In the last six months, President Obama has rolled out a series of proposals to address America’s still ailing housing markets. Elevating housing on the White House priority list is a welcome if belated development—one PPI called for in a major conference on new housing solutions we cosponsored last fall.
To assess the administration’s new proposals, we should start by clearly defining the central problem that must be solved. Contrary to media accounts, it’s not foreclosures, abandoned homes or underwater borrowers. These are all symptoms of a deeper malady: declining home prices. So the question we should ask is whether the President’s new flurry of ideas will move the needle on prices.
Mitt Romney’s solid win in Illinois on Tuesday placed him in an arguably unstoppable position for the GOP presidential nomination. He could claim formal victory perhaps as early as next month, and certainly, barring major mistakes, by June.
Along with his sweep of delegates in Puerto Rico, and the majority of delegates he claimed the previous Tuesday even as Rick Santorum got the headlines, Romney’s prize of 43 (out of 54) delegates in Illinois gives him a grand total (according to CNN’s estimates) of 562 out of 1019 delegates awarded so far; Santorum is more than 300 delegates behind. The “magic number” to clinch the nomination formally is 1144. Louisiana holds its primary this Saturday, and Santorum is a slight favorite; a loss could boost Romney’s sense of “inevitability” considerably. But in any event Romney seems certain to enjoy a big April, with very likely wins in DC, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut, and at least even odds in Wisconsin. Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania is also on the April calendar, but he’s hardly a cinch there, and the proportional allocation rules will limit his gains.
President Obama has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank, a simple declarative sentence that left most listeners wondering what he meant. The confusion arises partly because the administration did not follow up the president’s remarks with a specific proposal, but also because the operations of such a bank have never been fully fleshed out. Felix Rohatyn and I have elsewhere laid out the broad outline of how such a bank would function,1 and that description serves as a good starting point for our expectations regarding the president’s proposal and what Bank-type proposals generally ought to do.
As many writers have noted, American infrastructure is depreciating rapidly – we are likely well below the replacement rate of investment in roads, mass transit, airports, ports, rail, and water assets. The logical implication is that we need to invest more. But more investment in and of itself will not move us towards having the right mix of infrastructure assets in place.
The current mix results from one of two selection processes. The first is devolution to the states (for example the cost-sharing grants delivered by the Highway Trust Fund), and the second is selection by Federal agencies (e.g., the Corps of Engineers). At worst, these processes lead to politically motivated outcomes, either because state governments favor some projects for wholly non-economic reasons, or because the Congress can muscle the selection process from the federal agencies. The most recent transportation authorization bill, passed in 2005, made the word “earmark” famous by incorporating a stunning $24 billion of them – the price of having a law passed. Insofar as we have given the task of project selection to the political process, it would be surprising if this kind of event didn’t happen, not that it sometimes does.
Politicized project selection is one of several problems associated with the current process. But it is one of the reasons why a National Infrastructure Bank is so important and so urgently needed: not just because a bank might be able to lever federal dollars, but because it can use the existing dollars more wisely and obtain a higher public return.
What follows, then, is a description of the role a National Infrastructure Bank could play, taken from the perspective of the specific problems in the current process it might solve. This perspective also allows us to evaluate the administration’s proposal.
In a nutshell, Rohatyn and I propose that we collapse all of the federal “modal” transportation programs into the Bank. Any entity – whether state, local, or federal – would have standing to come to the Bank with a proposal requiring federal assistance. The Bank would be able to negotiate the level and form of such assistance based on the particulars of each project proposal. It could offer cash participation or loan guarantees, underwriting or credit subsidies, or financing for a subordinated fund to assure creditors. Any project requiring federal resources above some dollar threshold (on a credit scoring basis) would have to be approved by the Bank. Additionally, we imagine that some part of the funding for existing modal programs would be converted into block grants sent directly to the states and large cities to be spent on projects too small for the Bank’s oversight. Such grants could also be used for those programs desired by the states that do not pass muster on terms proposed by the Bank.
