Rick Santorum demolished Newt Gingrich Tuesday night on Gingrich's own southern turf of Alabama and Mississippi, leaving the former Speaker of the House with little evident reason to stay in the race as a conservative alternative to erstwhile frontrunner Mitt Romney, who got third place in both states.
Santorum beat Gingrich 35-29% in Alabama and in Mississippi by 33-31%, leaving the former Speaker as runner-up in both contests. Romney's third-place finishes were nonetheless within a percentage point of Gingrich's second place spots, in both states.
Although many had predicted Tuesday night would be a major psychological victory or loss for the Romney campaign, it was really all about Santorum's final domination of Gingrich.
Gingrich's entire survival strategy, before Tuesday night's results came in, was to keep building up the geographic stronghold of votes he had contructed in South Carolina, Georgia, and in the Florida panhandle, and find some way to turn that into a national strategy through April and May.
The former speaker could not keep up his southern streak, however; even in Alabama, where he was considered the favorite, Gingrich lost by a full six percentage points.
Gingrich swept many of the counties on Alabama's eastern border, along the Georgia line, and won all but two of the counties--Lee and Barbour-- around and between Montgomery, Dothan, and Colombus, Ga., winning him nearly the entire southeastern chunk of the state.
He did not do well much of anywhere else in Alabama, however. Rick Santorum dominated in the northern half of the Yellowhammer State, in the counties around Jefferson where Birmingham is located. It is an area rife with those Appalachian-foothills voters that delivered for Santorum in other bordering states as well, such as Tennessee, where Santorum won all but four counties in the state.
The disappointment in the Gingrich war room must have been unimaginable as results began to roll in and only one region of Alabama went for Gingrich as opposed to the whole state.
After winning South Carolina, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle, Alabama was the next geographically logical place for Gingrich to win if he was going to win another state. And he did not win.
Santorum has really put a period on this contest for the mantle of true anti-Romney. Gingrich nonetheless refused to concede the race Tuesday night, pledging--in what should have been a concession speech but what sounded more like a victory speech--his belief that, by the time the convention arrives, neither he, Santorum, nor Mitt Romney will have the required 1,144 delegates.
He hopes there will be no presumptive nominee; that instead, what he called "a whole new conversation" will begin in the leadup to the convention in the absence of a candidate with a majority of delegates.
That is the situation Gingrich thinks he can prevail in, and this is why he is constantly spouting that soundbite about being the "best candidate to go toe to toe in a debate with President Obama." He hopes that none of the candidates will win enough delegates, and that he, as the most experienced and most elder statesman-like of the three, will be the 'compromise candidate' picked at a brokered convention.
The question is, will the Republican Party ever get to that point? And since when do candidates publicly wish for no one to win their primary? Is Newt Gingrich some kind of anarchist?
No one else in the party besides Gingrich hopes the party ends up with a brokered convention, that is for sure. There has not been a brokered convention in the United States since the 1952 Republican meeting that ended up nominating future president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
More importantly, virtually everyone following this primary competition--whether journalist or Republican partisan--knows a brokered convention would be a general election death sentence for whomever is to face President Obama this November.
The idea that Newt is actually rooting for the scenario shows just how little the country means to him compared to how much he is driven by his own sense of ego-achievement.
The fact is that Santorum has checkmated Gingrich on his own turf--the Deep South--and has proved that he can win states in more than just the Midwest. And with the endorsement Wednesday morning of Rick Santorum by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, Santorum's hold on the south for the duration of this campaign seems just about solidified.
There were two anti-Romneys left, and the voters had to eventually pick one or the other. They did so, and Gingrich is just mad that it was not him. Rick Santorum has proven himself to be the one, true anti-Romney. For Gingrich, it's only a matter of time before he goes the way of Bachmann, Perry, and Cain.
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Losing on Tuesday night was an effective death sentence for Gingrich, but for Mitt Romney, his third place finishes in both states do not really tell campaign watchers anything the media had not already figured out ages ago. Romney is in the same place he was the day before, or a week before.
