Reflections on the NH results
(1) It’s not at all surprising that Ron Paul would do well in New Hampshire. Not only was he helped by the fact that Independents (known as “undeclareds” in New Hampshire, and who are more likely to be Democrat-leaning than Republican-leaning) are able to vote in either party’s primary there, but the state has a very strong libertarian tradition. “Live Free or Die” and all that. So my prediction is that this will be Ron Paul’s finest hour, and there will be no significant carryover into subsequent states’ primaries.
(2) Conventional wisdom is that Romney did well in New Hampshire because he’s a regional native son, having been governor of neighboring Massachusetts. But remember that he lost there to McCain in 2008 despite that fact. New Englanders know that there’s no great love lost between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In fact, a great many residents of New Hampshire, especially the more recent ones in the southern and more urban tier of the state, left Massachusetts for the less liberal climate of New Hampshire and are happy to have done so. I think that, although Romney did get a bit of a bump from the familiarity of having been governor of a neighboring state, it was more determinative that New Hampshirites have somewhat of a history of liking moderate Republicans rather than the more extreme conservative types, especially those of the socially conservative variety.
(3) Perry was never going to do well in New Hampshire, where Bush lost in 2000 despite ultimately getting the nomination. Whether such a judgment is fair or unfair, Perry is too reminiscent of Bush.
(4) What’s New Hampshire’s record of choosing the ultimate winner of the Republican nomination? Pretty good, actually. The only Republicans since the primary began in 1948 to win New Hampshire and not ultimately be nominated by the party were Harold Stassen (1948; Dewey was the eventual nominee), Henry Cabot Lodge (1964; Goldwater was the eventual nominee), a surprising Pat Buchanan (1996; Dole was the eventual nominee), and McCain (2000; Bush was the eventual nominee). Note how much New Hampshire Republicans seem to have liked RINO McCain, voting for him twice. But they couldn’t take him across the finish line in 2008 against Obama, who won the state in the general by approximately 54 to 44 percent.
So, oddly enough, although New Hampshire is unrepresentative of Republican voters as a whole and is quite tiny, and although many non-Republicans there can (and do) vote in the primaries, and although it votes very very early in the game before many other states have declared themselves and while there are still a large number of candidates from which to choose, New Hampshire actually has an excellent track record of picking the eventual Republican nominee.
Go figure.
Why let independents / undeclared vote in a partisan primary? Good way to skew the results.
@Dan
At one point you had to have been both a resident of the state and register in a party for a number of months prior to the primary to participate. The language of NH’s same day voter laws changed all that, and essentially force an open primary.
The NH legislature attempted to change that last year, but could not agree on language that met the same day voting requirement and also found a way to close the primary. You can be sure they will make another attempt. Obviously not in time for this election cycle.
Neo:
Paul also benefits directly from the free state project, which has motivated thousands of libertarians to move to NH with the goal of ultimately electing a libertarian majority to the state legislature and a libertarian as governor
UncleFred-
Thanks for the info.
I guess it works both ways… But it still seems silly to allow folks-who-wouldn’t-vote-for-one-side-anyway get to participate in choosing that side’s nominee.
Oh, well. Maybe they’ll get the language straightened out.
(I think there are a number of other states with “open” primaries — Just what are they *thinking*?)
Time to take a nap.
“…and although it votes very very early in the game before many other states have declared themselves and while there are still a large number of candidates from which to choose, New Hampshire actually has an excellent track record of picking the eventual Republican nominee.”
Determining the eventual nominee might be a more accurate choice of words. It’s because of choices in New Hampshire that voters in many other states never get to choose from a large number of candidates. They get to choose from the ones New Hampshire sends them. And sometimes, by that point, it’s not many.
NH may not have been a good fit for Perry, but he has to get more than 1% of the vote there to be taken seriously as candidate for the nomination. A candidate may not have to WIN the NH primary in order to become the nominee, but clearly nobody coming out of there with only 1% of the vote is going to end up as the nominee.
BTW, where are all those Mitt-bashers who were saying he could never break out above 25% of the vote? Mitt’s support seems to be growing and I see little evidence that conservatives are just waiting for more candidates to withdraw before coalescing around a single challenger to Romney. More likely, if Gingrich drops out, maybe most of his support goes to other anti-Romneys, but some of it will also go to Mitt. The idea that no supporters of Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, or Newt will wind up supporting Romney was greatly oversold, IMO. Inevitability is a real force multiplier for the guy who has it.
