday, March 13 -- Alabama (50 delegates), American Samoa (9), Hawaii (20), Mississippi (40).
Saturday, March 17 -- Missouri (52 delegates).
Sunday, March 18 -- Puerto Rico (23 delegates).
Tuesday, March 20 -- Illinois (69 delegates).
Saturday, March 24 -- Louisiana (46 delegates).

I haven't looked up delegate allocation rules for those states -- I do have a life, you know -- but a first glance at the next two weeks looks as if we could see Gingrich win Alabama and Mississippi (90 total delegates), Santorum winning Kansas and Missouri (92 total delegates), and quite possibly Romney sweeping the assorted island contests (79 total delegates), which would leave us almost exactly where we already are as the contest heads into Illinois. That's the point at which it will really begin to matter if Gingrich is still in the race.  With Gingrich still in the race we probably see another narrow Romney victory in Illinois. But if Gingrich is out of the race by then, I suspect the race may shift towards Santorum.

Let's pretend for a moment that the outcome in Illinois is likely to be an average of the results in two similar Midwestern states, Michigan and Ohio, and that Gingrich stays in the race.  We would see a finish something like this with Romney once again edging out Santorum:

Romney, 39.5%
Santorum, 37.5%
Paul, 10.4%
Gingrich, 10.6%
Other, 2.0%

If Gingrich drops out of the race we might reasonably expect 1/3 of his supporters to go to Romney and 2/3 of his supporters to go to Santorum, the other "Anybody But Romney" candidate. That would give us a finish like this, with Santorum with a slender margin:

Romney, 43.0%
Santorum, 44.5%
Paul, 10.4%
Other, 2.0%

As the contest moves forward and we encounter more winner-take-all states, the dispersal of the former Gingrich vote could become incredibly important.

So far Mitt Romney has run well enough to earn a plurality of votes in most of the states, but not a majority of the votes. That does, however, translate into a slim majority of the delegate count. But Romney continues to have difficulty crossing the 50% threshold.  On Super Tuesday he only managed more than 50% in his home state of Massachusetts, heavily Mormon Idaho, and in Virginia where neither Santorum nor Gingrich was on the ballot. (The Wyoming caucuses are an ongoing process with multiple ballots designed to force somebody eventually over 50%.)

If Gingrich drops out of the race soon enough to give Santorum a clear shot as the non-Romney, we could see a very close race until the end. If he stays in the race more than another couple of weeks, the building math and the resources of the Romney organization should allow Romney to grind out a first-ballot victory at the convention.

In politics, a victory is a victory ... whether by unanimous acclamation or by a single delegate. But a long, bruising, expensive nomination contest featuring the social conservatism of Rick Santorum and the one percentism of Mitt Romney doesn't seem likely to bode well for the GOP's chances of recapturing moderate voters in November.

P.S. As for Ron Paul? Well, he seems likely to keep on truckin' to the convention, and gives no indication that he's likely to bolt the party. He does not, however, look likely at this point to pile up enough delegates to have a substantial impact on the convention. So far he has piled up just 47 delegates, 6.7% of the total.  Republican Libertarians might be looking for a new standard bearer in 2016.