Ezra Klein on last night's Iowa caucuses.
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Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Ezra Klein's Wonkbook
Four years ago, Mitt Romney won 30,021 votes in the Iowa caucuses. In the 2008 field, that was only good enough for second place, and he went on to lose New Hampshire to Sen. John McCain. Last night, Romney won 30,015 votes in the Iowa caucuses. His total barely budged. But this time, it was good enough: Willard Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucuses, and later today, he's being endorsed by Sen. John McCain.
But boy, was it close. Romney edged out Rick Santorum by eight votes. For comparison's sake, Buddy Roemer got 49 votes. Which makes this something less than a resounding victory for either Romney or Santorum. Romney didn't improve on his vote total from 2008. Santorum didn't win in the state where he had spent virtually all of his time over the last year. Which means Romney still hasn't broken through with Republican voters, but Republican voters, at least in Iowa, have not found an anti-Romney they like better.
The oft-made comparison is to Iowa's 2004 caucuses, where Democrats famously "dated Dean, married Kerry". But Kerry's win that year was actually pretty resounding: 38 percent of caucusgoers, compared to Dean's 18 percent. Romney's vote total shows considerably less enthusiasm. Republicans dated Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Paul and Santorum, but they settled for Romney.
And they're likely to continue settling for Romney. It's possible there will be some upsets along the way, of course. But it's hard to see any other candidate really making a run at the nomination. Republicans are likely to end up with Romney as their nominee. The guy who was next-in-line is now first-in-line.
That, however, will come with some headaches. Romney has arguably been the frontrunner through the entire election. But he's never gotten the sort of scrutiny a frontrunner tends to attract. Rather, the media coverage has tended to swarm the succession of shiny, new, and very controversial not-Romneys. As Time's Adam Sorensen tweeted when Gingrich was in the lead, "It's like how Earth is protected from mass extinctions by Jupiter's huge asteroid-attracting mass. Newt is Jupiter."
Soon enough, it's just going to be Romney out there. And he's going to start getting hammered with questions about why he won't release his tax returns and where exactly his claim to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital comes from and why, when he was at Bain, he fired this nice-seeming guy being interviewed on the television.
That's the odd thing about Romney's campaign thus far: he's managed to be the frontrunner without really being treated like the frontrunner. Someone else -- someone more interesting, someone who sold more papers and made for better cable news segments -- always had the momentum, and so there was always an excuse to cover them. But whatever Santorum is, he's not Jupiter. At this point, there is no Jupiter. Or, perhaps more precisely, Romney is Jupiter. And he's about to get hit with a lot of asteroids. |
