Mitt leads in Florida by 9 points, and that will probably be close to the final margin. Santorum will suspend his campaign for the month of February, then perhaps contest super Tuesday if Newt has (finally) been totally discredited as a conservative alternative to Romney. Which is likely, because I don’t see Newt winning anything in February. Missouri would be his best shot, but he’s not on the ballot (the primary isn’t binding anyway). Eventually, I see Gingrich winning the remaining southern states (except Virginia, where he again failed to get on the ballot), and Mitt winning everything else. That gives the nomination to Romney, but provides enough delegates to Gingrich and Paul to turn the convention into a circus.

Note also that Obama is pulling away in the general election polls. Until now, he has always lost to a generic Republican, but been basically tied with Romney and comfortably ahead of every other actual Republican candidate. Now he is comfortably ahead of both the generic Republican and Romney and is blowing the other candidates totally out of the water with leads approaching 20 points. This will go on as long as the economy continues to improve (however slowly) and the Republican candidates continue to do Obama’s campaigning for him.

LL – I agree with your assessment. I did not know Gingrich missed the Missouri ballot. I think Santorum is hanging on in hopes Newt will self-immolate which he is close to at this point.

chris – it is amazing how angry Santorum is. I think your Hilary/Obama analogy is a good one. If those two can work together, anyone can.

Newt is essentially unelectable. Obama would end up with somewhere north of 325 electoral votes in a match-up with Newt. This is why whenever Newt start to gain in the polls he falls back down again after the Primary voters think about him for a while. The guy is a walking “skeleton in my closet” billboard.

What Newt does do well is battle with the press. Repub primary voters take it as gospel that the typical reporter from CNN, ABC, wash post etc is a diehard liberal who lives in a liberal echo chamber and supports Dem candidates. So any candidate that calls out the typical reporter and bashes them wins some points with these voters. Juan Williams and Newt must have conspired together to have that exchange (Wink). It was a perfect set-up.

Romney is a very different candidate then Newt. He plays much better in purple states then Newt or Santorum. Romney still sweeps the South including VA, NC, and Florida. Takes Indiana and NH, and probably wins Ohio, NV, and NH. Romney also will compete in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, PA although these states are much harder for Romney due to past voting behavior. Out West in Colorado and New Mexico Romney is better then Newt as well. Obama’s map to reelection is much narrower against Romney and the map does not really favor him that much.

Obama really needs to be at 49% or higher in his approval ratings. He is at 45% or so now which would lead him to about 47-48% if the election were held today based on Gallup data and analysis released today. The wild card here would be a very dramatic change in the economy this spring. There are some signs of some improvement in the economy right now but the signs are really soft

bbell, NH is over. Why do you keep saying Romney’s going to win it? Also, why do you insist on using “then” in place of “than?” It’s irritating.

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that Romney will be the eventual nominee, barring major unforseen screwups, but he may have to fight it out state by state over the long term because of the proportional delegate rules now in place. Even so, if the others don’t collect pretty serious delegate totals in each primary, it’s going to be tough to stay in the race because money will dry up.

Mittens wins the nomination and gets beat by 4-5 points in the general election (which we don’t care about) and by a smaller margin than McCain in the electoral college (but not that it will be “close”).

Stealing a bit from Twitter …

I’m still astounded that people think a permanent lunar colony is possible but universal health care is.

Go,Mitt, go! Not that I am a fan of his politics but I am a fan of having a Mormon be president so all my evangelical friends will start collecting food, preparing for The End of The World. They can’t imagine anything worse than a Mormon president and are confident that event would hasten Christ’s 2nd coming. Either way, it’s a win.

Is this the most time consuming, money consuming, destructive way to choose a party leader. If you tried you could not come up with a worse system?

If you tried you could not come up with a worse system?

Sure you could. Just for starters–

* put the nomination up for auction on E-bay;
* let the previous nominee select his successor;
* pistols at twenty paces.

I could go on. You forgot the rest of Churchill’s quotation: …”the worst form…except for the others that have been tried.”

I just got back from a week in South Carolina. One of the local shopkeepers told me the reason Romney didn’t win the state is because his organization ‘robo’ called everyone to death. The last three weeks before the primary it was not unusual to get 6 automated political calls in an hour, all day long. Most of the senior folks turned off their phones. It caused all kinds of problems for the home health companies that are supposed to do phone checks on people. Because no one was answering their phones, the health workers had to do door-to-door checks every day.
The consensus was that if Romney had enough money to set up that extensive of a phone network, he didn’t need their vote.
I didn’t have the heart to explain how easy it is to get political phone lists and set up automated calls, but I did understand the universal frustration of endless campaigning. I barely survived the Iowa Caucuses.