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I Spent $350,000, And All I Got Was This Lousy 21%

The dogged Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt have latched on to this positive spin of Romney’s CPAC victory: Some people will tell you that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve to win (because he bussed in College Republicans to vote for him). That’s like saying George W. Bush didn’t deserve to win because he raised more money […]

The dogged Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt have latched on to this positive spin of Romney’s CPAC victory:

Some people will tell you that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve to win (because he bussed in College Republicans to vote for him). That’s like saying George W. Bush didn’t deserve to win because he raised more money than his opponent. Romney’s ability to organize, inspire, and transport college students to the conference is precisely why he did deserve to win! A campaign that has the organizational ability to bus in college students has the organizational ability to do a lot of other things, too. The rules allow for it, so what’s wrong with Romney doing what he has to do (within the rules) to win?

Ethically speaking, I suppose there isn’t much “wrong” with it.  No one’s really saying that he cheated exactly, but we are saying that the result isn’t very representative of conservative opinion when a large number of participants in the straw poll had their way at CPAC paid on the condition that they vote for Romney.  As Dan McCarthy, who was at the conference talking about conservative ideas and fusionismtells us, the rumour is that Romney shelled out $350,000 to get that rather meager result.  It may not seem like it to the man who raises $6 million in a day, but that is a lot of money to blow on a straw poll of no great importance (or rather, it is of no great importance to anyone who isn’t desperate to prove that he is a real conservative).  Is that the sort of expenditure that a consultant from Bain Capital would think was well-spent? 

There was apparently a grand total of 1,705 votes cast.  Evidently, Romney got 350 votes.  Of those, he brought in 200 people on his dime.  That works out to $1750 per paid supporter in a straw poll that everyone pretty much acknowledges has only very limited importance.  Howard Dean in ’03 was a big one for flinging money around like he had an endless supply of the stuff, only to find that the supply wasn’t endless and that streams of cash do not automatically translate into votes in the primaries.  Romney’s ad buys and now this CPAC buy all suggest the same habit of frittering away resources on bad decisions or on what are relatively minor campaign events.  At this rate of spending on symbolic victories, he will be shelling out tens of millions of dollars for the Ames straw poll in Iowa this summer, where tens of thousands of votes have been cast in the past.  Of course, as the Spartanburg vote has already shown, when it comes to real voters whose support cannot simply be bought Romney doesn’t do all that well.  Maybe that’s because people don’t trust him and are not inclined to trust someone who feels compelled to buy support at an event that he, as the great conservative he supposedly is, ought to dominate as a matter of course.    

If election laws allowed blatant vote-buying, Romney’s methods at CPAC would have immediate real-world value and his victory there would show that he can buy support better than anybody.  The trick is that he fares poorly in straw polls where he can’t game the system, because his actual candidacy doesn’t inspire as much enthusiasm as getting your conference registration and hotel bill comped by a desperate politician. 

The point is that the CPAC straw poll isn’t really a measure of what conservative activists believe about their preferred candidates if the poll can be so easily distorted by a glut of Romney-paid Romney supporters.  You can applaud Romney’s win if you want, since it never hurts to win these polls, but what you can’t do is use that win as some sort of vindication that conservatives have endorsed him as their guy when he manipulated the rules of the poll to maximise his result.  It means that the participants who backed him there may well have no intention of backing him in the real world.  The result shows that a lot of people he effectively paid to vote for him voted for him.  In fact, it fairly shouts to the entire world that Romney knows he isn’t a real conservative and he knows everyone else knows it, so he feels compelled to inflate his level of support through these sorts of artificial tricks because he knows his boilerplate proposals aren’t winning anyone to his side and he knows that virtually no one is buying his “conversion” story.

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