This is more a vision of infrastructure policy than a blueprint for the immediate future. Admittedly, it will take years and a meticulous reorganization to produce this configuration. But the best way to measure our progress in infrastructure policy (and the merits of the administration’s proposal) is not to see how quickly we adopt the Bank’s specific features, but to see how the Bank addresses the underlying infrastructure policy flaws it is designed to fix.
Top Democratic and union leaders play host this week to prospective 2012 Congressional candidates, highlighting labor’s status as a critical cog in progressive campaigns. Some observers believe that, in the aftermath of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to strip the state’s public unions of collective-bargaining rights, labor has found both renewed public sympathy and political momentum.
It’s not clear, however, that such attitudinal shifts will be enough to reverse the steady erosion of union membership, and the voting power that goes with it. That’s the fundamental reality progressives must reckon with as they ponder how to forge electoral majorities.
To offset labor’s declining share of the electorate, Democrats logically must do one of two things: do better among union households or do better among non-union households. As it happens, the key to both is the same – winning more moderate voters.
Will Marshall explains why Gingrich should leave the race now in Politico’s Arena:
If Newt Gingrich quits the race now, he just may escape with his dignity intact. He can take pride in the fact that his chaotic campaign sparked several times, even if it never caught fire anywhere but South Carolina. Not bad for a guy whose been out of politics for more than a decade, and jumped into the race with no money, no organization and no clear plan to capture the GOP nomination.
The longer he stays in, the greater the risk that his campaign degenerates into an exercise in self-parody. Gingrich, the GOP’s certified Deep Thinker in the race, is now pushing the dumbest gimmick – $2.50 per gallon gas – since Herman Cain’s skeletal 9-9-9 plan.
By my reckoning, Mitt Romney lost his fourth opportunity yesterday to all but end the GOP presidential nominating contest (previously once after New Hampshire, once after Nevada, and once after Michigan). Had he won in Alabama and Mississippi, as much of the commentariat predicted and several polls suggested might happen, he would have banished the “Mitt can’t win in the South” meme, killed off Gingrich’s southern-based campaign, and left Santorum gasping for oxygen. But it was not to be, and now Santorum may have the long-awaited one-on-one contest with Romney as, finally, the “conservative alternative to Mitt” that so many opinion-leaders and voters alike have been seeking for more than a year.
Yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, stretching across ten states from Vermont to Alaska, did not resolve the GOP presidential nomination contest, but did place Mitt Romney in a position where probably the most he has to lose going forward is time and money.
Romney won four primaries (Vermont, Massachusetts, Virginia and Ohio) and two caucuses (Idaho and Arkansas), and looks sure to win a majority of delegates at stake last night. According to 538’s Nate Silver, the cumulative delegate totals at this point are 332 for Romney, 139 for Santorum, 75 for Gingrich and 35 for Paul. 1144 are needed to win the nomination. So Romney is clearly on a pace that will, if continued, carry him to the nomination.
PPI President Will Marshall explains the significance of Senator Snowe’s surprise retirement for Politico’s Arena:
“The decisions by Sen. Olympia Snowe and Rep. David Dreier to quit Congress are part of a broader trend: the ideological “purification” of the Republican Party at all levels. Moderates have become persona non grata in the GOP, with a whopping 71 percent of Republicans now identifying as either very conservative or conservative.
“This explains why the avowedly moderate Jon Huntsman never got traction in the GOP nominating race, and why the erstwhile moderate Mitt Romney is now pretending to be “severely” conservative. The absence of moderates’ restraining hand is evident in Virginia, where the GOP-controlled legislature has passed a bill forcing pregnant women to get ultrasound procedures before they can have an abortion.”
The Republican presidential nomination contest reached another milestone yesterday with two more major primaries, in Arizona and Michigan.
The delegate “haul” in both states was reduced by half, since they violated the RNC’s calendar rules by holding their primaries before March 1. But since these primaries were the first events to occur after Rick Santorum’s three-state sweep on Feb. 7, and because Santorum had risen rapidly in both national and Michigan polls since then, they became something of an existential threat to the Romney campaign. Indeed, prior to the results the air was full of panic-stricken, if largely anonymous, claims that party leaders would have to recruit a late-entry candidate if Romney failed to win in Michigan, his native state.
