Prof. Fried's big, public break with the GOP came in the heat of the last election campaign, when he joined Weld in backing Obama, citing the selection of Sarah Palin as GOP vice presidential candidate. (Fried had published an article blasting race-based affirmative action in the Harvard Law Review when Obama was its president). He has staked out an increasingly strident view of the Commerce Clause in his defense of Obamacare, testifying:

Sen. Durbin: The point raised by Senator Lee - the 'buy your vegetables, eat your vegetables' point? I'd like you ask to comment on that because that is the one I'm hearing most often. By people who are saying "Well, if the government can require me to buy health insurance, can it require me to have a membership in a gym, or eat vegetables?" We've heard from Professor Dellinger on that point, would you like to comment?

Prof. Fried: Yes. We hear that quite a lot. It was put by Judge Vinson, and I think it was put by Professor Barnett in terms of eating your vegetables, and for reasons I set out in my testimony, that would be a violation of the 5th and the 14th Amendment, to force you to eat something. But to force you to pay for something? I don't see why not. It may not be a good idea, but I don't see why it's unconstitutional.

Oddly, Prof. Fried even testified that if Congress lacked the power to mandate the purchase of insurance, "not only is ObamaCare unconstitutional, but then so is RomneyCare in Massachusetts" - despite the fact that the legal basis for a state-level mandate derives from state police powers rather than the more limited, enumerated powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution (you can hear his rather tortured reasoning on this point near the end of this video):

Last August, during the debt-deal battle, Prof. Fried went further, penning an op-ed for the Daily Beast entitled, without irony, "Obama Is Too Good For Us," blasting basically everyone in the GOP (besides Jon Huntsman) and Palin and the Tea Party movement in particular.

It is fair and accurate to describe Prof. Fried as a former Reagan official and former member of the GOP legal establishment. But it is deeply misleading to suggest that he speaks today for some element of mainstream thought on the Right, or to tout his views on Obamacare without presenting to readers his support for Obama, his effective divorce from the modern GOP, and the extreme nature of his views on the government's ability to make you buy broccoli.

Romney 41.8% (4 wins)
Newt 22.9%
Santorum 22.5% (2 wins)
Paul 9.7%

Conservative bloc: 46.6%
Moderate bloc: 43.5%

These states - most notably Iowa, Florida, and Ohio - have seen some of the most heated campaigning of the race. The bottom line in the swing states may be the same as in the red states (Romney being outvoted by the combined conservative vote, but winning a plurality by the division among his opponents) but he has clearly outdistanced any one of his adversaries, as Newt was largely a non-factor in Iowa, showed poorly in Ohio and was not on the map in New Hampshire, while Santorum ran a distant third in Florida. And the conservative bloc's lead in these states has been much more modest, with neither commanding a majority of the vote. There's certainly a plausible argument here that - whether or not he can win over skeptical swing-state swing voters - Romney has at least shown that none of his remaining opponents is a consistent vote-getter in those states. Like most of Romney's arguments for the nomination, this is more about the weakness of his opponents than his own strengths.

Finally, there's the vote in the territories (Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands), in which 113,014 votes have been cast:

Romney 87.8% (2 wins)
Santorum 8.5%
Newt 2.2%
Paul 1.4% (1 win)

Not much use breaking these out further; Romney's campaign steamrolled the other candidates in these jurisdictions, but none of them vote in November. In theory, combined with Romney's vastly improved showing this year among Florida's Hispanic primary voters, his overwhelming win in Puerto Rico might seem to indicate that despite Romney's current hardline immigration rhetoric** he may be on a path to do much better with Hispanic voters than I have feared. On the other hand, nothing in the general election polling would seem to support that view; neither Puerto Rican Republicans nor Cuban-American Florida Republicans seem to be all that representative of Hispanic swing voters in places like Colorado and Nevada.

* - After Saturday's Louisiana primary, the last state voting in March - or perhaps after the first April votes - I'll do a more complete update of my running tally of the popular vote in the 2012 primaries, see here and here

** - As opposed to his positions on immigration before 2007, when he supported the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill and a path to legalization, see here, here, here and here and here.

Politico, in a story on pressure by the Congressional Black Caucus on the case, notes the scale of the campaign to nationalize the story:

A change.org petition asking for Zimmerman's prosecution has drawn more than 420,000 signatures and an attorney for the Martin family has asked for an FBI investigation.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to Trayvon Martin's family. But obviously we're not going to wade into a local law-enforcement matter," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said when he was asked about Martin's death at today's briefing.

On the scene is a man with his own rap sheet of inciting murderous rioting:

Later Tuesday, civil rights activist Al Sharpton is expected to join Sanford city leaders in an evening town hall meeting to discuss with residents how the investigation is being handled. On Monday, students held rallies on the campus of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and outside the Seminole County Criminal Justice Center, where prosecutors are reviewing the case to determine if charges should be filed.

ThinkProgress, leading a chorus of "progressive" bloggers, complains that the media feeding frenzy has not been unanimous:

Martin has merited coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. The story has been covered by all three broadcast networks and extensively on cable. But there is one outlet that has barely mentioned Trayvon Martin - Fox News.

Now bear in mind that the very people pushing a "national conversation" on George Zimmerman are not always so concerned that the media give a full and fair accounting of our criminal justice system's fairness to victims of crimes. They are still complaining, a quarter century later, that the Massachusetts prison furlough program became an issue in the 1988 presidential election, and that a few obscure local ads even mentioned one particular graphic crime, committed by an inmate named Willie Horton. Somehow, even though it directly involved the judgment of a presidential candidate, that was not deemed fit for discussion.

