Thursday Night Quarterbacking: Where does the GOP go from here?

Super Tuesday has come and gone, and unsurprisingly everyone is claiming victory. In today’s blog I wanted to revisit my previous post, see how the candidates did and talk about where we go from here.

• Romney did end up winning Ohio in a tight race. This was a huge primary for him, and has established a narrative that he is the only one in the GOP primaries that has a chance of winning the swing states.
• Santorum won Tennessee and Oklahoma by substantial margins, showing the bifurcated nature of the GOP primaries. Romney will win all the moderate to liberal states, Santorum and Gingrich will be left to fight out the conservative states.
• Gingrich won Georgia, and claimed that he will pursue a “southern strategy.” The only logic in this statement is that he’s trying to invoke the memory of Ronald Reagan, but that’s not going to get him anywhere near the 1100+ delegates needed to win the nomination.

So where do we go from here? Well, we’re going to have to keep going a couple more weeks, but I thought what Santorum said about the Ohio loss was maybe the most telling point of the night. He tried to spin his freefall in the Ohio polling by saying that his result wasn’t too bad considering Romney outspent him exponentially. This actually underlines a big problem of Santorum’s going forward, and underlines his issues as a viable opponent for Barack Obama in November.

Barack Obama has talked about trying to raise $1 billion in this next election, and has announced he will take Super PAC support. Republicans aren’t looking at giving out participation trophies in the November election, they’re looking to unseat an incumbent president with an economy that seems ready to at least make a partial rebound before the election. This can’t be done cheaply, and while Gingrich and Santorum keep having to go back to the Super PAC well for their weekly allowance to keep them afloat, Romney and his affiliated groups seem to be the only ones able to manage the full campaign schedule. Whatever the Republicans think about Obama as a president, they’d be foolish to underestimate his abilities as a campaigner. That, combined with the recent mobilization of women’s groups thanks to Rush Limbaugh and the Sandra Fluke debacle, is going to be an uphill struggle for any candidate.

Santorum needed to prove that he can manage a national campaign, and has the staying power to not only get through next week but to get through November and get into the White House. Romney, for all his weaknesses, has met the minimum requirements to run a successful modern campaign. He has the financial support and he has the organization. The one thing the Republicans fear more than electing a relatively moderate, former Massachusetts Governor to the White House is having their candidate concede on the Tuesday night after the first Monday in November by saying “Well we were successful considering we were outspent 10:1 by President Obama. We can be proud of ourselves.” The real prize here is taking back the White House, not showing how well a candidate can do without having things like money, organization, or discipline.