Even if the party elites had all coalesced around Romney, he’d be deeply vulnerable to an insurgent challenger. But they haven’t coalesced around him. They have either kept their distance or openly denounced him as an apostate. Those in the latter category include such elected officials as Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint, Rick Perry, and Haley Barbour, and such pundits as Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, Jennifer Rubin, Stephen Spruiell, Michael Tanner, Kevin Hassett, Matt Continetti, David Boaz, Daniel Foster, and John Podhoretz. (I know I’m omitting many.) Romney has been voted off the island. ~Jonathan Chait

What do all of these “party elites” have in common? They were also almost completely united in their opposition to nominating McCain, who was the de facto front-runner coming into 2007. Enough Republican voters didn’t care what the elites said, and McCain received the nomination anyway. On immigration, McCain was directly involved in promoting much more controversial and widely loathed legislation in 2007, but as long as he pretended that he had “learned his lesson” and stopped pushing amnesty during the campaign he was able to recover enough to head off the other challengers. Romney has never attacked opponents of federal health care legislation in insulting terms. Instead, he is an opponent of that legislation, which is ultimately what will matter to Republican voters to the extent that this issue matters to them at all.

Movement conservatives had a fairly long list of reasons to dislike McCain, not least of which was his pastime of belittling them to gain good media coverage, but all of the activists and pundits’ hostility never translated into sufficient electoral support for any other candidate. Huckabee had also been “voted off the island” by many of the same people who declared McCain unacceptable, and despite that he won eight contests in the 2008 cycle. The conservative vote was split in 2008, just as it will be this time, and that helps Romney to be the McCain of this cycle. When almost all of the party elites were telling people to back Romney instead of Huckabee or McCain, Romney was rejected by two-thirds of Republican voters. It is possible that he could falter again, but by now Romney has become the known quantity, and it is Romney that the party elites have started dismissing as doomed.

There’s also an important difference between the reactions to Romney and McCain. Movement conservatives truly held grudges against McCain for perceived and real slights in the past. Romney’s overriding problem is that he has been so very eager to please movement conservatives that he has often turned into a caricature of one. If movement conservatives complained about the (non-existent) Obama “apology tour,” he made sure to name his next book No Apology, and if repealing Democratic health care legislation was the new conservative cause of the moment Romney made sure to position himself as a leading supporter of repeal. Where McCain’s breaks with conservatives were numerous, Romney has largely lined up with whatever movement conservatives have wanted for the last few years with the notable exception of the TARP.

As they did with Romney during the last election, party elites will anoint the acceptable anti-Romney that they are willing to tolerate, and they will desperately promote him as the alternative. It seems as if Tim Pawlenty has been auditioning for this role, and he may get it. These elites will probably overlook or dismiss more populist and Tea Party-aligned candidates because they are considered “unserious,” and one or more of these candidates will surprise them by undermining their preferred alternative. The conservative voters who are “supposed” to support Pawlenty to stop Romney will likely find one or more of the very conservative candidates in the race to be more interesting, and Romney will likely dominate among moderate Republicans. The minority of primary voters that follows the lead of party elites and backs the “serious” anti-Romney candidate will probably find that candidate outflanked on right and left. The 2008 cycle showed that party and movement elites judge the candidates very differently from the way most Republican voters do, and the former have surprisingly little influence over the candidates the voters choose to support.