Or turning to the present day, if the point is to use crime stories to dramatize real world concerns, what about a story that affects a lot more people than the fairness and competence of the Sanford, Florida police department: incursions into the U.S. by Mexican drug cartels? You can easily find dramatic individual stories written up in the local and sometimes national print media - a quick Google search turned up these examples:

March 14, 2012: "An alleged lieutenant of the Sinaloa cartel has been indicted in the U.S. for conspiracy in the kidnappings and deaths of a West Texas man and three New Mexico men."

March 3, 2012, a story Erick wrote up on RedState: "A Mexican drug leader. Oscar 'El Apache' Castillo Flores, was released by the United States back to Mexico and immediately set about reacquiring power and killing people. He eventually is gunned down himself. His death happened this past week.

In September of 2011, Oscar's brother Omar was gunned down in Texas. About the same time, someone kidnapped his wife from a Walmart in Brownsville, TX."

February 16, 2012: In a NY Times story on a Texas state government website compiling stories of Texans terrorized by the drug gangs: "Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state's top law enforcement agency, told a Congressional subcommittee in May that the agency had identified 22 homicides, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and 5 kidnappings in Texas since January 2010 that were directly related to the Mexican cartels."

December 16, 2011: "[A] new federal court case outlines how Mexican drug cartels have teamed up with violent street gangs to operate inside the United States.

The case involves dozens of members of the Barrio Azteca gang charged with operating a massive drug-trafficking and money-laundering enterprise. A handful of members have already been convicted and were sentenced in Texas this week, while others face trial next spring for racketeering, murder, drug offenses, money laundering and obstruction of justice.

Information released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) this week says Barrio Azteca is also responsible for the March 2010 murders in Juarez of a U.S. Consulate employee, her husband and another associate."

September 25, 2011: "Mexican police are investigating whether the death of a woman found decapitated at the Texan border is the third killing made in retribution for posts about drug cartels on social networking websites.

The woman, identified by local officials as Marisol Macias Castaneda, a newsroom manager for the Primera Hora newspaper, was found in Nuevo Laredo next to a handwritten note claiming she was murdered for posts about the Zetas cartel, which is believed to dominate the area's drug trade to Laredo, Texas."

March 3, 2011: "A man who stole drugs from a Mexican cartel was bludgeoned, stabbed and then decapitated in a suburban Phoenix apartment -- a gruesome killing that police say was meant to send a message that anyone who betrays the traffickers will get the same treatment."

December 8, 2009: NY Times story on a San Diego trial of a Mexican drug cartel; "authorities in Kansas City, Mo., and Miami are also investigating the Mr. Rojas-Lopez's squad for drug trafficking and killings in their cities."

December 4, 2009: "he raging drug war among cartels in Mexico and their push to expand operations in the United States has led to a wave of kidnappings, shootings and home invasions in Arizona, state and federal officials said at a legislative hearing."

This is even before we get to the matter of the Obama Administration's direct implication in the cartels' crimes via Operation Fast and Furious, the misguided gun-running scheme that ended up putting weapons in the hands of the cartels that killed, among others, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

As you can see, the cartel story has not, of course, been completely ignored; the New York Times has reported on it, federal hearings have been held, indictments handed down, and the state governments of Texas and Arizona are concerned. It is legitimately a major story, and should be covered as one. But the relevant point here is that no individual case has been given the kind of maudlin saturation coverage of the 41 CNN stories in less than a month on the Zimmerman/Martin case cited by ThinkProgress, nor are left-wing organizations pressing for justice for the cartels' many victims. (To the contrary, ThinkProgress has blasted the Texas government website as a 'Border Vigilante Website' and characterized discussions of violence at the border as "Fear-Mongering.")

The reality is that the Trayvon Martin case is being pushed by left-wing organizations eager to provide a backdrop of racial strife to this year's elections - a dangerous tactic, given how frequently popular agitation over these kinds of racially divisive stories have led to riots that leave people dead or homeless and local businesses and jobs destroyed. And that while activists on both sides of the aisle often try to get big media to focus on particular crime stories that advance some national political or cultural narrative, the media is much more apt to be receptive to such campaigns by the left than the right. That's not to deny that the media sometimes goes crazy over cases with no particular political significance, like the Casey Anthony and Natalee Holloway cases, but those cases didn't damage any of the left's narratives.

Serious news organizations always have to make choices in what they cover, and even news consumers who understand the media's biases are subject to the pervasive influence of decisions to allocate coverage. As I've noted before, for example, the media often puts a face to death penalty stories and tends to lump the death penalty and abortion issues together, while ignoring the fact that there are as many abortions every day as there have been executions in the past 80 years. When one local story is magnified many times over and personally dramatized, in the process consuming vast news resources, while stories affecting many more people are reduced to dry recitations of numbers with no followup and no coherent narrative, the viewing public is given a false picture of the world. That's no service to anyone but the activists of the left.

Before opponents of Mitt Romney get too excited here, it's important to remember that three of the past week's four contests were on very unfavorable turf for Romney: the Kansas caucus came in a state where the GOP has a very strong pro-life conservative contingent (Sam Brownback is the governor, after all), and the primaries in Deep South states Alabama and Mississippi are tough sells for a Massachusetts moderate (although the Mississippi GOP is very establishment-minded; there are few red states in which the Tea Party has less influence). The next five weeks feature a battery of states, some of them quite rich in delegates and a number of them winner-take-all, where Republicans are more accustomed to nominating guys like Romney - Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut.

