Today’s Reading List – September 14, 2007
About South Carolina…
David Broder looks and says:
No Republican in the modern era of contested nominations has won both of these early states, [ed note: IA, NH] and the plausible belief in the Romney camp is that his doing so would have the effect of vaulting him into the lead nationally. As of now, those contests will be followed by Michigan, where Romney spent his boyhood and the Romney name is familiar, thanks to his father's service as governor. Then come South Carolina, where Romney's challenge is simply to exceed low expectations, and Florida, which in the Romney calculus could be decisive in setting the table for the Feb. 5 super-primary. [emphasis added]
Lowell: This seems obvious to me. It apparently is not obvious to those who keep yammering on about national polls.
But Reid Wilson at OpinionJournal's Political Diary (subscription required) says:
But South Carolina is a precedent of its own: The state has never failed to go to the candidate who eventually wins the Republican nomination. If that trend holds, look for the Republican nomination to be fought out between Mr. Giuliani and former Senator Fred Thompson, who remain statistically tied for the lead with just over 20% of the vote each. Mitt Romney places a distant fourth, hovering around the double-digit mark, in a state where his Mormon faith is looked upon skeptically by some evangelical Christians.
OK, facts, Romney is polling worse in SC than other early states. Evangelicals are a larger presence in SC than elsewhere, but that does not necessarily mean that those two facts are directly connected. (It is the whole correlation/causation thing in statistical studies.) Thompson, because of his southern roots, would have a huge advantage there, regardless of religion. But what I really hate is that every time this, or something like it, gets written it implies that SC Evangelicals are religious bigots. Some undoubtedly are, but in the end I doubt it is enough to carry the day.
Lowell: My own guess (and that's all it is) is that Evangelical misgivings about Romney's Mormonism are in the mix, but suspicion about his true conservatism and his "Yankee-ness" are there too. How much of each is involved is impossible to tell. What matters, I think, is that all of those can be overcome. The religion hangup may be the first to go.
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