Researching my article for this week over at t2P on Mitt Romney's claims of a mandate, I didn't find one.
In fact, the numbers suggest that the Romney campaign is looking into the mediocrity well of stay-home partisans that make John Kerry's lackluster Democratic bid against George W.Bush look positively stellar.
The Republicans have been spending millions in these primary contests as much to create the anti-Obama wave that they need as they have in getting a specific candidate elected.
If the numbers that a gentleman on Twitter, Michael Li posted for the cost per vote in Iowa are correct, Romney is going to bleed badly needed general election capital as long as the others hold on.
• Perry spent a whopping $817.00 per voter.
• Paul popped $227.00 per voter.
• Gingrich grubstaked $139.00 per voter.
• Romney spent $113.07 per voter.
• Bachmann blew $8.00 per voter.
• Santorum got the most bias for the buck. He spent $1.65 directly in Iowa, and the Super Pac money dropped into the final week of his campaign pushed up his total to around $3.10. [1]New Hampshire was not a strategic battle ground. Romney has been there since 2008 building up an iron-clad system to take the state, and he spent more money there than any other candidate.
The Granite State has a much more mild and moderate GOP base. Only 22% of registered Republicans there call themselves evangelicals.
So the radical Right is going to take the fight to Mitt in South Carolina. They can spend lots of Super PAC money on Santorum and mobilize both the huge numbers of Christian evangelicals and the 50+ Tea Party groups in the state to come out against him.
If they come out.
According to the Pocono Record:
"Iowa's Republican Governor Terry Branstad predicted a higher turnout, saying on FOX News a figure of around 130,000-140,000 "could be possible."
The actual number was just slightly above 2008 levels, when Republicans didn't turn out in droves either in the face of the wildly popular Clinton-Obama primary.
Jason Linkins over at HuffPo nailed Iowa:
The numbers tell the story: of the 2,250,423 voters in the state (using the higher voting-eligible population), only 147,255 came out last night. And of those, only 122,255 voted in the Republican contest, for a turnout percentage of 5.4 percent. And if any of the hype about Democrats, Occupiers, Anarchists, interlopers, and stray ACORN activists (those that haven't been secreted off to Bagram Air Force Base for indefinite detention) -- all voting on the GOP side to gum up the works -- is true, it's possible that there was an even smaller percentage of sincere GOP voters.
The news in New Hampshire wasn't much better. 247,223 of the state's 1,034,045 eligible voters of which 767,383 are registered, turned out. [1] Of them 97,600 or 9.4% of the eligible voters turned out for Romney after years of campaigning and a massive, professionally run organization working the state.
Modest for a Republican primary, but devastating for the Romney campaign's general election hopes because Independents who count at 312,621 roughly 41 percent of the total registered voting population, were eligible to vote.
Virtually none of them showed up.
This, in Romney's "safe" state.
The news in South Carolina is apt to not be pretty, although Romney will probably squeak by with a win.
What has not happened, with all of those millions, and hours of anti-Obama propaganda, though, is that the vast, moderate middle of the electorate has not jumped on the GOP bandwagon.
The debt ceiling debacle, added to the well-known woes of the George W. Bush years, along with a slowly healing economy, are headwinds that Mr. Romney, whose Mormon religious affiliation and corporate insider standing, both huge liabilities with the party faithful, seems to be keeping people home, rather than at the polls voting Mr. Obama out.
Mr. Romney can win the nomination. He will not get the mandate.
My shiny two.