That said, especially after Romney's team made the mistake of talking up his chances in Mississippi (where he finished third), this has been a rough week for him in the popular vote, salvaged only by the continuing division among the conservative bloc. The conservatives drew at least 64% of the vote in all three states to less than 30% for the moderates, and Newt Gingrich alone ran almost even with Romney even when you include Hawaii, which Romney won. Month-to-month, Romney's share of the vote has been declining even as the field narrows, with the conservatives drawing a clear majority of the votes cast in March (aided as well by poor showings by Ron Paul in the Deep South) despite not even being on the ballot in Virginia. Neil has more.

None of this means that Romney will not be the nominee. Barack Obama lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton after March 1 by 600,000 votes, and still won the most delegates; even if this race finally devolved into a 2-man race and Romney started losing head-to-head battles with Rick Santorum, he'd still probably take the nomination. And as of now, even if Romney can't win over a majority faction of the party, he has still outpolled any other one candidate.

There are, in my view, three groups of voters to watch to see if the primary breaks out of its current groove:

First, the Newt voters. Newt needed wins last night in Alabama and Mississippi to re-establish himself as at least a regional candidate. He didn't get them, and it's hard to see where else he'll find more favorable conditions. Like Erick, I think it's time for Newt to exit and let this be a 2-man showdown between Romney and Santorum (Paul doesn't need to get out, his voters aren't going anywhere else). Newt has enough delegates already to have a little leverage if there's a contested convention, but he has no path to the nomination in his own right, there's no way a deal made with Beltway Republicans is going to end with him in either position on the ticket, and unlike Paul he's not representing a wholly distinct faction of the party. If Newt leaves, or if his remaining supporters give up on him, I'd assume the majority will go to Santorum - but Romney would at least have the opportunity to convince some who are uncomfortable with Santorum, and that could change the popular vote dynamics.

Second are the Momentum voters, who haven't really appeared in significant numbers yet (although they do represent some part of why Romney has pushed up to the mid-30s from the 25% position he was stuck at in national polls for all of 2011). Momentum voters may not love or even like Romney, but they're voters who will get behind the frontrunner and who, in GOP primaries, traditionally step in to end the contest (except in 1976, when if anything they went increasingly to Reagan down the stretch - but then, he was Reagan. Over the 1968, 1976 and 1980 primaries combined, he drew 51.9% of the popular vote). Except so far, they haven't - I thought we were seeing momentum at last when exit polls suggested a Romney win in Mississippi, but it didn't happen.

Third are their opposite - the Bitter Enders, which is largely the class I'm in at this point. These are the voters who have come around to the view that Romney will be the nominee, but will nonetheless go to the polls to cast ballots against him to register their protest at having such a candidate head the party. Paradoxically, Romney's best bet for getting the Bitter Enders to stop voting against him is to play up the possibility that Santorum will win (forcing people to think twice about the consequences of voting for him), or at any rate force a contested convention that could handicap the ticket in the fall. Pretty much everyone who's still casting votes for Perry, Bachmann and Hunstman is in this category, and I'd wager a fair number of the Newt voters as well (I won't decide for a while yet who to actually vote for on April 24).

II. State By State

Here, I've updated the table of states (also included here are the two territories with popular votes released, the Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands), ranked by the conservative bloc's share of the popular vote.

As you can see, the conservatives have now drawn a majority in 12 states (including cracking 60% of the vote in 6 states in or around the South), and a plurality in 4; the moderates have drawn a majority in 6 (including Virginia), and a plurality in 5 plus the Northern Mariana Islands; the libertarians drew a plurality only in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the uncommitted vote was more than a third of the vote. The only state primaries where a majority voted for the moderate candidates, given a choice, have been Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

III. Primaries vs Caucuses

The four new contests don't do a lot to change the overall picture I noted before, in which Ron Paul is much stronger in caucuses, Newt Gingrich in primaries. But note that the conservative bloc has now passed 50% of the vote in primaries.

(I'll skip the turnout comparisons to 2008, as we're now far enough into the primary schedule that the comparisons are now truly apples to oranges. But I will note that Ron Paul continues to draw significantly larger numbers of voters than in 2008).

If you've read many endorsements or apologias for supporting Romney, you're familiar with the genre. Let's start with the National Review's always-incisive Ramesh Ponnuru, who endorsed Romney in December. If there were compelling arguments to be made for Romney's ideas, Ramesh would make them. He waves a few times in the direction of Romney's various current positions (Romney "now favors a market-oriented reform to Medicare"), but nearly all of his argument for Romney as acceptable to conservatives are based on the idea that the party would lead Romney, rather than the other way around:

If Mitt Romney becomes president, he will almost certainly be dealing with John Boehner as speaker of the House and Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. While they, too, have their conservative detractors, they are the most conservative congressional leaders Republicans have had in modern times, and they will exert a rightward influence on the Romney administration. If they send him legislation to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, or reform entitlements, he will sign it where Obama would veto it. If at some other point in his presidency a liberal-run Congress sends him tax increases, he will veto them where Obama would sign. Compared with President Obama, a President Romney would do more to protect the defense budget.

