I agree with Ross when he writes:

But with his “three golds and two silvers” and his delegate lead, Romney still looks sufficiently viable that he, not Rudy, is shaping up to be the natural “stop McCain” candidate in Florida for movement conservatives who can’t stand the Arizona Senator.

As I said long ago in the pre-Michigan era (Tuesday afternoon): 

Meanwhile, if Romney manages to win [Michigan], he becomes the default anti-McCain, leaving no room for Giuliani anywhere.  Even if Romney loses, he still has money to continue competing if he wants, while Giuliani cannot draw upon such a large personal reserve.  

Because Huckabee has decided to lay off of McCain, and prior to tonight still had strong polling in a number of Feb. 5 states, Romney faces the daunting prospect of an anti-Romney pact between the two of them, effectively shutting him out of the South on Feb. 5 and then having Huckabee drop out and endorse McCain soon thereafter.  As McCain and Huckabee divide up the spoils of February 5 and work in concert to keep Romney down, Huckabee’s withdrawal and endorsement then throw his supporters and the race to McCain.  McCain-Huckabee follows?  That might be too much for the party to swallow, but that could be Huckabee’s reward for helping to break Romney. 

P.S.  Since Romney is still the delegate leader, he was always going to be the logical opponent of whichever candidate emerged victorious out of South Carolina.

If exit polling is correct, it seems very likely that McCain has won South Carolina, and Huckabee has placed a respectable, but still disappointing, second.  Romney appears to have done a little bit better than Thompson, who seems to have fallen badly short of what he needed to get, and Ron Paul has edged out Giuliani again. 

Just look at those numbers on immigration policy.  Huckapandering works like a charm.

P.S.  Early returns are currently showing Romney running weaker than exit polls suggested he would, and Huckabee is running stronger.  Here’s hoping for 7% or better for Ron Paul and fourth place for Romney. 

Update: Romney ended up in fourth, but Paul managed just 4%.  That’s a bit of a let-down after a second-place, double-digit result in Nevada, but not out of line with most of the polling.

Everything in the exit polling breaks down much as you might expect, but one thing that continues to puzzle me is Romney’s strong performance among Catholic voters, which is not limited to South Carolina.  As  I mentioned earlier today, 38% of Catholics in the Nevada caucus supported him, and the same pattern has emerged in the earlier contests and in Florida polling.  Among all Catholics in South Carolina’s primary, he got 24%, and 28% of weekly church-going Catholics backed him.  Despite finishing a distant fourth overall, he placed second among weekly church-going Catholics.  If there are numbers breaking down Romney’s Catholic support before his religion speech and after I would be very interested to see what they are, because I would wager a nice steak dinner that his support among Catholics increased significantly after that speech and remained strong ever since.  My guess is that the themes he outlined in that speech did nothing to assuage the doubts and concerns of evangelicals, but it may very well have won over a substantial bloc of Catholic voters.  In a strange way, the anti-Mormon problem for his candidacy may have started to boomerang and work to his advantage.  Perhaps it benefits him by providing a kind of sympathy specifically from Catholics.

So Romney has easily won Nevada, which virtually no one else was actively contesting, except for the presence of some Ron Paul staffers.  With 78% reporting, Ron Paul is slightly ahead of McCain in state delegates, and they are both at 13%.  Once again, Romney leads all other candidates among virtually all demographic groups.  Granted, this was a caucus and necessarily had a make-up skewed towards activists and certain groups more than others.  According to entrance polls, Mormons turned out at a disproportionately higher rate than almost any other group (7.5% of the population, but 27% of caucus-goers), and supported Romney almost unanimously (Ron Paul was in an extremely distant second among Mormons with 3%).  Some find this troubling, but I can’t say that I do.  It is perfectly appropriate if Mormons want to vote for a Mormon candidate based on nothing more than their shared religion (and it would be perfectly appropriate, if they were so inclined, for them to refuse to vote for a non-Mormon candidate on the same grounds).  Presumably, these caucus-goers also liked what they heard from the candidate, but even if it were a purely identity-driven result I wouldn’t necessarily find it at all troubling.  It may not be the best way to make a voting decision, and it may not result in the best choice, but it is a normal and inescapable part of democratic politics.  (I could add that this is one of the reasons why a democratic system produces such poor government, but I think I’ve made that point already.) 

