Mitt Romney's inspiring message to Rick Santorum: Resistance is futile
Mitt Romney
responds to the Rick Santorum campaign's
new memo outlining how Santorum could win the Republican nomination:
“Everybody has a scenario where they could become the nominee -- that’s fine, but we have a primary process and so far we have two, two and half times as many delegates as he has; millions of more votes than he has,” Romney told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. “That’s the nature of the political process. If he is able to pull off a miracle, then so be it.”
Maybe Mitt Romney is right and Rick Santorum needs a miracle, but if that's true, it's not because Mitt Romney has "millions of more votes" than Santorum ... because he doesn't. I just added up all votes cast for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, and Romney has gotten 3.265 million votes to Santorum's 2.113 million. That's a difference of less than 1.2 million votes, and if you took away Virginia—where Rick Santorum wasn't allowed on the ballot—it's less than one million.
As far as the delegate count, the current counts are merely estimates. And it's true that based on those estimates, Romney has a little more than twice as many delegates as Santorum. (But not "two and half times" as many, as Romney claimed.) But it's worth pointing that that while Romney got more than six times as many delegates than Santorum in January, since then he's only gotten 1.75 times as many delegates as Santorum.
Obviously, Romney would be pleased with getting 1.75 delegates for every delegate Santorum gets, but if you look at the popular vote, things are much closer. Taking Virginia out of the equation, Mitt Romney has only won 37.5 percent of votes cast compared with 31.9 percent for Rick Santorum and 18.7 percent for Newt Gingrich.
If things don't change, that's enough for Mitt Romney to win the nomination, but it's hardly a commanding lead. And if Gingrich fades much more than he already has, it's entirely plausible that Santorum would close the gap with Romney.
So Rick Santorum might need a miracle to catch up with Mitt Romney, but he won't need a miracle to outperform Romney in the remaining contests. And if that happens—if Romney loses the "second half"—he's going to find himself in an even more uncomfortable spot than he already is.