A President Romney's judicial nominees would be superior to President Obama's simply because he would not be trying to stack the bench with liberal activists. But they are likely to far exceed that low bar. Each Republican president since the Nixon-Ford era has nominated a higher percentage of conservatives as justices to the Supreme Court than his predecessor. That's mostly a testament to the growth and development of the conservative legal network. Romney is likely to look for nominees whom conservative lawyers like - Robert Bork is a top adviser - who are professionally accomplished, and who cannot be portrayed as extreme. If Republicans hold the Senate they will almost certainly be confirmed. If they do not, they will probably be confirmed.

Romney's regulatory agencies will be relatively restrained. His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board will not punish Boeing for locating a plant in a right-to-work state. He will act, within the limits of his legal authority, to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing expensive restrictions on carbon emissions. He will reinstate conscience protections for pro-life health-care workers.

It's true that almost any Republican president, not just Romney, would do these things. But that's the point.

Then there's Ponnuru's National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg. Jonah has long been my favorite NR writer, someone I respect and almost always agree with. He hasn't really taken sides in this trainwreck of a primary season, but in early February he laid out what he thought was the best argument for Romney:

Even if Romney is a Potemkin conservative (a claim I think has merit but is also exaggerated), there is an instrumental case to be made for him: It is better to have a president who owes you than to have one who claims to own you.

A President Romney would be on a very short leash...If elected, Romney must follow through for conservatives and honor his vows to repeal Obamacare, implement Representative Paul Ryan’s agenda, and stay true to his pro-life commitments.

Moreover, Romney is not a man of vision. He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to "fix" health care in ways Massachusetts would like. He was told to fix the 2002 Olympics. He was told to create Bain Capital. He did it all. The man does his assignments.

How about RedState's own Martin Knight, offering his own take on Goldberg's column?

I don't believe he'll be a Conservative out of gratitude, i.e. because he'll "owe" us - it will be because he'll have no choice. Keeping the GOP's conservative rank-and-file happy would not be just be a matter of political profit for a President Romney, it will be a matter of political survival.

...I believe Romney would be a strong and able President and he would be fiscally better than George W. Bush and most importantly stratospherically better than Barack Obama. I believe he will be pro-life and pro-gun in word and deed throughout his Presidency and that he would nominate conservative judges and push them through the Senate.

I believe all this because I believe that a President Mitt Romney would seek a second term in 2016. He's too ambitious not to, and if there's anything no one can doubt, it's the breadth and depth of Mitt Romney's ambition. And he certainly would not want to be a one-term President. Which is where we'll own him, lock, stock and barrel.

...[U]nlike 2008 and 2012, in 2016 Conservatives are going to have lots and lots of ... options.

And you'd best believe that a President Romney and his staff are going to be well aware of those options and what would happen if he fails to walk the line - and the need for him to do so would be even more acute given how little he's trusted by Conservatives in the first place. No Republican White House would want a repeat of 1992 - and with so many viable alternatives, and a significantly more organized conservative base, it's not so much that a President Romney would fear not being able to win the General Election in November 2016, it's that he might just become the very first sitting President to experience the humiliation of failing to win his own Party's nomination in the Primaries.

In point of fact, I think Martin's argument overlooks two points: (1) Romney will have enormous tools at his disposal to raise money, change the primary rules, etc. to throttle off any primary challenge and (2) even if all this works, a re-elected Romney after 2016 would have no such constraints. But take the argument as it is; it is still primarily an argument that Romney will be led rather than lead.

Next up is Leon Wolf, another RedState Contributor I greatly respect and usually agree with. Leon's point, written in early January:

Now, Mitt Romney has often been criticized (fairly and completely accurately, in my opinion) as a flip-flopper. I agree that this is less than a desirable trait and if I had my druthers I would prefer someone like Rick Perry who has been more or less consistently conservative for a relatively long time (an easier feat in Texas than Massachusetts, no doubt, but that is beside the point). However, the most salient point I can divine about this criticism, given the fact that Romney's latest flops are all to the right, is that Romney is being criticized for accurately perceiving that he needs conservatives. Yes, I would agree that Romney would bear careful watching as President and constant egging on from Congress, but I would certainly prefer someone who panders to me for political reasons than someone who openly gives me the finger in order to pander to centrists and/or leftists, which is exactly what we have gotten in terms of Presidential nominees for the last 20 years.

Then we have former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, writing back in October; Gerson is hardly a trusted movement conservative, but he's an eloquent writer. What's his "conservative case for Mitt Romney"?

So are Romney's current views his most authentic ones? On some issues - say, health care policy - it is difficult for an outsider to tell.

...Even conservatives who buy none of these explanations may calculate that Romney is acceptable. Precisely because he has a history of ideological heresy, it would be difficult for him to abandon his current, more conservative iteration. He has committed himself on key conservative issues. Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt. As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.

There is, however, a less-cynical conservative case for Romney. Opponents accuse him of political pragmatism - of which he is clearly guilty. But Romney might put his pragmatism to good use. His economic advisers are solidly conservative. Before the primary season is done, we are likely to see some serious entitlement and tax reform proposals. A leadership team of Romney, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might be just what the moment requires: prudent adults who are conservative but not too far ahead of the public.

In other words, the best arguments for Romney as the leader of the party are arguments that Romney will not lead the party but follow it, subsume his own ideas and inclinations and cater to what the voters and his caucus on Capitol Hill seem to want. How does this work in practice? Let's look at what supply-side analyst James Pethokoukis, one of the sharpest minds on the right-leaning economic punditry beat, wrote about Romney's original 59-point economic plan:

[I]magine private-equity boss Romney back at Bain Capital sitting down to read his team's 59-point turnaround plan for some troubled widget maker. And imagine if the first two action items started with the phrase "Maintain current..."

