Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The Huckabee-Romney Dynamic   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

There has been a bit of a debate about whether Huckabee has been "taking votes away" from Romney. Yesterday, I posted a few links suggesting that this is not the case. Huckabee's voters told exit pollsters that they fairly strongly preferred McCain to Romney. I think that's right. But I think it's also true that Huckabee did more than anyone else to take out Romney. After Huckabee beat Romney in Iowa—something nobody else in the field could have done—almost everything else had to go Romney's way for him to win. The odds were against that happening, particularly given Romney's own weaknesses as a candidate. (I think here of Lisa Schiffren's observation that when the going got tough in debates, Romney always seemed to be pleading with his eyes for the moderator to bail him out.)

Try to picture the race if Huckabee hadn't taken off. Romney would have won Iowa and probably Michigan. There would have been no bitter Huckabee-Romney feud, so his voters might not have preferred McCain over Romney as strongly as they did yesterday. Romney might have done better in the south and might have emerged as the conservative alternative in the primary. Maybe he could even have competed in South Carolina. We'll never know.

If Romney had not been in the race, however, I'm not sure Huckabee would have done much better, given his inability to reach beyond evangelicals. Even in some of the Southern states Huckabee won last night, he might have lost a two-man race to McCain.

So if I had to diagnose the reasons Romney lost, I would say, in this order, they were: 1) Huckabee's emergence as a candidate with strong appeal to evangelicals; 2) Romney's ineradicable flaws as a candidate; and 3) Romney's mishandling of the immigration issue. (Romney needed a way to get to McCain's right on immigration without alienating Hispanics. Maybe that wasn't possible, but he certainly didn't pick the best way to do it.) Mistaken strategic choices by the campaign were not a big part of the reason for his failure, and it was not foolish for some conservatives to try to get their fellow conservatives to rally around him. It just didn't work.

02/06 12:44 PMShare