Plenty has and will continue to be written about John McCain's problems with movement conservatives and the heart of the Republican base. There's plenty more to talk about, and we'll continue to pop popcorn and watch the Republican party fight multiple wars, such as movement conservatives vs pragmatists, economic and anti-tax conservatives vs social conservatives, neocon imperialists vs paleocon isolationists, and pro-corporate lovers of cheap labor vs nativists who want to deport 15 million illegal workers. But today, the day after Super Tuesday, let's look at some election results that indicate just how weak a hold likely Republican nominee has over his own party's base.
McCain has garnered more than 37% of the vote in only 8 of the 29 states. If you take out Arizona—where he only managed to get 47%, compared to the home-state totals of 64% for Obama, 60% for Huckabee, 57% for Clinton (plus 69% in AR) and 51% for Romney—the only place where McCain has gotten more than 37% of the vote are states that have voted Democratic in presidential elections going back at least to 1992—CA, CT, DE, IL, MA, NJ and NY.
Of course, even for the Republicans with their winner-take-all allocation of delegates (which in some places award delegates by statewide totals, while in others delegates are awarded by Congressional district), it's the delegate count that matters. If we assume that the Republican's geographic base is in those states where they've consistently won electoral votes and the swing states that have been contested by tipped to the Republicans, we see further weakness for McCain in the delegate counts.
The Republicans contested 21 states yesterday. According to the figures at Real Clear Politics, there were 826 delegates up for grabs. John McCain had a big day, winning (according to RCC's calculations) 511 of those delegates. But look where he won them. If we count AR, CO, MO and WV as swing states, there were 380 delegates available in the Democratic states, 345 in the Republican states, and 136 in the swing states. Because of his narrow win in MO, McCain ended up with 43% of the delegates from swing states. Huckabee got 40%, and Romney the remaining 17%. In the Republican states, they split very evenly. McCain and Huckabee each took 37% of the delegates from Republican states, with Romney not far behind with 26%.
Where McCain racked up his huge delegate lead was in the Democratic states. 326 of the 380 delegates from solid Democratic states--86%--went to McCain. Romney snagged the remaining 14%.
Romney's delegates came from states across the spectrum of Republican to Democratic. 32% of his delegates came from Democratic states. 54% of his delegates are from Republican states, and the remaining 14% are from swing states.
Huckabee won two swing states, his home state of AR and, with the caucus help of the McCain forces, WV. Those 44% account for 25% of his total. The remaning 75% of his delegates come from reliably Republican states in the South.
McCain is in command of the delegate race because a disproportionate number of his delegates come from states he has almost no hope of winning in November. Thanks to his very narrow win in MO, 11% of his delegates come from swing states. 25% of his delegates are from Republican states (with close to half of those delegates coming from his home state). But 64% of the delegates McCain picked up yesterday are from Democratic states.
It seems apparent that Huckabee is killing Romney's chances (and probably vice versa). There's been plenty of chatter from reporters that all of the Republican candidates hate--really hate--Mittens. It appears that Huckabee is doing a blocking move to keep Romney from getting the nomination. The problem for Republicans is that the beneficiary of Huckabee's maneuvers is someone the Republican base doesn't much like.
A quick glance at who's winning our primaries and caucuses shows a competitive race across the board. Hillary Clinton won some big Democratic states like CA, MA and NJ. But Barack Obama also won some solidly Democratic states like CT, DE and MN. They fought close battles in battleground states like MO and NM. And they both posted big wins in solidly Republican states like AL and OK.
A comparable scenario on our side would be a three-way race where two candidates beat each other in the battles for IL and NY, NJ and CT, MN and MA, while a third candidate wins the nomination by getting huge numbers of delegates from AL and AK, ID and KS, ND and OK. The Democratic base probably wouldn't be likely to embrace a candidate who couldn't ever get more than 37% of the vote in states with large numbers of Democrats. So it's not surprising the Republican base is unhappy that their nominee is likely to be a guy who can't win in any states with a lot of Republicans that the GOP has any chance of winning in a competitive election.