Romney probably wouldn't bother reading any further before tossing the report in the trash, calling a meeting, and cracking heads. Heck, if Private Equity Romney were called in to turn around Romney Campaign Inc., axing CEO Romney might be the first move on his to-do list - especially after looking at last night's numbers from Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.

Pethokoukis included a number of suggestions for how Romney could overhaul his agenda, but he wrote much more glowingly about Romney's revised plan. Here's what Rush Limbaugh, who has been critical of Romney, took away from Pethokoukis and his fellow supply-sider Larry Kudlow enthusing about the improved plan:

[D]o you remember a piece by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal not long ago, I quoted from it repeatedly. Henninger's point was that Romney is not naturally a conservative. He's gonna have to be nudged. He's going to have be shoved in that direction. And here we have a long campaign, and it looks like that's happening. Jim Pethokoukis writes critically of Romney's 59 point plan. The next day Romney calls or his office calls Kudlow and says, "Hey, big change coming on the economy. We got two new economic proposals, and it's all supply-side." So Henninger was right. He's being nudged to the right. It's all good, folks, it's all good. The long campaign is just fine.

And maybe this is all good; maybe it's time to throw out the book of the past 100 years. Maybe the second decade of the 21st century will be the time for a party that is run by legislative consensus and responsiveness to popular demand, rather than principled leadership. Maybe for once, public servants will do nothing but serve us what we ask them for. Stranger things have happened. But it will be a grand new experiment, running a presidential campaign and maybe a presidency without the candidate's own opinions entering anywhere into the picture. It remains to be seen if the experiment will succeed.

* - Excluding the Wyoming Caucus, for which the vote totals are minuscule and there's no comparable 2008 data. Late-arriving votes are still being tallied in some of the Super Tuesday states as well, but the numbers are pretty close to final everywhere. Also, vote totals (including minor candidates) were only available for some states, whereas in others I just added up the people I had data for, thus the totals don't completely match up.

II. State By State

The conservative bloc has won a majority in nine states, concentrated heavily but not entirely in the South and the caucus states (but including Ohio, where the conservatives drew 52.2% of the vote). Add to that three states where the conservative bloc formed a plurality, including Michigan. By contrast, the moderates have drawn a majority in five states - two New England states, two caucus states with large Mormon populations, and Virginia - and a plurality in five others, including two more New England states and Arizona, which also has a significant Mormon population. Only Florida, where Romney poured vast financial resources into the notorious 65-to-1 ad advantage over Newt Gingrich (the only opponent on the airwaves), did the moderates come close to a majority outside of Romney's most natural home turf.

III. Primaries vs Caucuses

I'm on record as far back as 2008 believing that caucuses should be abolished, and that the ability to win primaries is much more indicative of general election strength than winning more sparsely-attended and often unrepresentative caucuses. It's worth examining how the votes break down by type of election:

Mitt Romney, in 2008, was largely a creature of the caucuses; with his money and the unity and organization of his Mormon support, he won eight caucuses while winning only three primaries, in his home states of Massachusetts, Michigan and Utah. That's been inverted in 2012, although Romney fared much better in the Super Tuesday caucuses than he had before yesterday, undoubtedly owing in part to heavy Mormon support in Idaho and Alaska.

This time around, it's been Rick Santorum who relied heavily on the caucuses (where he could overcome his financial constraints by relying on cohesive religious conservative communities); although Santorum has broken out of that box in the Missouri, Michigan and Ohio primaries, only in Tennessee and Oklahoma has he won significantly contested primaries. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich continues to draw nearly twice as much support in primaries as caucuses, reflecting a campaign that is not well-organized and draws on older voters unified by ideology rather than religion. But the real story of the caucuses is Ron Paul, who regularly draws twice as much support in caucus states as primary states, where the larger electorate more easily drowns out his band of committed activists.

IV. Turnout and 2008 vs 2012

Note here that Idaho switched from a primary in 2008 to a caucus in 2012, dramatically reducing turnout; not coincidentally, it's the only state so far where Ron Paul drew fewer votes than in 2008. Romney, meanwhile, has seen his vote share vs. 2008 dramatically lifted by his showing in states like Ohio and Virginia that didn't vote last time until after he had withdrawn from the race. Also note that Washington last time held both a caucus and a primary, which explains why the caucus was much more heavily attended this year. Ohio figures from 2008 are a little iffy because two sets of numbers were reported. What you can see from this chart is that, aside from states where he didn't run last time. Romney really has only grown his vote totals from four years ago in a couple of states where he went all-out spending money (or, as in South Carolina, where there was a particularly large, up-for-grabs McCain vote). The fact that Romney drew fewer votes than four years ago in ten different states, as the frontrunner against an arguably weaker field, does not inspire confidence.

Overall, turnout has not been impressive outside of South Carolina, Michigan and Ohio and a couple of the smaller electorates. Note that South Carolina was the one state where the conservative vote really came together behind a single, non-hometown candidate; like the fact that Newt's and Rick Perry's highest showings in the national polls were the highest of any of the candidates, this is indicative of the fact that there's a lot of untapped enthusiasm out there for a candidate who can unite and excite the various components of the conservative base of the party. Newt wasn't able to sustain that any more than Perry was, but there's no doubt that both pursued a path to the nomination that had a higher ceiling than that of an unexciting moderate or a religious conservative.