Considering that Romney won the caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa that did not close until midnight Central Time, by Wednesday morning Tuesday night's overall delegate count was in Romney's favor. By winning 22 delegates out of Alabama and Mississippi's proportional primaries, the former governor had, by one count (MSNBC's), actually won more delegates overall on March 13th than Santorum did, the night's putative winner.
More important is Romney's place in the overall delegate count, especially compared to his opponents. By an aggregate count, Romney boasts 432 delegates to his nearest competitor Rick Santorum's 165, Newt Gingrich's 134, and Ron Paul's 25.
Delegate totals vary from source to source, but even with these rough numbers, Romney has a clear lead over his rivals. As Romney's advisers were all over the news Wednesday morning saying ad nauseum, it is hard to see how Santorum is going to manage to turn 165 into 1144 quicker than Romney will turn 432 into the same number, especially with these proportional contests the Republicans have started having.
Nevertheless, many were expecting Romney to score at least one second place finish on Tuesday night.
As it became clear that Santorum would not only win Alabama and Mississippi, but win by a few full points, the statisticians and numbers gurus on the cable news networks began to remark on a polling and voting phenomenon that has been seen before, but not confirmed to this degree until Tuesday night: a gap between Romney and Santorum's polling numbers and their election numbers.
Romney's problem is that he almost uniformly performs better in pre-election polls than he does on the actual election day. Santorum reaps the benefits of this disparity in that he almost uniformly performs better on actual election day than he does in pre-election polls.
But the truth is that Romney had never been expected to do particularly well in either state until polls in the week before the primaries began to show hints that he just might have a chance to win in one, or perhaps both, of the southern states up for grabs.
Whereas polls last month had showed Santorum polling ahead of both Romney and Gingrich in both states, polls taken in both states in early March showed him and Gingrich running neck-and-neck; Santorum in third, but only by one or two percentage points.
Romney ended up recouping a rather respectable number of votes, with 28% in Alabama and 30% in Mississippi--the first time he's broken the 30% mark in any southern state, as a matter of fact. (As Chuck Todd noted somewhat humorously on MSNBC's coverage Tuesday night, it appears former Miss. Governor Haley Barbour's Romney endorsement and political machine was worth approximately two percentage points.)
Romney certainly performed better in Alabama this time around than he did in 2008, where he received only 17.75% in Alabama's Super Tuesday contest, third place behind winner Mike Huckabee and John McCain.
He ended up in third place again this time, but at least a much closer third place: less than a percentage point behind runner-up Gingrich, in fact, as opposed to a twenty-point loss to 2008 runner-up John McCain (Mississippi's primary in 2008 took place months after Romney had suspended his campaign).
And, really, how can you fault Romney for not winning Alabama and Mississippi, of all states the dorky New Englander could lose? His 'gaffe' of saying the southern primaries were an "away game" is a perfect example of journalist Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe as "when a politician tells the truth."
Romney will be in more familiar turf next week on March 20, when voters in Illinois go to the polls and select their choice for Republican primary nominee. Romney is currently the favorite to win there, but given what happened in the south on Tuesday--not to mention previous debacles in Colorado and Ohio, where the vote was humiliatingly close for Romney--I would say Santorum has a decent chance of yanking this one out from under the former governor as well, unless Romney can get his ass up to the Land of Lincoln and make his case without apology, with determination, and with confidence and certainty.
Bless the poor man, he would be a much better president than Santorum or Gingrich (that is only speaking relatively about the three men). Somehow, he just can't get across to the public the authority and determination that voters want from their president. He will have to find a way if he even wants to think about actually becoming president.
About the author: Ian MacIsaac is a staff writer for the Capital City Free Press. He is a history major at Auburn University Montgomery in Montgomery, Alabama and former co-editor of the school newspaper, the AUMnibus.
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