If you have to explain why you can still win, you're losing (Chris Keane/Reuters)
If Newt Gingrich pulls off a miracle in Florida—or even if he beats expectations and comes close to victory, as
a new poll indicates might be possible—it's easy to see why he'd continue on. But even if he takes the
anticipated shellacking, Gingrich is
vowing to continue forward.
Gingrich's basic argument: that even after Florida, less than 10 percent of delegates will have been selected, and that going forward, the prevalence of proportional allocation methods in the remaining states will make it impossible for Romney to secure the nomination anytime soon. As he said yesterday on ABC's This Week:
But the fact is, this race is going to go on. The conservatives clearly are rejecting Romney. He is nowhere near getting a majority. And the fact is, once you get beyond Florida, these are all proportional representation states, and he's not going to be anywhere near a majority by April.
And so this is going to go on all the way to the convention.
Who knows whether or not Newt is telling the truth when he vows to continue his campaign at least until April, but his claim about delegate math is accurate, though it might not mean much. Based on the primary calendar and delegate allocation guide from thegreenpapers.com, as of March 31, only 50.2% of Republican delegates will have been selected. Thanks to new Republican Party rules, except for the first four states, all of those contests must have some sort of proportional allocation. That means Romney's best case scenario is probably being three-fifths to two-thirds of the way towards the delegates he needs.
That being said, if Romney has three-fifths to two-thirds of what he needs by the end of March, he'll have a nearly absolute lock on the nomination. Although proportional allocation rules won't be required after April 1, nearly two-thirds of the delegates available after that point will be awarded using proportional allocation. That means if Romney builds a big lead early, he'd have to utterly crater (probably to something below 20% in most of the remaining states) to fail to get the delegates he needs.
The bottom-line—and there's not really going to be a way for Newt to spin this otherwise—is that in order to beat Romney, he's going to need to beat him. It might feel good for him to blame Rick Santorum for having divided conservatives, but Mitt Romney's strategy has always been to divide and conquer. And if Newt can't stop that strategy ... it's known as losing. In other words, the only real way to win ... is to win. But if Newt wants to keep bashing Mitt Romney even after he's effectively lost the nomination, more power to him.