In these 16 states, home prices are down an average of 16 percent since October 2008—from a median of $160,596 to a median of $131,191 in December 2011.
The states included in the PPI analysis are among those hardest-hit by the housing crisis: Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, Indiana, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
PPI’s analysis is based on data derived from Zillow and the U.S. Census Bureau. The overall median home value for the battleground states is a weighted average based on the proportion of housing units in that state.
The GOP nomination contest has entered its most critical two-week period yet, with primaries in Michigan and Arizona on February 28; the Washington caucuses on March 3, and then the eleven-state extravaganza of Super Tuesday, March 6.
With Rick Santorum now holding a steady lead over Mitt Romney in national polls of Republicans, it is crucial for Romney that he win his native state of Michigan to regain momentum, reassure party elites, and replenish his diminished financial coffers.
Romney and his Super-PAC are reportedly outspending Santorum’s forces in Michigan by about a 3-1 margin, and are fielding a mix of positive and negative ads. An early PPP poll showing Santorum sprinting out to a 15-point lead in Michigan now looks to be an outlier; PPP’s latest survey in the state shows Santorum only up by three points, and at least one other poll shows Romney regaining a small lead. Everyone agrees the contest is very close, with support patterns indicating Santorum holding his customary leads among evangelicals and “very conservative” voters, and Romney doing well with “moderates” and Tea Party skeptics. Polling of Arizona (where Romney benefits from a sizable LDS vote) is also becoming available, uniformly giving Romney a single-digit lead. A wild-card in Arizona is that Newt Gingrich is doing relatively well there (unlike Michigan, where he’s running fourth behind Ron Paul); one theory is that his supporters could break to Santorum on primary day.
All of these dynamics make tonight’s CNN candidate debate in Arizona very important. It could, in fact, be the last televised debate of the entire contest. One possibility is that both panelists and the other candidates could gang up on Santorum, who’s been under attack as a “fiscal liberal” by his rivals, and as an erratic religious extremist by many news media observers. (In a potentially significant, and certainly unprecedented development, two conservative opinion-leaders considered supportive of Romney, Matt Drudge and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, have suddenly begun attacking Santorum’s religion-based views on cultural issues). Santorum, who’s been a relatively strong debater, could try to duplicate Gingrich’s successful tactic of turning attacks on his tormenters. And of course Gingrich himself, not to mention Ron Paul (who’s shown recent interest in going after Santorum) will be factors as well. It would be a particularly poor moment for any candidate to commit a gaffe.
If February 28 produces anything less than a dual Romney win in Michigan and Arizona, Super Tuesday could become dicey for Mitt (it is generally assumed Santorum is likely to win the March 3 caucuses in Washington). He’s beginning to experience money troubles thanks to his heavy spending and his lack of an ideologically-driven small donor base. Romney does have some Super Tuesday advantages: his home state of Massachusetts votes then, and he and Ron Paul are the only candidates on the ballot in Virginia.
The most alarming threat to Romney would be a divide-and-conquer strategy where Santorum concentrates on the biggest prize, Ohio, while Gingrich’s Super-PAC spends the fresh $10 million it has reportedly received from casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, to focus on Georgia, Tennessee and perhaps Oklahoma. Additionally, Paul is expected to concentrate on small-state caucuses where he could do additional damage to Romney’s delegate count.
There are also new rumblings of discontent from elite Republican circles where a Santorum (or Gingrich) nomination is considered potentially catastrophic, while Romney’s perpetual inability to win over conservative voters or show much appeal to independents is perpetually troubling. One “prominent Republican senator” informed a reporter last week that if Romney loses Michigan, he will go public with a call for a draft of Jeb Bush. While there’s zero evidence Republican voters are interested in a late entry or a “brokered convention,” or that any particular “white knight” could avoid the pitfalls that have snared the actual candidates, it is obvious Romney would suffer from major defections of elite party support, if only among his funding sources.
All in all, it would be very prudent for Romney to win Arizona and Michigan next Tuesday. If he loses both, the craziness will really intensify and almost anything could happen. Alas, it just keeps getting better and better for President Obama.
The Republican presidential nominating contest continues to produce endless surprises.