“where are all those Mitt-bashers who were saying he could never break out above 25% of the vote?”
“Romney did get a bit of a bump from the familiarity of having been governor of a neighboring state, it was more determinative that New Hampshirites have somewhat of a history of liking moderate Republicans rather than the more extreme conservative types”
We Mitt-bashers hold that Romney can’t break 25% when there’s another plausible candidate. We recognize that he owned NH, and are delighted that he barely matched McCain’s 2008 outcome. Mitt’s the pretty horse, not the strong horse.
where are all those Mitt-bashers who were saying he could never break out above 25% of the vote?
25% of the vote isn’t the same as 23% support …
…don’t confuse the two.
Moreover, don’t conflate vote and support either.
To disagree that Romney is the more “electable” candidate isn’t …necessarily …to “bash” either.
Of course, I can understand the confusion about the difference if it’s a result of worrying about kickback from [the Romney PAC] attack ads.
That’s the problem with reliance upon MAD, yes?
Once you decide on going negative as a primary campaign strategy, where does it end?
…I wonder if maybe someone erroneously discounted the part about the meaning of mutual, eh?
@ foxmarks and davisbr: I see, so the statement “Romney can’t get above 25% support” remains a true statement provided (a) we no longer use actual voting as the relevant measure of support in the context of a popular election or (b) we include not only the combined votes cast for all ACTUAL candidates but also the hypothetical votes additional, unspecified “viable” candidates would have received had they too been running against Romney. That all sounds eminently reasonable and fair, and nothing like goalpost-moving.
I predicted a complete Romney win back on August 12th. Intuition, yo.
Conrad: Your failure to understand the rules of the game is not evidence that the goalposts have been moved.
Obviously, if Romney is the only righty in the race, he will get more than a quarter of the votes and/or support. A strong candidate would be gathering support as competitors dropped out. Cain left, Mitt go no bounce. Bachmann left, Mitt got no bounce. Romney is the candidate of last resort for ~75% of GOP voters.
Romney might be well-advised to mimic the Obama strategy and see the competition denied ballot access. Then he gets all the votes!
“he could never break out above 25% of the vote”
“Romney can’t get above 25% support”
=whoosh=
VOTE / SUPPORT: different things.
Let me clarify and emend for you: if everyone drops out but Mitt, he will receive 100% of the vote, yes?
Is that the same as 100% support?
No.
It seems obvious with a bit of reflection, an election counts votes. Who is arguing that in NH (and possibly elsewhere going forward) Mitt won’t receive, well, whatever percentage of the votes he receives? Up to 100%, even?
But. You don’t poll for votes. You count votes.
You do poll to try and determine support though. Big difference.
I do realize that the difference may need thinking about for a minute or ten.
I can’t speak for foxmarks, but I recommend you re-read my original comment.
NOTE: I posted a long comment in neo’s previous thread on the NH win on Mitt which is relevant to the “Mitt basher” bit though.
The relevant bit …in case you’re wondering about the “bashing” part …was this:
I would edit that, if I could, to:
…sure wish there was a preview function; I have no idea how the html is going to turn out (for the blockquotes, as I left out the cite=”” part). Sorry if it’s a mess.
My point, is that as a Romney supporter yourself, you should tread lightly with painting those who don’t care for Mitt with terms like “basher”: I’ve said I’ll vote the ticket in the fall.
It doesn’t do Romney any good to go all ad hominem though, and perhaps alienate people who are pre-determined to vote the ticket …just because we declare we aren’t “fond” (if you will) of Romney.
(And who knows: if his VP candidate is as wonderful a choice as McCain’s was, I may improve – to your pov – to the point of enthusiasm for a candidate that I do not believe can win the election. It happened with McCain after all, whom I despised for many years …reasons also given in previous comment cited.)
This is a rerun of 2008. The schedule is front-loaded with open primaries, so Democrats get to have a say in who the Republican nominee is. This problem was obvious in 2008. Has the Republican Party made the slightest effort to address it in the past four years? Not as far as I can tell.
