. . . it will add to the valuable perception of renewed momentum he got from his strong showing on Super Tuesday, when he won primaries in Tennessee and Oklahoma, as well as the North Dakota caucuses, came within 1% of Romney in Ohio, and ran a strong second nearly everywhere else. And it looks like Santorum is the overwhelming favorite to win Saturday’s Kansas caucuses:
Long-shot Newt Gingrich, weak outside the Deep South, dropped plans for a six-stop swing Friday and Saturday through Kansas. The former U.S. House speaker from Georgia is gambling a couple more southern states — Alabama and Mississippi — can sustain his quest for the nomination.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who remains front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, is uninterested in the Kansas caucus. He won’t personally chase Kansas’ 40 delegates to the GOP national convention.
The key thing here is that Gingrich is not campaigning in Kansas because he’s been forced to fight in Alabama and Mississippi merely to maintain whatever semblance of “viability” Newt’s got left, which frankly isn’t too damned much.
So if Santorum wins Saturday, both Mitt and Newt will try to pretend it’s irrelevant, but a Kansas win would add weight to the perception of Santorum as the conservative alternative — “a two-man race” with Romney, as he says — and thus should boost his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi by a few points. I say all that as a precursor to talking about the polls, which must be taken with a grain of salt.
Unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, where you had lots and lots of polls to compare and try to spot the trend, there have been very few polls in Alabama or Mississippi. It is therefore necessary to say that we can’t tell if the Rasmussen poll of Alabama, showing a virtual three-way tie between Newt, Mitt and Rick, will bear much resemblance to the vote totals on Tuesday. And I’m highly skeptical of the Rasmussen poll of Mississippi, showing Mitt with an eight-point lead.
Remember this: Polls are a lagging indicator in politics. This is why it helps to have a lot of polls bunched up together in a sequence, so you can attempt to plot a trend and extrapolate forward. We don’t have that in this case, so we are in some sense “blind” to what’s happening in Alabama and Mississippi. (I haven’t seen any polls from Kansas at all, but the fact that Newt and Mitt aren’t campaigning there is an obvious sign that Santorum should do well.)
We are merely speculating, therefore, to consider this scenario: Santorum wins Kansas, bumping up his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi, where it is entrely possible that Newt could finish third — and that, my friends, would be the end of Gingrich. It would be bad enough for Newt, who has staked his entire campaign on doing well in the South, to finish second in either of Tuesday’s primaries. But a third-place finish on “home turf” would be the kind of humiliation the Gingrich campaign could not survive.
My buddy Quin Hillyer lives in Mobile and has been covering Santorum’s campaign down there and quotes Alabama Policy Institute president Gary Palmer about Santorum’s speech there: “He looked presidential — he really connected with the audience.” Quin also relates how Santorum stopped a speech to help a lady who fainted.
Santorum’s creating a good impression in Alabama, it seems, and so if we can take the speculation a step further — not a prediction, mind you — think about this not-too-extreme possibility: Santorum wins Kansas on Saturday, then wins Alabama and/or Mississippi on Tuesday, and Gingrich finishes third in all three states. The narrative then would be?
Santorum the Newt-Killer Emerges
as Last Remaining Conservative
Opponent to Moderate Mitt Romney
Just speculation, as I say, but you can see why it may have been too early for Mitt’s boys to say only an “act of God” could stop Romney from winning the Republican nomination. And it looks like Mitt may be having some money troubles.
UPDATE: Press release from the Santorum campaign:
KANSAS CITY ROYALS ALL-STAR MIKE SWEENEY
ENDORSES SANTORUM FOR PRESIDENT
Verona, PA – The Rick Santorum for President campaign is proud to announce that it has received the endorsement of All-Star Major Leaguer Mike Sweeney.
Mike Sweeney said: “I take great pride in the success I’ve had on the baseball field, but even greater satisfaction in knowing that I have spent my entire life embracing Godly principles and instilling these values into the everyday lives of my children, family and friends. After personally getting to know Rick Santorum, I am absolutely convinced that he is the only candidate in the 2012 Presidential race that shares these same core values! The moral decline of our great country must stop now and this can only be achieved through real leadership and real solutions. I believe Senator Santorum has the wisdom, passion and vision to bring our country back to global excellence with those core Christian beliefs that our Founding Fathers envisioned, including protecting the rights of the unborn child, in mind. This election is the most important in my lifetime and as a father, husband, and American I am proud to play on Rick Santorum’s team!”
Mike Sweeney was a five-time Major League All-Star, with a career batting average of .297 and over 200 homeruns. Sweeney played for four Major League teams, including over a decade with the Kansas City Royals. Sweeney is very active in the Kansas City community, supporting various organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of Kansas City and Children’s Mercy Hospital. Sweeney is also the advisory chairman of the Catholic Athletes for Christ and a spokesman for Life Teen, the largest Catholic youth ministry program in the United States.
Over at the New York Times, Nate Silver is counting delegates and projects Mitt Romney getting to barely 50 percent — 1,162, or 18 more delegates than the nominating majority. While I can’t quibble with Silver’s math, the problem is that what he has done is an extrapolation of current trends, which is OK so far as it goes, except that no mere extrapolation can predict future evenst.
Go back to early December, when Santorum was in sixth place in the Iowa polls. No expert at that time would have given two cents for Santorum’s chances of winning Iowa, much less would the experts have predicted that Santorum would be Romney’s strongest remaining rival after Super Tuesday.
What happened? Events happened, events that no one expected in early December. And while no one can deny that, as the situation stands now, Romney is the near-prohibitive favorite to be the nominee in Tampa in August, we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after that, much less what’s going to happen between now and the Texas primary on May 29.
Oh: Texas was originally scheduled to vote on April 3, but a lawsuit about re-districting pushed it back to late May — another one of those “events” no one predicted three months ago. It always pays to be careful about predictions in politics, because events happen.
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