This blog continues the discussion we began with Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).The next book in this series is The Comeback: the 2024 Elections and American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Q Last thing. The President spoke out in the news conference about how people need to be careful with their language in general, and he spoke about his own daughters and setting an example. I know he's not the language police, you're not the language police from this podium to pick on people on the left or the right. But there is a letter that went to the Chief of Staff today from a conservative group, Concerned Women for America, saying that the President should direct this super PAC, on the Democratic side, that took a million-dollar check from Bill Maher, who has had some pretty coarse things to say about conservative women.
And I understand the President can't -- he's not in charge of the super PAC, it's an outside thing. But he did bless that PAC and say to his supporters, you should give to this PAC if you want to. So can he also say, give a million-dollar check back if it's from somebody who said these things?
MR. CARNEY: I think the points that you made as you were asking your question are the ones that I will make, which is that we are not, and cannot be, the arbitrator of every statement that everybody makes in the policy and political arena.
As a general matter, obviously language that denigrates women is inappropriate. And I think I would point you to what the President said when he was asked about this during his press conference, which is that he chooses to lead by example, or to try to. He chooses to, in the pursuit of a more civil discourse in our public space, he chooses to try to practice that civility himself. And he calls on everybody to do just that.
A new video documents Maher's remarks about women and people with disabilities:
Based on final and official results from the six states whose primaries preceded Super Tuesday and near final and unofficial results from the seven Super Tuesday primaries, 7,846,172 voted out of 68,125,000 eligible citizens or 11.5 percent.
Turnout in 2008 was 13.2 percent of eligibles and it was 12.2 in 2000. Of the thirteen states with presidential primaries which have voted so far, eight had lower turnout than 2008, five had higher – all states that allowed independents or both independents and Democrats to vote in the GOP primaries in a year when there was no Democratic presidential contest.
These were some of the highlights of a joint preliminary report on GOP primary turnout released by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Center for the Study of the American Electorate on Thursday.
The state with the highest turnout was New Hampshire where 24.5 percent of eligibles voted, higher than the 24.2 percent that voted in 2008, but lower than the 26.41 which voted in 2000. In South Carolina 17.3 percent of eligibles voted higher than the 13.5 percent that voted in 2008, but lower than the 19.5 percent that voted in 2000. Ohio’s 2012 turnout was 13.9 percent, higher than the 12.8 who voted in 2008, but lower than the 16.8 who voted in 2000. Michigan had a higher turnout in 2012 (13.6 percent of eligibles) than the 12.0 percent that voted in 2008, but lower than the 19.6 percent who voted in 2000. The other state with higher 2012 turnout as compared to 2008 was Vermont where 11.8 percent of eligibles voted as compared to only 8.3 percent in 2008. But the 2012 turnout was substantially lower than the 18.0 percent who turned out in 2000.
FHQ has been saying since our Very Rough Estimate of the delegate counts a couple of weeks ago that Romney is the only candidate who has a chance to get there. But, of course, I have not yet shown my work. No, it isn't mathematically impossible, but it would take either Gingrich or Santorum over-performing their established level of support in the contests already in the history books to such an extent that it is all but mathematically impossible. Santorum, for instance, has averaged 24.2% of the vote in all the contests. Since (and including) his February 7 sweep, he is averaging 34.7% of the vote. That is an improvement, but it is not nearly enough to get the former Pennsylvania senator within range of the 1144 delegates necessary to win the Republican nomination....The bottom line here is that Romney has enough of a delegate advantage right now and especially coming out of today's contests that it is very unlikely that anyone will catch him, much less catch him and get to 1144. The latter seems particularly far-fetched given the above scenarios. And that is a problem in this race. Well, a problem for Gingrich and Santorum anyway. If all either of them can take to voters is an argument that all they can do is prevent Romney from getting to 1144, then neither has a winning strategy. That sort of strategy has a half life; one that will grow less effective as, in this case, Romney approaches 1144. Complicating this scenario even further for Gingrich and Santorum is the fact that if neither can get to 1144 or even close to it, neither is all that likely to be the candidate to emerge as the nominee at any -- unlikely though it may be -- contested convention.