A week ago, the key question was whether victories in two low-turnout caucuses and a “beauty contest” primary would vault Rick Santorum past Newt Gingrich as the latest aspirant to the conservative-alternative-to-Romney mantle. Now, cascading evidence from polls suggest Santorum has become a serious threat to Romney’s status as front-runner, and is a couple more primary wins away from becoming what might be called an existential threat to Mitt’s candidacy.
National polls are now consistently showing Santorum leading, or essentially tied with, Romney among Republican voters. More alarmingly for Romney, the three latest polls taken in Michigan—whose primary will be held on February 28—show Santorum leading there, too, despite a longstanding assumption that Mitt would romp to an easy win in his native state.
While there has been no recent public polling in Arizona, which also holds its primary on February 28, the Santorum Surge has clearly spread to the Super Tuesday (March 6) states. A Quinnipiac poll, for instance, now shows him leading in that day’s biggest state, Ohio, and another survey indicates he’s threatening Newt Gingrich in his own home state of Georgia. An especially dangerous development for Romney is that Santorum is now running ahead of Mitt in at least one major general election poll, calling his longstanding “electability” advantage into question.
All the polls indicate that a key ingredient of the Santorum Surge is relatively high favorable/unfavorable ratios, reflecting his ability to escape significant questioning while Romney and Gingrich (and their super PACs) have pounded each other with negative ads. That is very likely to change, even though conservative opinion-leaders are far more protective of Santorum than of either Romney or Gingrich, and most will not join the fun the way they so often have with the other candidates.
Just today, reports have come out suggesting that Team Romney might execute a multi-state air war against Santorum, attacking him from the Right for votes in the Senate favoring No Child Left Behind and Medicare Rx Drugs. Despite the fact that both were Bush administration initiatives, supported by many Republicans at the time, these programs have now become symbols of big-spending heresy. That line of attack, however, is not all that’s on the horizon. There’s also at least one report that Gingrich’s main super PAC donor, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is on the brink of reopening his check book to finance attacks on Santorum, apparently in part because Adelson wouldn’t mind helping Mitt as well as Newt.
All this warlike activity on the GOP side is clearly good news to Democrats. It also comes at an opportune time, just as better economic news and a sharper Obama message has emerged to lift the incumbent’s re-election prospects notably. Obama has led Romney in eight consecutive major general election polls by at least five points. Even more significantly, according to an analysis yesterday by Ron Brownstein based on the latest Pew survey, Obama is now matching his 2008 performance very closely among nearly every key demographic category.
Obama’s stretch of good luck is also extending into individual controversies with the GOP. So far, at least, he seems to have regained an advantage in the battle with Republican politicians and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over a proposed employer insurance mandate for contraception coverage. A relatively small modification of the original mandate to require insurers rather than religiously-affiliated institutional employers won the administration praise from an array of Catholic hospital, social-services, and higher-education leaders, frustrating the efforts of the Bishops to speak for Catholic institutions in demanding a complete repeal of the mandate.
And while polling on the subject has varied significantly according to the timing and wording of surveys, it’s reasonably clear Catholic voters’ attitudes on the subject closely track public opinion generally. Meanwhile, as the controversy beings to focus less on broad claims of endangered “religious liberty” and more on attitudes towards the more specific issues of health insurance coverage, Republicans are running the risk of identifying themselves too closely with the Catholic hierarchy’s very unpopular views on contraception.
The current prominence of a presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, who has not been shy about proclaiming his own hostility to contraception, probably does not help – well, at least not the Republicans.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission forever changed the landscape of political spending.
The Court’s ruling to allow virtually unlimited contributions to outside political groups1 unleashed a record $290 million in outside spending in 2010 (not counting spending by party committees).2 According to the Center for Responsive Politics, total outside spending in 2010 on congressional races was more than four times the total outside spending in the last mid-term elections in 2006. And as the torrents of super PAC spending in the GOP presidential primaries attest, outside spending in 2012 is on track to break all records.
But does outside spending really “work” to put a favored candidate in power? With the jury still out on 2012, this memo looks to the Senate races in 2010 for some clues.
The answer? Maybe.