It appears that Romney would have won handily had he received the same level of support from Mormons that he did among Protestants or Catholics (43 and 38% respectively).  The strong Mormon backing turned a convincing win into a rout.  Huckabee locked down his quota of about a fifth of evangelicals, but as usual has not expanded much beyond that.  Ron Paul ran quite well among voters 18-59.  It was the voters older than that who made up a plurality of the total who gave a boost to McCain.  Interestingly, Romney led McCain among Latinos 41-25, which will become a bit of fodder for the immigration debate.  Giuliani once again is bringing up the rear in sixth place with just 5%–this in a state where he was polling in double digits just a month ago.

On the Democratic side, it seems that my Obama pick doomed him to a second-place finish.  Clinton has been projected as the winner, and Edwards suffered a humiliating blowout, which is all the more severe given his reputation of having supposedly strong union backing. 

Update: Counting only pledged delegates, Clinton and Obama are tied.  At this rate, unless Obama can win a lot more endorsements and gain many more superdelegates, he will lose the contest.  Update: Apparently, the Democratic caucus in Nevada is even screwier than we thought.  It seems that Obama may be awarded more delegates in the end because of counties with odd numbers of delegates congressional districts that he won, which would give him a lead among pledged delegates, while Clinton continues to have a massive lead thanks to her superdelegates. 

On the Republican side, there are not nearly so many unpledged delegates to obscure the results from actual voting.  Romney has a significant lead in the pledged delegate count: 64 to Huckabee’s 21 and McCain’s 15.  The problem is that Romney has gained a large part of this lead from winning two basically uncontested caucuses.  Without the 26 he received from Wyoming and Nevada, his lead is nowhere near as impressive.  It remains the case that he stands to come out of the four major January contests as of tonight with one victory despite extensive investment of time and money, and even that victory, as impressive as it undoubtedly was, was in his old home state.  When he can organise large numbers of supporters, spend great sums to turn out his people and skew the results in his favour, as he has successfully done in two caucuses now, he wins.  When he has to win voters in broader-based, less-controlled contests, he tends not to do very well.  Is that really the candidate that Republicans want for a general election?

Let me see if my cursed predictions can doom another pair of candidates to defeat.  In Nevada, Obama and Romney win.  In South Carolina, it will be McCain and Obama (next Saturday).

This recent tussleamong the Democrats over invoking Reagan–even to make an obviously pro-progressive, pro-Democratic point–reflects the character of the Democratic race and the nature of some of the lukewarm progressive response to Obama that you see expressed in the netroots.  Obama cited Reagan as an example of someone who “changed the trajectory of America.”  Now, as I understand modern progressive demonology regarding the 1980s, most Democrats agree with this, but often view the change in question negatively. Obama’s use of Reagan here, his rivals’ responses to it, and the criticisms from Democratic pundits and activists all capture quite nicely the main tensions on the Democratic side this election year.  Obama talks endlessly, constantly, incessantly, about change–his is allegedly the “change we can believe in,” while Edwards’ change is that for which you fight, and Clinton’s is the change that is no change at all (but for which you have to work really hard).  So Obama invoked Reagan as an example of someone who could build a large political coalition and bring “change,” while Clinton belittled this as she belittles everything Obama says, because her public persona and her record, such as it is, epitomise the Democrats’ response to the Reagan years from the “defensive crouch” on foreign policy to her overall mostly “centrist” positions and she and her husband memorably demonised the Reagan years as the “decade of greed,” etc.  Meanwhile Edwards is, as ever, in adversarial, fight ’em-to-the-death mode and wants to make clear that he has no truck with any of those lousy Republicans.  Yeah, John, we get it–you’re a tough guy!  The typically flabbergasted netroots and progressive pundit responses were all along the lines uttered by Edwards: how dare you mention the name of the ancient enemy!  For progressives, this is just the kind of seemingly conciliatory language that makes them wary of Obama, whom they regard as lacking in the necessary zeal. 

At one level, I can sympathise with this response.  My family and I cringed when we heard Newt Gingrich give a much more fulsome paean to FDR in January 1995 when the new Republican majority took over the House.  But this is actually different–Gingrich actually admired FDR and what he did, and was making peace with FDR’s legacy, while Obama was not accepting, much less endorsing, what Reagan did.  He was acknowledging that Reagan had been a significant political player who had turned the country in a different direction.  In other words, he was acknowledging that Reagan was successful at implementing his agenda (or at least some of it) and thereby saying that the same opportunity might be available for Democrats in this election (with the none-too-subtle and none-too-modest implication that it would be a missed opportunity unless the Democrats nominated him).  This is a clever move, in the same way that Tony Blair paying respect to Thatcher’s legacy was clever, but it entails none of the ideological baggage that usually goes with these sorts of statements.  Unfortunately, because of the Democratic response to his remarks, the implicit comparison between himself and Reagan, who was vastly more qualified for the job in either 1976 or 1980, is not seen as evidence of the man’s delusions of grandeur, but is instead taken as another example of his transcendent power to unify America.  Well, I’m not buying.  I have generally dismissed or viewed very skeptically claims for Obama’s “transformational” potential, whether in foreign affairs or domestic politics.  These theories attribute too much importance to symbolism and vague rhetoric, and they take Obama’s views too little into account.  However, I might be willing to see how Obama represents the possibility of the Democrats’ reconciling themselves to Reagan and the Reagan-Bush years, in part because there may be good reason to think that the political era that began in 1980 is coming to a close.   

