Romney's campaign--a postmortem

What was wrong with Romney's campaign? I think commentators have been generally right on in assessing what happened to him. Basically, he was vulnerable because of his record in Massachusetts. He tried to switch to more conservative positions, which made sense tactically, but opened up the vulnerability of coming off as a faker. Voters are loathe to trust their votes to a faker. This vulnerability became a festering open wound with Huckabee's rise. Here was a candidate whose strong point was his seeming genuineness--the polar opposite of Romney.

Jay Cost, the best election blogger out there, was right on when he wrote that Romney's negative attacks hurt him:

How might these negative attacks have hurt Romney? My sense is that it likely kept him from winning over those who supported McCain or Huckabee. That is, at its most basic level, it backfired; not only did it fail to convince Huckabee or McCain voters to back Romney, it alienated those voters from him.

That's exactly right. Supporters of the other candidates got angry about Romney digging the dirt on them, when at the same time he was asking them not to believe the dirt on him in his past record.

Cost has also argued that Huckabee was not taking away votes from Romney, enabling McCain to win. His conclusions go against the inside-outside theory I've held all along, about McCain's coalition being too small to win the nomination. Cost writes:

I do not think one can argue that McCain's wins have been dependent on a divided field. Independents, moderates, and Bush disapprovers have certainly formed the core of McCain's voting coalition. However, McCain has done what most winning candidates do: win his base by large margins while stealing plenty of voters from the other guy's base. McCain does not win conservatives or Bush supporters outright - but he has done well enough with them that he could probably win New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Florida in a head-to-head match up.

While it is difficult argue that a narrower field would turn any of McCain's wins into losses, the fact remains that each race would probably have been tight. Under my assumptions, McCain never would have won more than 54% of the vote - and his victory in South Carolina over Huckabee could have shrunk to a little less than one-half of one percent. So, McCain has been building a voting coalition that can trump the coalitions of other candidates - but not by much.

This analysis is true for what it's worth. But what it ignores is the bloodbath between Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson which ground down all those campaigns, leaving them short of cash, damaged from attacks, and abandoned in two cases. If the Huckster hadn't run, things would have been different for Romney and their kindling-strategy might have worked. Had Romney or Thompson not been in the race at all, or dropped out sooner, the situation would be a lot different for Huckabee now. In six contests since Super Duper Tuesday, McCain has won two by large margins, two by tight margins, and lost two. I predicted bumps in the road based on the inside-outside theory, and it has proven correct.