Mitt Romney dodges a bullet

The Republican race

But the narrowness of his victory in Michigan portends a long struggle ahead

| NOVI, MICHIGAN, COLUMBUS, OHIO, AND NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE |

ON FEBRUARY 28th a trickle of Democrats arrived to vote in Michigan’s Republican primary, as permitted under the state’s primary rules. They came to defeat the presumed Republican front-runner, Mr Romney. Democrats see him as the most dangerous opponent to Barack Obama, and relished the chance to promote Rick Santorum, a social conservative whom they think would be a lot easier to beat. In what became quite a nasty contest, with plenty of mudslinging all round, Mr Santorum encouraged the ruse.


Despite it, Mr Romney snagged a modest victory in Michigan, beating Mr Santorum by 41% to 38%, as well as romping home in Arizona, by 47% to 27%. A loss for Mr Romney in Michigan might well have been fatal. Not only did he grow up there, his father was a popular former governor. But Mr Romney also badly needed to demonstrate his appeal to the Midwestern voters who will be crucial in any general election. Scoring such a narrow victory means that he failed to do so very convincingly.

Michigan is a big and diverse place, with everything from the kind of rich suburbs that Mr Romney grew up in to grim, distressed industrial cities such as Flint, Pontiac and Detroit. Little wonder then that it is a vital swing state, with a useful 16 votes in the electoral college that actually chooses the president. On the face of it, Mr Romney’s stronger economic credentials might seem to commend him to voters looking for a turnaround for America. But matters are more complex in a state where the car companies are crucial—and where many voters believe that Mr Romney would have preferred their industry to go bankrupt than to get money from the government to help it survive.
Exit polls showed that Mr Romney’s Michigan voters were older, wealthier and better educated than Mr Santorum’s. In other words, when Mr Santorum called the president a “snob” for wanting to send everybody in America to college, he was making a naked, and rather successful, appeal to class resentment.
While Republicans more usually divide on social issues, says Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, in Michigan the election saw a clear split along class lines. Mr Romney’s great wealth and low tax rate hurt him. So did his inability to connect with ordinary voters (he made a gaffe about his wife’s “couple” of Cadillacs) and the fact that he worked in private equity, which buys up companies and lays off workers. His decision to hold one of his main rallies in a vast stadium, in which the paltry turnout looked even paltrier, did not help either.
And on to Super Tuesday

On March 6th, ten states are due to vote (see map). Mr Romney is in better shape than he was a couple of weeks ago, when he was facing the prospect of a loss in Michigan on the back of a triple-state loss to Mr Santorum on February 7th. But he had to spend a lot of cash to hold on to a state he would once have expected to win easily.
Of the ten Super Tuesday states by far the biggest prize is Ohio, Michigan’s next-door neighbour. It has 18 electoral-college votes and a reputation for being the presidential bellwether. The fact that Mr Romney had to struggle so hard for such a modest victory in Michigan is a worry for him here, where the demographic make-up is similar.
Other problems loom, too. Even more than Michigan, Ohio is home to a sizeable evangelical Protestant movement and also to many Catholics, two groups to whom Mr Santorum, with his firm views about such mortal perils as contraception and homosexuality, appeals. And in the gritty north and east of the state, it has a lot of fed-up blue-collar workers and ex-workers, as Michigan does. Bain Capital, which Mr Romney used to run, is not an object of affection for them.
Mr Romney’s “Rolls-Royce” organisation is also a bit of a myth, in Ohio at least. His team did not open their headquarters in Columbus, the state capital, until February 24th, and he only has a dozen paid workers there (more than his rivals, admittedly). He is also at loggerheads with the state’s Republican governor, John Kasich, after he failed to support Mr Kasich’s plans last year to take on the public-sector unions. Mr Romney’s recent trip to the state was a damp squib, and Mr Santorum is comfortably ahead in the only two recent Ohio polls, by 7% and 11%.
Even if his superior ground-work and funds for TV advertising allow Mr Romney to eke out a narrow victory, Ohio, like most other states voting at this stage of the proceedings, is awarding its delegates on a complicated proportional basis. Because of the way such mechanisms work, Mr Santorum seems to have got as many delegates in Michigan as Mr Romney did, despite having “lost” there.
Mr Romney’s difficulties in Ohio, though, are as nothing compared to the drubbing he can expect on March 6th in the South. The contests in three of the Southern Super Tuesday states—Oklahoma, Tennessee and Georgia—are likely to be straight fights between Mr Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. (No-one will pay too much attention to the fourth, Virginia, because neither Mr Gingrich nor Mr Santorum was sufficiently well-organised to get himself on the ballot there, though Mr Romney will find its 49 delegates very useful.)
Mr Gingrich, who represented suburban Atlanta in Congress for 20 years, enjoys a slight lead in Georgia’s polls, while Mr Santorum has a commanding one in both Oklahoma and Tennessee. That may change, though not to Mr Romney’s advantage. Mr Santorum has not yet won a Southern state; Mr Gingrich is exceptionally good at stump politics down South. He triumphed in South Carolina one angry speech at a time. After weeks of attacking Mr Romney and Barack Obama, he has only recently turned his fire on Mr Santorum, calling him a “big labour Republican” (unions have a strong presence in Mr Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania). Mr Gingrich embarked on a two-day bus tour of Georgia this week.
Tony Shipley, a state representative who is chairman of Mr Gingrich’s Tennessee campaign, says Mr Gingrich may do the same in his state. Mr Santorum’s rise in Tennessee’s polls, like his rise nationally, has been abrupt, and it remains to be seen next week whether he can survive a full-frontal assault from Mr Gingrich.
Primaries in Alabama and Mississippi follow Super Tuesday by a week; but whether Mr Gingrich or Mr Santorum prevails there an unpleasant geographical split looms for the Republicans. Mr Romney runs most strongly in coastal states, such as Massachusetts, which votes on Super Tuesday but which Republicans are unlikely to win in a general election, and in states with heavy Mormon populations, like Nevada, which he won handsomely. (His triumph in Florida on January 31st is an exception.) He does poorly in the Midwestern heartland and in the Republican stronghold down South, even though he will win Virginia next week by default.
So all the indications are, increasingly, that the nomination contest will be a long and bitter affair. That can only benefit Mr Obama, whose approval ratings continue to rise. This is mainly due to a steadily improving economy: but Mr Santorum’s rise, which has forced Mr Romney to talk about contraception instead of jobs, and led both men viciously to attack each other, has also helped the president.
In the end, Mr Romney still looks by far the most likely to prevail, as he steadily racks up the delegates he needs to reach the magic total of 1,144. He currently has 143, compared with 62 for Mr Santorum and 32 for Mr Gingrich and 20 for Ron Paul, the distant but persistent fourth candidate in the race. But he will probably have to wait until the big coastal states vote—most of them only from late April onwards, with California not voting until June—to get over the line. And he will have been forced to tack well to the right by then.