No true love: GOP electorate still holding out for something better

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On a night in which neither team had rhythm on offense, Sunday’s Super Bowl was won when a running back reluctantly fell into the end zone while trying to run out the clock. Sounds like the GOP primary season so far.

Give the Romney camp some credit. They knew Minnesota and Missouri were heading south and tried to preempt the bad news. Mitt Romney’s political director Rich Beeson sent out a memo Tuesday morning announcing that Romney did not expect to do well tonight and explaining why the results would be meaningless.

Beeson stressed that no delegates were awarded Tuesday. He then jumped forward to Feb. 28 and laid a preemptive claim to victory in both Michigan and Arizona. Both are binding primaries, and Arizona is winner-take-all. After Beeson’s bravado in this memo — and the rough night Romney endured Tuesday — the former governor will be in very bad shape if he does not win both of these.

Looking forward to March, Beeson noted that Romney’s opponents are poorly organized and poorly funded for a race that now turns into a game of whack-a-mole, stretching weaker organizations like Newt Gingrich’s and Rick Santorum’s, both of whom did not even get on the ballot in Virginia. “Gov. Romney is the only candidate prepared to compete in simultaneous contests across the country,” Beeson asserted.

Beeson’s emphasis on the big picture helped cloak an acknowledged weakness in the March 6 southern primaries in Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi — states which Gingrich has staked out to stay alive. But according to Beeson the rules in these states make it hard to “take large delegate prizes” and the likelihood will be a split among “multiple candidates.”

Looking outside that Southern grouping, however, Gingrich will also have to tackle a pile of Western, Midwestern, and Eastern states. Beeson predicted Gingrich and Santorum will lose on Feb. 28 and “their hopes for a comeback in March may be very difficult and based on an incomplete understanding of the delegate selection rules. Even ‘success’ in a few states will not mean collecting enough delegates to win the nomination.”

Yet Beeson’s memo had an air of protesting too much. If these nonbinding contests meant so little, and Romney is so confident despite the results, why try so hard to guide the narrative?