As I’ve been saying all along, the interminable series of debates seems to have had the effect of allowing the media and pollsters to pick the front runner before any voters got to have their say. And why did the Republican Party allow the debates to be moderated by media liberals?
Sure enough, we have exactly two primaries under our belts, and some people are already saying that Romney has the nomination all but locked up. Whether you support Romney or not, this stinks to high heaven. It certainly looks to me like an attempt to bypass the voters.
What a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable primary season.
rickl: I can’t find the article right now, but I read the other day that the New Hampshire legislature had attempted to address the issue and change the law to make the primary more closed. But they couldn’t agree on something about the wording. And so the present system remains.
rickl: This problem was obvious in 2008. Has the Republican Party made the slightest effort to address it in the past four years?
You’d have to be old enough to remember, but the current primary format was actually “the solution” proposed many years ago.
Frankly, after a few decades of this nonsense, I’ve come to believe we were had. I’m not saying it was on purpose, mind you: but in retrospect, the cure has turned out to be worse than the disease.
Jay Cost posted a wonderful article on his blog at The Weekly Standard several weeks ago, if you’d like to read a thoughtful analysis (Jay’s a really smart-smart guy): Let’s go back to the old nomination system
…there’s more; read the whole thing.
davisbr: I have long thought that the primary system is deeply flawed.
…I think I recall reading that a few years back neo …actually, it might’ve been what got me pondering the subject (again). TY for the link.
This is worth a look: by “Baseball Crank,” by way of Ace.
“The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years’ worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign.
“Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can’t possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies – about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans – none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him?
“…Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see – there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It’s one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years – many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man’s actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for.”
That Jay Cost article is excellent. Any chance we can jettison the American Idol primaries?
Very discouraged, me. I wish people would really vote their convictions instead of treating this like a horse race, and I think it’s insane to have open primaries and caucuses.
Trivia: Jay’s very first blog a decade plus ago was called The Horse Race, Bev’.
Beverly:
Concerning the piece Ace wrote (which I had read earlier)—you will find, if you look at Romney’s record, that he has changed his position almost entirely in one direction: from less conservative to more. Initially he was not involved in politics; he worked for Bain for many years (but of course, we know that). His first political run was in Massachusetts in 1994 against Ted Kennedy for the Senate. Most of the less conservative sound bites came when he was running for that office, especially during debate with Kennedy in which Kennedy was trying to paint him as too conservative for Massachusetts. His second run was the one he won, governor of Massachusetts, and then of course there was his tenure in that job. He actually vetoed many bills there but was overridden by the liberal legislature. Then, after he finished his term and began running for the presidency last time, he was certainly more conservative in his positions, and has remained so.
Therefore, you can believe his sincerity or not, as you wish, but his trajectory is almost entirely, as far as I can see, from less conservative to more.
Funny thing, that’s been my trajectory as well. It’s also the trajectory of Ronald Reagan and many other people who were more left and went to the right. Actually, Romney even began much to the right of most of them, and has moved more right since then. Since I study and write about the process of political change, I find that path of Romney’s quite believable—more believable than that he was really a closet liberal all the time, and vetoed those bills just in order to set up the deception that he was somewhat conservative, and that after running on a conservative platform in 2012 he will revert to this hidden liberalism once again.
I think you’re absolutely correct Neo, and a major difference between Mitt and McCain is that Mitt is at least competent. With Mitt, the glass is more half-full than it is half-assed (McCain) and a lot of people are finally becoming aware, in spite of the MSM collusion with the radical Democrats, that Obama and the Dems have just gone too far with their (typically) obtuse, hard left-wing agenda.
The way they blew off losing that drone with nothing more than an insipid request to “please return it”, was significantly more important than people realize. Anyone who doubts that Obama is a full-blown traitor, and the Democrats around him are little more than opportunist toadies, typical of Venezuela, N. Korea, etc., then they are seriously naive. There is simply too much evidence, for too long…
I sure hope you’re right, Neo. I’m an apostate myself, and my old friends can hardly believe the change: in my case, from being an eyewitness to an act of war against my country, and the Quisling behavior of the Democrats afterwards.
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“In fact, a great many residents of New Hampshire, especially the more recent ones in the southern and more urban tier of the state, left Massachusetts for the
less liberal climatelower taxes of New Hampshire and are happy to have done so.”FIFY
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