V. Where Do We Go From Here?

As I noted at the outset, Romney hasn't - yet, at least - shown the kind of growing share of the vote that would characterize a frontrunner who is sealing the deal. From here the race moves to Kansas (as well as Guam, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas) on March 10, and Alabama, Mississippi and Hawaii (as well as American Samoa) on March 13; other than Hawaii, these are likely to be much more friendly territory for Santorum and Gingrich than Romney (Paul may do well in Kansas, which holds a caucus). Missouri holds its caucus on the 17th, Louisiana its primary on the 24th. On the other hand, we have two primaries that are likely to heavily favor Romney - Puerto Rico, where he's been endorsed by popular Governor Luis Fortuno, on March 18, and Illinois, which has a fairly liberal Republican electorate long accustomed to settling for moderates, on March 20. My guess is that we won't really begin to see momentum - Romney starting to finally pull away in the popular vote, as opposed to winning tight pluralities in competitive states while each candidate wins the states more naturally favorable to them - until we get into the winner-take-all votes in April, partcularly Wisconsin (which should naturally be competitive) and Pennsylvania (which should naturally heavily favor hometown favorite Santorum).

Is that a good thing? I think thus far, it's been important for the primary to keep going, because (1) until yesterday, there remained a path to victory for other candidates, and the voters need to know that the race won't be ended prematurely by backroom deals rather than by acts of the voters, (2) it forces Romney to work for conservative support and become a better candidate, and (3) it sends a message to the party establishment that Romney-style candidates who are long on money and short on reliable principles will not go down without an expensive and laborious fight.

Like Erick and Neil, I think Romney's narrow wins in Florida, Michigan and now Ohio have cemented him in a position where it's all but certain that he'll be the nominee, and as I said before, I think Michigan was the last hope for a new entrant in the race. For reasons (2) and (3) above, I don't see a lot of harm in continuing the campaign through the rest of March until we are 100% certain of that fact, as it gives additional states the chance to register their objections to the frontrunner and put Santorum through the final paces of seeing if he can find one last way to knock Romney off his pedestal. Newt, despite gaining some delegates yesterday and a moral victory in his home state of Georgia, no longer has much to accomplish in this race besides a protest candidacy.

There's a three-week break between the April 3 primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and DC and the next set of primaries. My guess is that if Romney can win Wisconsin, it will be a lot harder for Santorum to justify continuing, and if he folds his tent, Newt and Paul will no longer have a race to show up for. Given how Wisconsin has been Ground Zero for many of the leading political battles of the past two years, that could be the real end of things, and if not, it will come with Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut on April 24.

But whenever the verdict of the delegate race becomes final, the voters have already spoken, and their message is clear: this is still the conservatives' party, awaiting only the right leader to unite it.

I. The Unconvincing Convert

One argument that's been made in favor of Romney (including by a number of people I respect who are trying to find a way to support him in good faith) is that both the Republican Party and the conservative movement should, and do, welcome converts - and thus, Romney's history of being on the wrong side of practically every domestic policy issue should not be an obstacle to accepting him into the fold now.

Now, it's important that we recognize the full scope of what we are dealing with here, because Romney supporters often try to draw false equivalences to other Republicans who have changed positions on issues over the years. You need to examine Romney's history in this regard in its full detail to appreciate that his record of flip-flops and deviations from conservative and Republican positions is on an order of magnitude beyond anything else out there.

You can start with this DNC oppo video, which despite including a few ticky-tack attacks and ignoring a number of his major flip-flops does a devastatingly effective job of showing how easy it is to dramatize Romney's dizzying changes of position over the years, and sometimes over as little as a single day:

I went in detail through Romney's flip-flops and their meaning back in Part III of my 2007 series: abortion, immigration (more here), guns, the Bush tax cuts, campaign finance reform, Don't Ask Don't Tell, No Child Left Behind (see here, here and here on that last). This is before we even address his position on health care, although as I noted last time, Romney claimed in 1994 to be opposed to the use of mandates in health care. And even this list doesn't fully capture the entirety of Romney's enormous record in such a short career of taking positions opposed to the current conservative view, as every new controversy reveals another - witness Romney's record (after his supposed conversion to the pro-life cause) on compelling Catholic hospitals to dispense 'emergency' contraception.

As I discussed in 2007, Romney's flip-flops are uniquely damaging to him because (1) there are so many of them, (2) they came relatively recently in his public career, and in most cases he has spent little or no time in office developing a record of fidelity to the new positions, (3) he didn't really offer plausible explanations for them compared to his oft-impassioned explanations for holding the earlier positions and (4) there really isn't one central core to Romney as a political leader that is free of flip-flops, no one thing we could be sure he'd never compromise on. Thus my characterization of Romney's record as a sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see.

All of that helps explain why Romney is broadly mistrusted, why nobody can really be sure if he'll stick with his newly-minted positions when the going gets tough. But I need to expand here on the third point.

The Republican Party is chock full of converts. People get more conservative as they get older, get jobs and families, experience more of life. Even many of our most prominent leaders were once liberals or Democrats or both, Ronald Reagan foremost among them (two of the candidates I've supported against Romney - Rudy Giuliani and Rick Perry - were former Democrats). Movements and groups in the party (from neoconservatives to Dixiecrats to Reagan Democrats) have often been identified on the basis of their prior affiliations on the other side. Change in party affiliation, policy positions or political philosophy, alone, is not reason for excluding people from leadership roles.