Because 2010 was a “wave” election that rode on Tea Party rage, it’s almost impossible to disaggregate the impact of outside spending from prevailing electoral trends. In addition, many other factors—such as the strength of a particular candidate’s appeal and organization—cloud the picture.
Nevertheless, in some campaigns, a big unmatched advantage in outside spending seemed to help tip the balance in a candidate’s favor. In 2010, this worked to the advantage of Republicans—conservative outside groups spent about twice as much on Senate races as liberal groups. Even though conservative groups spent millions of dollars more on losing races than on winning ones (e.g., in Nevada and Colorado), the sheer volume of conservative outside spending meant that their overall “batting average” was nearly twice that of liberal outside groups.
Given this mixed record, there’s only one real certainty about the impact of outside money on Senate races in 2010: Running for Senate is a lot more expensive than it used to be.
Four contests in the last week have done little to resolve the Republican presidential nominating contest.
As long expected, Mitt Romney followed up his Florida victory by comfortably winning the Nevada caucuses, registering (if narrowly) his first majority showing. Turnout was low, the process was marred by errors, and Romney’s margin was undoubtedly padded by the unusually large level of participation by Mitt’s fellow Mormons (about a fourth of the caucus turnout, giving Romney near-unanimous support). But it gave Romney the right to boast of victory in three very different states (New Hampshire, Florida and Nevada), and continued the bad news for Newt Gingrich, who couldn’t even hold onto an apparent Donald Trump endorsement for a few hours.
But then came the three February 7 events: a non-binding (and arguably meaningless) primary in Missouri, and caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado. And all three were won by Rick Santorum, who had all but been forgotten by national media during the Romney-Gingrich slugfest in Florida and Nevada. The sting to Romney was enhanced by comparisons to his performance in 2008, when he won the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses decisively. Gingrich was not on the ballot in Missouri, and finished a poor third in Colorado and a poor fourth (behind Santorum, Romney, and second-place finisher Ron Paul) in Minnesota.
The Santorum Sweep was a product of other candidates ignoring Missouri, and then an effective grassroots campaign in the other two states. Low turnout also helped accentuate Santorum’s bedrock support among social conservatives (the same constituency that gained him his Iowa win). For all the hype about his big night, his candidacy remains a largely Midwestern phenomenon, and he’s yet to show strength in the southern states where he’s suspected of being a Big Government Conservative, and Gingrich has served as the anti-Romney conservative threat.
The contest now hits a lull until February 28, when Michigan and Arizona hold primaries. Michigan is Romney’s native state, and Arizona has a relatively large LDS population, so he is favored in both despite yesterday’s setbacks. Then comes Super Tuesday (March 6), with its assortment of relatively expensive primaries (Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, Massachusetts) and a bunch of widely scattered caucuses (where Ron Paul is expected to make a strong appearance). Everything about this landscape favors the vastly better-financed Romney, unless his opponents manage to split up the states and beat him piecemeal.
More to the immediate point, the lull will provide Santorum’s opponents with a fine opportunity to take him down several notches with negative ads focusing on his Washington “insider” background and the occasional heresies in his record that trouble conservatives. Meanwhile, Santorum’s status as an international symbol of right-wing bigotry (mostly based on the vast Google-based campaign to taunt him for anti-gay sentiments, but also extending to his very extreme positions on abortion and contraception) will hound him in the broader media environment. It’s not clear he will be able to emulate Gingrich’s success in converting “persecution” by the “liberal media” into primary votes, but the inevitable mockery he will receive is very likely to drive down his general-election trial heat numbers.
Democrats, of course, are richly enjoying Romney’s difficulty in nailing down the nomination, particularly now that it is beginning to affect his own general-election numbers. As it happens, Mitt’s problems are coinciding with a modest increase in the president’s job approval ratings and gradually improved economic indicators. Last week’s surprisingly positive jobs report drew a lot of attention across the political spectrum.