Republican nomination battles used to be punch-out affairs -- win enough early primaries, and your opponent would be forced to quit because he couldn't raise enough money. But in the era of super-PACs, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum can stay in the race as long as their billionaire patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess, keep writing checks. Ron Paul, meanwhile, has an army of idealistic supporters who pony up $50 each week that he keeps campaigning....Counting delegates this early is an imprecise art. Some delegates are not bound, and the early caucuses did not actually allocate delegates to the national convention -- that will occur in state conventions this spring or summer. The Associated Press' estimate puts Romney currently at 415 delegates, to Santorum's 176, with Gingrich and Paul controlling 105 and 47, respectively. A candidate needs a majority of all delegates in order to win the nomination, which this year comes to 1,144.
Two of the remaining winner-take-all states will be uncontested, Utah and Pennsylvania. Romney is all but guaranteed to win Utah's 40 delegates on June 26, and so if Santorum win his home state's 72 delegates on April 24, his net gain is 32 -- leaving him about 200 behind Romney, with about 1430 remaining. The remaining states are scattered geographically and demographically, distributed evenly between Romney's base (the Northeast), Santorum's (the heartland), as well as the Romney-leaning West and the Gingrich-Santorum South.
If Romney were to stumble and win only a third of the delegates in the remaining states, Santorum would have to win more than half of all the delegates in order to pull ahead, meaning that Gingrich and Paul together would have to be held below 16 percent. To date, not even counting Romney's blowout in Massachusetts, Romney has won nearly half of the delegates while Santorum has won about one-fourth. That means the only path to Romney losing requires Santorum to double his past haul, while Romney drops by about 70 percent. That's not likely.
The most contentious aspect of the GOP calendar, adopted by the Republican National Committee at a 2010 meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, is the rule requiring primary and caucus states voting in March to allocate their delegates proportionally, instead of on a winner-take-all basis.
"It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now," said former Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen, a Romney supporter who opposed the new nominating rules when he served on the RNC. "It's been a long drawn-out affair, and that's not a positive thing."
"I saw right away that we were going to have a lot of proportional states, and that was going to drag things out," Pullen said. "I didn't feel that made much sense given that we have a sitting Democratic president." ...
At the time the calendar proposal was under consideration, manyRNC members were enviously looking back on the 2008 Democratic nomination fight, a prolonged and dramatic battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton that honed each candidate's political skills and energized millions of Democrats nationwide.
Conservatives on the committee, meanwhile, groused that a handful of early voting states handed them a nominee, John McCain, who failed to inspire the Republican base.
But critics of the new process argue that 2008 was a flawed model for the 2012 calendar because neither party faced the monumental task of unseating a sitting president.
"I think these RNC rules that turned to proportional awarding of delegates, I mean, this was the dumbest idea anybody ever had," Christie, another Romney supporter, recently told Fox News. "We voted against it at the RNC. The reason we did is you're running against an incumbent president who will not have a primary. So your idea? Make ours longer so we can beat each other up longer."
Mitt Romney's one-point win in Ohio was a half-empty/half-full phenomenon. On the one hand, he came from behind. On the other hand, he came out only narrowly ahead.
In a sketch last weekend following Mitt Romney's win in Michigan, "Saturday Night Live" had its Romney character boast that it was another instance of voters saying of him, "Eh, I guess."
"Eh, I guess" looks to be the motto he'll have to try to ride to the nomination. It was an "eh" night for Romney, although he avoided catastrophe by pulling out a razor-thin win in Ohio where he was trailing most of the night. Otherwise, he won one state where he used to be governor (Massachusetts), a small Northeastern state (Vermont), an essentially uncontested Southern state (Virginia), a heavily Mormon state out West (Idaho) and Alaska. In Virginia, he couldn't get to 60 percent against just Ron Paul. Rarely has a candidate seemed so inevitable and so weak at the same time.
