Friday, January 04, 2008

Re: Exit Polls   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Like Mark Hemingway’s correspondent, I think a lot of the commentary about the Republican results in Iowa is beside the point. As he says, what jumps out at you from the exit polls is that Huckabee crushed Romney among evangelicals and Romney crushed Huckabee among everyone else.

These numbers powerfully suggest that Romney couldn’t really have done better in Iowa. His strategy was premised on there not being a candidate who could unite evangelicals the way Huckabee did. Being more “genuine,” or doing more to appeal to people making less than $50,000, wouldn’t have helped. Yes, as David Brooks implies in his column today, Romney had more appeal to people higher up the income scale. But religion made a bigger difference; and if evangelical voters in Iowa tend to have lower incomes than other Republicans, then the income divide in the party could be partly illusory. If Huckabee’s rise makes Republicans revamp their agenda to appeal to working-class voters, they will be doing a smart thing for a dumb reason.

So could Romney have followed a strategy that relied less on Iowa? It’s hard to see how, if he was going to run as a conservative alternative to McCain and Giuliani. John Ellis is a smart political observer who argues, as many others do, that Romney should have run as a candidate of “new ideas” rather than a “700 Club” Republican. Well, first off, these things aren’t mutually exclusive (or Republicans would be not just in bad but hopeless shape). But second, there was no way that a pro-choice Mitt Romney could have beaten Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. And once he flipped on that issue, all of the attacks on him as plastic, etc., were baked in the cake.

01/04 03:01 PMShare