But here's the thing: politics, even presidential politics, is only partly about exercising power; it is just as much about persuading people of ideas and their implementation in laws and programs. A political leader is, for better and worse, the salesman of his or her party's ideas and proposals. Converts can actually be tremendous ambassadors for winning over new people to their party's standard, because they understand how to speak to the doubts people on the other side may have about their own positions. And they can talk the audience through the process of their conversion, explaining how they came to realize they were wrong, or detailing how the other side changed (in Reagan's famous phrase, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.")

Romney never does this. He admits, grudgingly, his flip-flop on abortion, because it's the most prominent one, but even there, his explanation of how he became a pro-lifer over the stem cell issue (oddly, an issue on which many pro-life Mormons are not on the pro-life side) is less personal and less convincing than his prior narrative of how a family experience led him to be pro-choice. The dual conversion narrative leaves both positions sounding hollow and insincere: St. Paul only went to Damascus the one time.

And after that, it gets worse. If Romney really believed that his past positions on tax cuts, guns, immigration or campaign finance reform were terribly misguided, he could pepper his stump speeches with the kind of stories Reagan so often told about how he came to see that the old Democratic ideas just didn't work in the real world. He doesn't, and perhaps as the son of a Republican governor, presidential candidate and Cabinet secretary, he knows it would ring hollow. If anything, Romney bristles and throws back other people's changes in position when his are raised (a tendency Drew M. has compared to internet trolling). He's so busy trying to sell conservatives on the notion that he's bought our ideas that he doesn't have it in him to sell those ideas to anyone else. Jonah Goldberg and others have talked about how, as a convert, Romney often seems to have the words but not the music of conservatism, to not know the language. But that's precisely what a convert to a new set of ideas usually possesses in excess: an enthusiastic desire to share with the world what it was that made him change teams. The fact that Romney can't do this in convincing fashion and barely tries is not just a clear indication that his changes of position are matters of political convenience, but also why he has no chance of selling the voters on conservative and Republican policies if he can't really explain why he was won over by them himself. This is a serious liability in a general election, and a serious liability for a president as well. Even if Romney's primary opponents prove too flawed to stop him, it should worry us greatly about the future of our party's ability to convince anyone that we stand for anything worth believing in.

II. The Money Man

A second problem I have with Romney, and which worries me greatly if he wins, is that he is precisely the kind of candidate that political consultants, campaign professionals and the campaign committees in the GOP love, and who lead us over and over again to defeat.

(Side note: if Romney's the nominee, I will fight for him to win, because the stakes are too high to roll over and accept an Obama re-election. But that doesn't mean I need to be blind to the costs of Romney winning).

Political consultants love candidates who enter races with a lot of money and not much in the way of a political record or political convictions. Such candidates can be tailored to a script and platform developed by the consultants, they spend money on the consultants and their businesses, and when the candidate inevitably fails because he or she lacks the natural political instincts and convictions to speak well off script, the consultant can just shrug, say there's only so much you can do with a bad candidate, and move on to the next one. Over and over, Republicans have lost races with such people, and if Romney manages to back his way into a victory this fall, we shall never be rid of them.

We all know, whether or not we admit it, that Romney (who has heavily outspent his rivals in negative advertising in his key victories in Florida and Michigan) would not be the frontrunner in this race if he didn't have the most money. Patrick Ruffini gave a great, detailed account a few years back of the many flaws of wealthy candidates:

The dollar signs dancing around in consultants' heads don't make up for the fact that most self-funders tend to be subpar candidates for important structural reasons. First, they're political dilettantes unfamiliar with the rigors of elected politics. They make rookie mistakes. They assume their records before their recent entries into politics aren't relevant or won't be scrutinized. They have less political acumen or knowledge than many of the people I follow on Twitter, or even most of them. And that's just when they start running. Once they do, they run overkill levels of TV, and often resort to slashing negative ads to dislodge better known competitors, which drives their own negatives up....The gaudiness of the campaign operation tends to infect media coverage late in the game, and that's when self-funders really get worked over by the traditional press corps, which tends to counter-balance the perceived buying of the election with uniquely skeptical coverage when voters are actually paying attention. And as any student of campaigns will tell you, earned media is far, far more valuable than paid media, even at inflated levels of spending. From an ideological perspective, self-funders are political chameleons. Since they're somewhat politically attuned, they're likely to have been a donor, but like most big donors, they're pragmatists who've played both sides. And it's not uncommon for these rich candidates to have made donations to fashionable lefty social crusades. The country-clubbers who have supported Focus on the Family or the National Rifle Association with their philanthrophic dollars are few and far between.

All of this should sound familiar (from Romney's political tin ear to his carpet-bombing ad campaigns to his donations to Planned Parenthood). And as Ruffini pointed out, it gets worse when you consider the downstream effects of how a campaign built around money rather than principles warps the entire structure of the party and the movement:

And there's another element here that shouldn't be tolerated: corruption. To put it indelicately, when a mega-self-funder gets in, people get bought. Local parties are capitalized to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars with endorsements magically appearing shortly thereafter. People who couldn't afford to take salaries before can now take salaries. Others get put on the campaign payroll. Elected officials who've fought hard and risen through the ranks suddenly become fans of political "outsiders", leaving their own integrity and intellectual honesty open to question. In any system where money rules, conservatives lose. When endorsements and political support are rooted in money, not principle, that's just as great an insult as choosing a moderate over a conservative in a red state on electability grounds. This is not a matter of being a campaign finance zealot as it of avoiding bad and unreliable candidates who tend to lose at alarming rates.

There are certainly strong reasons to suspect that Romney has at least tried to do just this, in the way he has spread his money around over the years to people who turned up as his allies later (see here, here and here, here), most notoriously by donating money to help retire Tim Pawlenty's campaign debts as Pawlenty has stumped for Romney. This is how you get Romney surrogates attacking people for things they themselves voted for.