No one senses Romney's weakness more acutely than Santorum and his advisers. They're convinced they could beat Romney one-on-one, and for that reason they are increasingly frustrated by Newt Gingrich's continued presence in the race. Gingrich, of course, easily won his home state of Georgia Tuesday night but did not do well in Tennessee and Oklahoma, as he had hoped. Now, Santorum is aiming to beat Gingrich in next week's Alabama and Mississippi contests, in the hopes of finally defeating the former speaker, or at least forcing him into total irrelevance.
"We'd never ask anybody to get out of this race," Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said on election night. "But you look at the numbers: If Newt were out of this race, we'd be winning these states by ten points."
Romney’s showing in the state could be a bad omen for him in the fall if he is GOP the nominee. Ohio Democrats have out-organized and out-hustled their Republican counterparts already, even holding their own election night event at the Ohio Democratic Party headquarters.
“Tonight Mitt Romney managed to eek [sic] out an embarrassingly narrow victory in Ohio and the race came at an extremely high cost to his candidacy,” Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a statement.
Redfern's statement makes no sense. Obama lost the 2008 Ohio primary by a very substantial margin. He won the state in the fall.
AP reports that unions plan to spend over $400 million in 2012.
But unions are being spread thin as they deal with a new wave of measures they say are designed to weaken their clout. Indiana passed a right-to-work measure earlier this month, and Republicans in New Hampshire are pushing a similar bill. Legislatures in Arizona and Utah are weighing measures to limit bargaining rights for their public employees.
"Part of the Republican strategy is to try to bleed us," said Mike Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO. "There are certainly more union members now who understand the importance of political engagement and are willing to go door-to-door and make phone calls and do campaigns."
Tim Phillips, president of the conservative anti-tax and anti-regulation group Americans for Prosperity, denied any grand strategy to weaken unions. His group, founded with the support of billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, spends millions on anti-Obama and anti-union ads across the country.
"It's not accurate to say there's some master plan to drain resources," Phillips said. "These are genuine public policy efforts."
But Phillips said he thinks that, for the first time, unions have to confront organized grassroots opposition in a number of states.
"And Americans for Prosperity is absolutely a key component in that," Phillips said. "The unions have always had the advantage and we are now matching them."
... The AFL-CIO is following a new strategy outlined last summer to contribute less money to specific candidates and spend more on building its infrastructure. The goal is to lay a foundation for year-round mobilization that keeps going in the months following an election. Competing for the union money are the various races, from president to state lawmaker.
...
The new strategy emerged after some unions grew frustrated last year that Obama and Democrats in Congress were not doing enough to stand up for labor's agenda. But leaders say union members have become more enthusiastic about Obama since the president increased his focus on job creation.
The AFL-CIO also started its own labor super PAC, which allows it to raise unlimited amounts of money and mobilize support beyond its traditional base. The new super PAC has already pulled in $3.7 million.
Like the team that engineered President Obama’s victory in 2008, Mr. Romney’s lawyers and strategists say they have devised an approach to the second half of the primary campaign intended to ensure that he methodically amasses the 1,144 delegates necessary to win the nomination, staying ahead of his rivals in that count even if they win the popular vote in some states. ... Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director, said of Mr. Santorum: “He has no states on Super Tuesday where he is going to do anything to cut the delegate lead. He is going to fall further and further behind. It becomes a mathematical battle as much as it is a political one, and the math just doesn’t add up for Santorum.” ...
The Romney effort over the next several months is an echo of the campaign that Mr. Obama waged against Hillary Rodham Clinton four years ago. Having lost the delegate lead in February, Mrs. Clinton struggled in vain to recapture it. In Texas, she defeated Mr. Obama by 51 percent to 47 percent but earned only four more delegates than he did.
“The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear,” David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, wrote in a memorandum titled “The Math” a day after the Texas vote in 2008. “In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead. They failed.”
Mr. Beeson was the political director for the Republican National Committee at the time and watched the Democratic fight with interest. The current Republican process has its differences, but the kinds of spreadsheets and maps that Mr. Beeson and his colleagues use are similar.
“We’ve read those same memos,” Mr. Beeson said of Mr. Plouffe’s many delegate-counting missives.