But Obama’s general election standing remains questionable. During the last week, there was a major brouhaha over the Catholic Bishops’ intense reaction to an administration decision to require contraceptive services coverage for employee health plans sponsored by religiously affiliated hospitals and charities (direct church employees were exempted via a “conscience” exception). Several prominent Catholic Democrats expressed fears the decision would be disastrous politically, but then polling showed Catholic voters largely unmoved or supportive of Obama, even as the administration signaled it wanted to compromise.
In what appears likely to be a very close general election, the variables remain unstable. It’s clear Obama needs to win back moderate voters estranged by factors ranging from the general condition of the economy to conservative-media-fed narratives of his alleged hyper-liberalism. How to do that, while setting out realistic goals for a second term and exploiting a Republican nominating contest being constantly driven to the Right, is the obvious challenge for Team Obama.
As the 2012 election gets underway, President Obama is still waiting to see who his opponent will be. Candidates and campaigns matter hugely, of course, but we should also pay attention to the field on which the match will be played—and at first glance, the lay of the political land doesn’t look so favorable to Obama and his party.
The lingering economic slump has demoralized voters and tilted the electorate rightward. With idle workers, underwater homeowners, exploding deficits and debts, growing inequality, and a bitter, broken political system, objective reality isn’t exactly working in incumbents’ favor. Upon closer inspection, however, the electoral landscape may not be as forbidding for progressives as it first appears.
For one thing, the recovery finally seems to be gaining momentum, complicating Republican attempts to cast Obama as a “failed president” who doesn’t have a clue about how the economy works. For another, Republicans are incumbents too, and their intransigence and obstructionism throughout 2011 will make many swing voters reluctant to entrust them with undivided control of the federal government. Finally, the fractious battle for the GOP nomination reveals a party at war with itself, while conservatives’ venomous attacks on Obama push Democrats toward unity.
But no matter whom the Republicans pick as their standard bearer, the tricky political terrain confronts Obama with three strategic imperatives: 1) roll up a big majority of moderate voters; 2) win back a good chunk of the in-dependents who deserted his party in 2010; and 3) fashion a stronger economic message that combines jobs and fiscal responsibility.
As the recent events in Florida demonstrate, a week is still a lifetime in politics.
Coming out of the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney’s campaign was in significant disarray; Newt Gingrich seemed to have emerged as the long-awaited “conservative alternative to Romney,” with a path to the nomination, a positive and negative message that seemed to be resonating with Tea Party activists, and the Super-PAC money to compete in an expensive state like Florida. “Establishment” Republicans, including some key conservative opinion-leaders, were beginning to panic.
Now, the day after Florida, Romney is back in charge of the race, and while Gingrich, Santorum and Paul are all still campaigning avidly, it’s difficult to see a clear path to victory for any of them.
Romney, who fell immediately and badly behind in Florida polls after the South Carolina results were in, recovered last week and won the state by a 46-32 margin over Gingrich (Santorum, who won 13 percent, and Paul, who took 7 percent, conceded the state and spent little time there).
There were four main factors in the Florida turn-around: money, debates, opinion-leaders, and demographics.
On the money front, Romney and his Super-PAC outspent Gingrich and his Super-PAC by nearly a 5-1 margin – precisely, $15.7 million to $3.3. million, contradicting initial reports that Newt’s Super-PAC would buy $6 million in Florida media. Additionally, Romney began running ads before South Carolina, which enabled him to “bank” a significant lead among early voters (about 30% of total votes). Romney’s ads were heavily negative, and focused particularly on Gingrich’s Freddie Mac consulting contract, a powerful issue in a state hit very hard by the collapse of the housing market.
The two candidate debates were Gingrich’s big opportunity to establish momentum and excite conservatives, as he did so effectively in South Carolina. Yet Newt basically bombed, particularly in the final 1/26 event, where he let Romney get to his right on immigration policy and seemed defensive and nervous.
Opinion-leaders, in Florida and nationally, took a major toll on Gingrich and undermined his ideological bona fides. In-state, he was sharply criticized by the state’s most popular Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio, for ads calling Romney “anti-immigrant.” Even more importantly, key leaders in Miami’s Cuban-American community, most notably the Diaz-Balart brothers and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, endorsed Romney and worked hard for him. Meanwhile, national Republicans, including credible conservatives like the editors of National Review, labeled Gingrich erratic and unelectable, and flatly denied his claims of being an important contributor to the Reagan legacy.