Money is not a bad thing, and its presence in politics is inevitable. But the sooner we prioritize being a good candidate over being a well-funded one, the better for our prospects as a party.

III. The Naked Moderate

Here's another overlooked point: Romney is trying to run as a novelty, a Republican who has neither the strong loyalty of any domestic faction nor a corresponding strength on national security.

It is true that Republicans have nominated moderate, Establishment-backed candidates before. But if you look at the moderate Republicans to win the nomination since Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft in 1952, you will notice they all have something in common: all of them had military service records (several being war heroes of one sort or another), and all had significant foreign policy credentials. And several of them ran to the right of their primary opponents on national security, trumping domestic policy divisions. Ike, of course, had been Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, and faced an opponent (Taft) who was seen as somewhat isolationist; Ike was elected during the Korean War. Nixon, a WWII veteran who was more or less a moderate on domestic policy in 1960 and 1968 and a liberal by 1972, had made his name as an anti-Communist and been a two-term Vice President; he was elected at the height of the Vietnam War. Ford, a WWII Navy combat veteran, was nominated while already the sitting President. George HW Bush, a WWII Navy aviator who was shot down over the Pacific, was sitting 2-term Vice President (like Nixon, a VP whose duties were mainly in the foreign policy realm), and had been Ambassador to the UN, US representative in China and CIA Director. Bob Dole, crippled from his WWII injuries, had been in the Senate for decades and two-time Senate Majority Leader. John McCain, of course, spent a quarter century in the Navy, suffered torture as a POW in Vietnam, was first elected to Congress as an anti-Communist, focused throughout his Senate career on foreign policy and ran in 2008, during the 'surge' phase of the Iraq War, as an Iraq hawk and champion of the surge. Every one of these candidates, successful or not in November, led with their foreign policy/national security credentials and experiences.

(George W. Bush was moderate on a fairly large number of major issues, but even in 2000, Bush's strength on taxes and social issues made him the more conservative candidate in the race and a favorite of many in the electoral base; Bush ended up as the third-most-conservative president of the past 100 years, after Reagan and Coolidge. So I don't really class him as a moderate).

Romney has none of this going for him. He's never served in the military, and his main, modest foreign policy experience is from running the Winter Olympics in Utah. These are not absolutely disqualifying factors for a presidential candidate; George W. Bush had little to no foreign policy experience as Texas Governor (really, just dealing with Mexico); Bill Clinton had none at all. But they mean that Romney will be going into battle without one of the key credentials that other moderate Republicans used to command respect and keep their party united. He'll have the weakest base of core support of any GOP nominee since Dewey or possibly Willkie.

IV. Policy Talks, Biography Walks

Look: a great country takes all types, and Mitt Romney is one of the kinds of private citizen who contribute enormously to making America great. He's smart, articulate and fantastically disciplined and hard-working. He was a fabulously successful businessman, intimately involved in the development of many new and growing businesses during his career in venture capital and private equity. He ran the Salt Lake City Olympics well, rescuing it from a corruption scandal as well as the challenge of handling the extra security that came from hosting the Games just five months after September 11. He's obviously a good family man, a man of faith and unquestioned personal integrity. He seems like the kind of guy anyone would be glad to have as a next-door neighbor or a son-in-law. He's the kind of shirt-off-his-back guy who would ride out in the dark on a JetSki to save a drowning family and their dog, or shut down his entire business for days to help a co-worker rescue his kidnapped daughter, or give 15% of his income to charity. If we lived in a world without ideological conflict and were simply choosing a manager from among our most upstanding citizens to be a political leader, Mitt Romney would be near the top of anyone's list.

But that's not the world we live in, and we need to choose a candidate who can handle the world as it actually is. Ideas matter. As I've explained before, you persuade voters to your side by making arguments about philosophy and public policy and then tying them back to their real-world consequences. Romney's insistence on campaigning on his biography rather than his principles is one of the reasons I compared him in 2007 to failed Democratic campaigns of the past, and he's had the same problem this time - he hasn't articulated a concise message on economic policy so much as he's just told people that Obama is a failure on jobs and he's a businessman here to help. And that, in turn, only makes him more vulnerable to the frequent gaffes that stoke dislike of Romney's life of wealth and privilege.

All of this is why Romney cannot win in November; the best he can hope for is to stand by and let Obama lose the race. I believed in 2008 that Romney was unelectable; I still believe that was true of that race (although in retrospect it's hard to imagine any Republican winning after the mid-September financial crisis). I can't say that with the same certainty this time around; as Sean Trende and others have explained in great detail, Barack Obama is an enormously vulnerable incumbent president, one with an LBJ-sized credibility gap in his constant predictions that the economy is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (remember "Recovery Summer"?). The electorate doesn't believe in his policies and doesn't believe in his results. If high oil prices dovetail with a double-dip recession, Obama could simply collapse, no matter who his opponent is. But I still believe Romney is a terrible general election candidate, who will need a lot of good fortune and outside help to end up winning, and that just about anybody will be able to beat Obama in those circumstances.

Maybe Romney wraps up the primaries tomorrow, and he'll go a long way towards doing that if he wins Ohio. He's had chances to follow up wins before and blew them, but the voters sooner or later may throw in the towel and let him finish things off. But nobody who wishes the Party of Reagan well should regard that prospect with anything but grim resignation. This is no way to run for president.