Cross-posted at The Americann Scene

As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda. Even as George W. Bush continues to bump and scrape along the bottom of public approval, significantly more people now believe we are “winning” the war.

What winning really means and whether that vague impression can be sustained are questions that the war’s proponents would prefer not to answer for the moment. Their objective during this election year is simply to reduce public pressure for withdrawal, which is still the choice of an overwhelming majority of voters. ~Joe Conason

This is pretty much in line with what I argued in one of my TAC columns last month (sorry, not online).  As others have noted, the real political goal of the “surge” seems not to have been to stabilise a viable Iraqi government, but to shore up collapsing support for the war here.  Even so, the domestic political effects have mostly been limited to Washington.  Public opinion remains as resolutely against the war as it was a year ago.  Three quarters of Americans do not want a “large number” of troops in Iraq two years from now, and half the country wants most of our forces out in less than a year.

Rod looks to the future:

For us Huckaboosters, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for our man to drop out, and spend the next four years doing some hard thinking and networking, getting ready for 2012.

I don’t intend the title to be as insulting as it sounds.  What I mean is that a failed Huckabee run would put him in much the same position that Edwards’ failed ’04 campaign put him these last several years (and Edwards had the advantage, so to speak, of being the VP nominee, which I doubt Huckabee will receive given the intense hostility to him wthin the party leadership.)  Huckabee may spend the next several years doing hard thinking and networking if he drops out, but I doubt he will be preparing for another presidential run.  If the example of John Edwards tells us something, it is that repeat candidates for the nomination tend to perform less well in the second attempt (Reagan being a big exception that leaps to mind).  Despite his policy and philanthropy work in the last four years, and despite his intensive cultivation of supporters in the netroots and in Iowa, John Edwards has become a has-been and also-ran who does not yet realise that he is either one.  Given the incandescent loathing of Huckabee in elite conservative circles and among big-money donors, I don’t know exactly what kind of networking he could build that would make him more successful in four years.  Rod’s talk of Huckabee ’12 was premised on the speculation that the GOP loses this year and loses badly, which I think is quite likely at the rate they’re going, but then if that is what happens the incumbent Democratic President Huckabee would be running against would probably be, barring epic incompetence or disaster, able to resist any Republican challenger.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks about the possibility of a brokered convention.  Yglesias even proposes that it would be good for the GOP to have the high drama of a nomination contest that came down to the end.  He’s right that it would draw a lot of media attention, and it would give endless material for political reporters and pundits to talk about, but while there would be a lot of media exposure it’s not clear to me that this works to the benefit of the eventual nominee and the party.  In some respects, a hard-fought nomination contest improves all of the candidates running and prepares them for the general election, but as with any long, drawn-out internal contest the winner at the end comes away muddied and bloodied and vulnerable.  In open elections, a party doesn’t really want an automatic coronation, which then allows the nominee to become lazy and rusty in his campaigning, but it doesn’t want the kind of free-for-all in which all of the participants are made to look vulnerable and small.  While the media would be paying more attention to a four- or five-way grudge match, the image that this sends to the country is that the party is in disarray, rudderless and imploding before their eyes.  While it’s true that a third candidate typically benefits from a fight between two leading rivals, no one really benefits from a four- or five-way scrum, since the very existence of the contest reminds the public that any one of these candidates was unable to weld together a political coalition within his own party.  If, as David Brooks has said, the Republicans are beginning to talk like the 1970s Tories on economics, they are behaving like the late 1990s Tories in their leadership contest, and it will have similar general election results.  Also, a contest that goes all the way to the convention makes it that much harder for any eventual nominee to unify the obviously fragmented party around himself, and in the course of the next six months until the convention the divisions wiithin the party would become wider and more damaging as each faction would be jockeying for position.  The Democrats in 1952 had a brokered convention and then lost badly that fall, but then they, like today’s GOP, were on the wrong side of public opinion regarding an unpopular war.  If the Republicans cannot unite around someone before April, this year could be even worse for them than it was already likely to be.