And finally, Florida was a much better state for Romney demographically than South Carolina: less “southern” culturally, with more relative moderates, fewer evangelicals, and a sizable Hispanic population dominated by Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans, who were unmoved by Gingrich’s efforts to attack Romney as hostile to immigrants. In the end, Gingrich won several of the same demographic categories he won in South Carolina —evangelicals, “very” conservative voters, and strong Tea Party supporters—but they simply represented a much smaller percentage of the electorate.
By election eve, Gingrich was clearly flailing. He resorted to very harsh attacks on Romney as a tool of the “Republican Establishment,” over-the-top appeals to Christian Right audiences, and such strange tactics as a robocall targeting Jews (only 1% of the Republican electorate in Florida) with claims that Romney had cut off funding for kosher food at Massachusetts nursing homes.
On primary day, Gingrich even pledged to keep the competition with Romney going for “six or eight months”. This was a rather interesting remark as it would extend his candidacy well past the Republican Convention. In the end, though, the main thrust of his concession speech was to demand that Rick Santorum get out of the race. Santorum, in turn, reciprocated by saying Gingrich had lost his “shot”.
The most important question for Gingrich now is whether he can convince his main Super-PAC donor, Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, to keep sending checks. The next contest is a caucus in Nevada which Romney has long been favored to win. Next Tuesday, Missouri also holds a non-binding primary in which Gingrich is not even on the ballot, along with caucuses, in Colorado, where Santorum is hoping to make a splash. After that comes Minnesota, another state where Romney is favored.
To make matters worse for Gingrich, Romney will remain difficult to beat as February comes to a close. On February 28th, Romney is heavily favored in his native state of Michigan, and will also be able to count on a sizable Mormon vote in Arizona. The road ahead is thus difficult and expensive for Gingrich until Super Tuesday, March 6, when the Speaker will have the chance to compete in his home state of Georgia . That being said, however, Gingrich will surely lose Massachusetts to Romney. He is also unlikely to win Ohio, and once again is not even on the ballot in Virginia.
All in all, while the wild gyrations of this nomination contest so far make it difficult to say it’s over, Romney has the money, momentum, and the strategy to win fairly easily if he does not make mistakes. If Adelson cuts off Gingrich’s money, it could happen sooner rather than later. The longer it goes on, of course, the more permanent damage Romney could sustain to his favorability among the non-Republicans, those who are watching him bob and weave and try to outflank his opponents to the right.
In the last six months, President Obama has rolled out a series of proposals to address America’s still ailing housing markets. Elevating housing on the White House priority list is a welcome if belated development—one PPI called for in a major conference on new housing solutions we cosponsored last fall.
Mitt Romney’s solid win in Illinois on Tuesday placed him in an 
By my reckoning, Mitt Romney lost his fourth opportunity yesterday to all but end the GOP presidential nominating contest (previously once after New Hampshire, once after Nevada, and once after Michigan). Had he won in Alabama and Mississippi, as much of the commentariat predicted and several polls suggested might happen, he would have banished the “Mitt can’t win in the South” meme, killed off Gingrich’s southern-based campaign, and left Santorum gasping for oxygen. But it was not to be, and now Santorum may have the long-awaited one-on-one contest with Romney as, finally, the “conservative alternative to Mitt” that so many opinion-leaders and voters alike have been seeking for more than a year.
Yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, stretching across ten states from Vermont to Alaska, did not resolve the GOP presidential nomination contest, but did place Mitt Romney in a position where probably the most he has to lose going forward is time and money.
PPI President Will Marshall explains the significance of Senator Snowe’s surprise retirement for 
The Republican presidential nomination contest reached another milestone yesterday with two more major primaries, in Arizona and Michigan.
The GOP nomination contest has entered its most critical two-week period yet, with primaries in Michigan and Arizona on February 28; the Washington caucuses on March 3, and then the eleven-state extravaganza of Super Tuesday, March 6.
The Republican presidential nominating contest continues to produce endless surprises.
As the recent events in Florida demonstrate, a week is still a lifetime in politics.