Romney needs this one

Michigan's voting is today, and the conventional wisdom is that Romney disparately needs a win. I'm going to go ahead and echo the conventional wisdom. If Romney finishes second, that really, objectively, shouldn't be the end of his campaign. He'll have finished second in three contests back to back, and have won Wyoming. He should still be in it with a strong chance to win. The problem is the media pundits will all be sounding his death knell, and this is going to impact South Carolina and Florida. Romney says he'll continue in SC. Perhaps he'll just want to spite the Huckabee campaign, and campaign against him in SC. But there's no way he'll win in SC if he loses Michigan. He's 3rd at 16% right now. He needs Michigan badly. The problem is, he's running as the authentic conservative candidate in an open-primary state that doesn't have a Democratic contest. Advantage: McCain. The polls are too close to call between the two.

An interesting sidenote: Democrats in Michigan might be trying to sabotage the Republican race by voting for the weakest candidate. Who would they choose? Probably Huckabee.

From the Miami Herald:

''In 2000 when McCain won Michigan, the pundits didn't give it that much credibility because it was an open primary, and this one is even more open,'' Johnson said, noting that Hillary Clinton is the only leading Democrat on the ballot. That's because Michigan, like Florida, was stripped of its delegates for moving up its primary, and most of the Democrats pulled their names off the ballot there.

Rival camps, however, suggest that Romney's political obituary will be written if he loses Michigan, the state where he was born and his father was governor.