CONCORD, N.H. — Even as most of the Republican presidential hopefuls hustle through town halls and diners ahead of Tuesday’s primary here, a consensus is emerging among the campaigns that South Carolina will serve as the great clarifier.
That’s where it will become clear that either Mitt Romney is on an inexorable path to the nomination or this process will take some time and the Republican Party’s conservative base isn’t quite ready to accept the once-moderate Massachusetts governor.
New Hampshire still matters. But its 2012 relevance is chiefly in how the results will shape South Carolina on Jan. 21.
With Mitt Romney enjoying a wide lead in Granite State polls, the key outcome Tuesday isn’t who will finish on top. Rather, it’s whether Jon Huntsman places strongly enough to keep going to South Carolina and whether Rick Santorum can outperform Newt Gingrich.
In the three-dimensional chess game that is a multi-candidate primary, some measure of success here for Huntsman would give the former Utah governor a rationale for taking his campaign south and targeting the center and center-right voters Romney would otherwise have largely to himself. And if Santorum can, in the second consecutive state, perform better than Gingrich, the former Pennsylvania senator will have a strong case to make in South Carolina that he’s the one the right should rally around to stop Romney.
“If we can be that strong conservative alternative [out of New Hampshire], then that’s the place where we can do well, I think,” Santorum said of South Carolina, adding that he “didn’t have the money to spend in New Hampshire before we got here.”
The possibility of a candidate drawing votes on Romney’s left flank and a more unified opposition on the right would present the GOP front-runner with his most serious challenge yet. Even if it didn’t threaten his long-term prospects, it would at least slow his momentum and presage a longer race.
A third Romney victory — in the heart of the GOP’s Southern base and in a state that has picked the party’s nominee in every primary since 1980 — would almost certainly ensure a coronation in Tampa.
“That’s a strong run, there’s no question about that,” Huntsman acknowledged, discussing the implications of a Romney sweep of the traditional first three states. “Pretty soon somebody builds up a sense of inevitability and in fundraising and organization and all that — it’s just the real world.”
Even as Romney officials seek to tamp down expectations by hewing to talking points about how their candidate won only 15 percent in South Carolina four years ago, some of the front-runner’s most prominent supporters are openly discussing the prospect of the Palmetto State as a TKO.
“He’s going to win in New Hampshire, and it’s going to come down, my friends, as it always does, to South Carolina,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a rally near Myrtle Beach last week. “If Mitt Romney wins here, he will be the next president of the United States.”
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, in New Hampshire stumping with Romney, noted that he’s “the front-runner in all the polls in South Carolina.”
“I think he’s doing great [in South Carolina],” Haley said.
The stakes there are equally high for the other candidates: Top backers of Santorum and Gingrich have already discussed how their candidate’s out-polling the other here would set them up for South Carolina.
For Santorum, topping Gingrich in New Hampshire would mark the second state in which the former senator would have outdone the former speaker — and that’s an important part of Santorum’s decision to come here, explained his chief strategist.
“We can beat some people here,” said John Brabender. “And once you do that, I think that’s helpful, because it shows some consistency.”
In Gingrich’s case, performing better in New Hampshire would demonstrate that Iowa was a fluke.
“I think we will get a strong indication that the Santorum bubble was exactly that and that Newt is still in contention,” said former Rep. Bob Walker, a close Gingrich adviser. “And by the time we get to South Carolina, we think we’ll have a very strong story to tell there and that [South Carolina] will end up being a major way of separating out the field between conservative and moderate.”
Brabender concurred.
“I think the role of South Carolina is to narrow this thing down to two candidates, Mitt Romney and one other candidate; we hope that’s Rick Santorum,” he said. “Everything changes once that happens. Because I think it’s after South Carolina that we see a big change in the field.”
Santorum’s hope is that Rick Perry, having gone down with one final fight, exits after the Palmetto State and that Gingrich, having finished behind Santorum in a third straight contest, follows suit.
“At that point you’re just helping Romney to go on,” said a Santorum official about Gingrich, post-South Carolina.
Huntsman officials also think that South Carolina will sift the field — but into a three-way contest among Romney, a social conservative, such as Santorum, and their candidate.
If the former Utah governor can parlay a strong Sunday debate performance into at least a third-place showing in New Hampshire, he could at the very least be a thorn in Romney’s side with the independents who can participate in South Carolina’s primary.
“South Carolina can blow everything up,” said Huntsman campaign manager Matt David, sketching out a long contest in which three candidates split delegates over a period of months.
Romney backers hope that Huntsman will be a nonfactor in South Carolina — and that the conservative trio of Santorum, Gingrich and Perry are all still drawing votes when Jan. 21 comes around. Then the former Massachusetts governor could win with a McCain 2008-style plurality, and Santorum or the other two conservatives would be hard pressed to compete financially in a big, resource-draining state like Florida.
Romney’s camp is as gleeful as Santorum officials are downcast about Perry’s decision to make a stand in South Carolina.
Boston’s hope: that with more than two weeks on the ground there and an in-the-black bank account, Perry can build back his numbers sufficiently to at least pull votes from the more plausible two conservative alternatives.
“He’s got some money!” said former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, hopefully, of why Perry could still be a factor.
2 comments:
As stated in the article, South Carolina will be a major factor in determining who will go on to compete for the Republican nomination. I don't necessarily think that this primary will completely come down to two or three people, but there will be some clearing out among the candidates. I think Perry will drop out, if he's smart. I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.
I think pretty much any way you look at it, nobody has much of a chance except Romney. Other candidates have been coming and going as the potential "big competition" from the beginning; Romney is the only one who's had constant support. Santorum won't last long, especially if he keeps turning people off with his crazy hardcore social conservatism. That's a pretty bold statement by McCain though, I'm not too sure the Republican party can unite for Romney, especially with the tea party movement going on. Unfortunately for Republicans, there seems to be no candidate that doesn't have at least one massive flaw.
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