NY Times Editorial
Divided on the Right
Published: March 14, 2012
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed implausible that the Republican nomination fight would not be resolved by the August convention. But Rick Santorum’s primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday make that a real, if still distant, possibility. If the convention becomes as disorderly as the primaries, it will reflect a party consumed by anger and frustration, led around by its most extreme base, and lacking any sense of forward direction.
Mitt Romney still has the most delegates and the clearest path to the nomination, but he is so unpopular that his opponents could gather enough delegates to block him. In state after state, he has been repudiated by voters seeking a more boisterous and convincing conservative. In virtually all of the competitive contests so far — particularly in the heart of the South, the Republican stronghold — more people have voted against him than for him.
Most public opinion polls show that Mr. Romney would have the best chance against President Obama in November, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the party’s zealots. In Alabama and Mississippi, fewer than 40 percent of the primary voters on Tuesday said defeating Mr. Obama was the most important quality in a candidate. Many people who voted for Mr. Santorum or Newt Gingrich said Mr. Romney had a better chance of winning.
What was important to them? More than 70 percent of voters in the two states said it was important that a candidate shared their religious beliefs. Mr. Santorum won with the votes of those who said it was most important that their candidate be a true conservative, or have a strong moral character. Those numbers suggest that many Republicans would rather drive into a political ditch than temper their extreme ideology to defeat Mr. Obama.
It’s not just voters, however, who have divided their party and pushed it to the margins. Republican officials constructed this year’s primary and caucus schedule so that it would not be settled early, hoping to build enthusiasm. States with early primaries were forced to distribute delegates on a proportional basis, rather than winner-take-all, and they were penalized if they tried to move up in the calendar.
The strategy might have worked with candidates who could inspire a broader range of Republican primary voters. Republican elders, however, hadn’t figured on a party so utterly divided that an elongated season would increase internal animosity and deplete resources.
And they hadn’t foreseen that a prolonged exposure to vapid, wacky or outright dangerous ideas would start to repel the swing voters needed by the party in November. The longer this field has talked about birth control, or protected the low tax rates for the rich, the better Democrats have done in the polls.
Mr. Romney will probably get enough delegates to win the nomination; at the moment, he is being helped by Mr. Gingrich, whose titanic ego prevents him from throwing his support to Mr. Santorum. But if Mr. Romney’s platform remains solely a promise to substitute his business experience for Mr. Obama, he will guarantee his party an uninspired crawl to the convention, and beyond.
NYTimes.com
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