So it’s finally, incontrovertibly over.
Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidential race on Tuesday saved Mitt Romney and his friends many millions of dollars and additional heartburn from charges that he’s not a “true conservative,” and gave his campaign much more time to plan the convention and the general election. Even though Romney had the nomination all but locked, and might have knocked Santorum out of the race on April 24 with a big win in Pennsylvania, Santorum had a lot of incentive to stay in the race until May, when a bunch of primaries in states with large evangelical populations were to vote. One theory holds that the cold water the RNC poured on an effort by Rick’s allies in Texas to change that state’s delegate allocation from a proportional to a winner-take-all system was the clincher, since that was the only scenario under which Santorum might have denied Romney a majority of delegates.
In any event, Mitt gets a breather, and Santorum gets to fantasize about things he might ask of a Romney campaign or administration—or perhaps of a run in 2016 if there is no Romney administration. A lot of ink is being spilled right now in assessments of Rick’s run; my own, for The New Republic, suggests he lost, ironically, because of his loyal votes for the “compassionate conservative” agenda of George W. Bush once so beloved of the Christian Right (as Mike Gerson reminded us in a Washington Post op-ed this week), which the Romney campaign used to undermine his conservative support this year.
There’s also a lot of talk about how and when Romney will get out his Etch-a-Sketch and begin pivoting to a general election message. He definitely needs a change of pace. General election polls are showing him in a much worse position against Obama than it appeared at the beginning of the primary season. One new PPP poll from North Carolina shows Romney’s approval/disapproval rate among independents in that state deteriorating from 45/36 in February of 2011 to 25/62 today.
The Obama campaign is making a serious effort to keep attention focused on the “severely conservative” positions and rhetoric the presumptive GOP candidate embraced during the nomination contest, most recently with a web video that is sort of a greatest hits collection of Romney’s recent panders to the Right. A secondary rationale for this line of attack, it is likely, is to sufficiently remind the media of Romney’s primary rhetoric that a later charge of “flip-flopping” will be easy to sustain if Mitt tries to moderate his message.
It’s unclear at this point exactly how much time and opportunity costs Romney will have to devote to an effort to placate unhappy conservatives and unite his party. On the one hand, he knows most conservative voters will eventually come around in a general election fight against Obama; that’s one important reason care should be taken in evaluating Romney’s poor overall favorability ratios, which are worsened considerably by temporary conservative dismay. On the other hand, he can do without the distraction of intraparty sniping, and would undoubtedly like to tamp it down before it threatens to loosen his control over such future assets as his vice presidential selection and his convention and stretch-run messages.
Meanwhile, Romney and his party continue to struggle a bit in trying to develop a consistent message about the economy. The latest monthly jobs report was very disappointing to the White House, but was not dramatically negative enough to support a relapse in the GOP message from one accusing Obama of inhibiting the recovery to one attacking him for outright failure. Romney did pull off one imaginative (if too transparent to stick) ploy in using a highly selective statistic of job losses by women from January 2009 until now to suggest Obama is waging his own, economic “war on women.” But you get the sense Republicans are awaiting more definitive information on economic trends between now and November before settling on an economic message.
Obama continues to get generally good news from the polls. One thing he does not have to worry much about is placating his party base. According to Gallup, Obama’s job approval rating among “liberal Democrats” currently stands at 87%. Nor does he have a party unity problem: his present job approval rating among “moderate Democrats” is at 75%, and among “conservative Democrats” is at 73%. Romney can only gaze enviously at these numbers.
Photo Credit: Robert Huffstutter