If you watch as much news as I do, you’ve probably heard that question at least a couple hundred times by now. Whether it’s coming from a host asking their panel of pundits, or from a Santorum or Gingrich supporter trying to play up perceptions of Romney’s weakness, you hear it incessantly.
The conventional wisdom is fairly blunt: if Romney were a good candidate, he’d have won the nomination by now. Even John McCain had won before Super Tuesday. Romney can’t, so he’s weak.
In this situation, the conventional wisdom sounds a lot like Ann Coulter’s definition of Newt Gingrich – it sounds great until you think about it for a few seconds.
The real answer as to why Romney hasn’t won the nomination outright is simple: the new RNC primary rules make that almost impossible this early. And that’s by design, not chance.
Remember the crazy 2008 nominating schedule? Many state party organizations were jockeying for earlier primaries and caucuses to make their state a player in the nomination process. The result was a heavily front-loaded process that favored candidates with high name ID and a lot of money over those who needed to build a national reputation.
The rest was the nomination of John McCain, who many in the party didn’t want and who was viewed as being too moderate and wrong on many issues. And with his loss to Barack Obama, the desire of many in the party was to draw out the nominating process in the hopes of making it more fair and less top-heavy. Most people didn’t like how quickly after the first four contests the race was effectively over, so the RNC looked a variety of rule changes to draw out the process.
The result? A change to the RNC nominating rules that required any state allocating delegates in a primary or caucus before April 1 do so proportionally. This was a major change. The day after Super Tuesday in 2008, John McCain had 680 pledged delegates – over half the necessary number to win him in the nomination, and neither Romney nor Huckabee had any realistic chance of catching up. This is because many of the early contests, including major ones like Florida, were winner-take-all. Today, even in late March, Romney trails McCain’s mid-February numbers by almost 200 delegates.
The fact is, after 2008, we wanted a longer process that allowed more time for vetting and gave more states a role to play. We wanted to make it harder to win, under the belief that a tougher primary made for a tougher candidate. We wanted the process to take a while. And it is taking a while.
Is this because Romney is weak? Nope. The rules themselves ensure that this process will last far longer than past presidential primaries.
That certainly hasn’t stopped everyone from saying it, though. The same people who complained that McCain wasn’t conservative enough and were pushing Romney as the conservative alternative are some of the same people saying Romney isn’t conservative enough (like Rick Santorum). Yet few, if any, are pointing out that the real reason this race is dragging on is by design, rather than because of any particular candidate’s weakness.
Romney is a strong candidate and will be our nominee. And whether it takes until June or August, he still represents our best chance to defeat Barack Obama in November.
