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Mark Halperin set off tremors in the political world last night by reporting via two Republicans that John McCain had settled on Mitt Romney to be his running mate.
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Making matters more confusing, Politico has learned that McCain will visit suburban St. Louis for a major rally with Romney and his still-bitter primary nemesis Mike Huckabee on Sunday, Aug. 31, the day before the start of the GOP convention.
Top Missouri Republicans yesterday received the invitation for a rally featuring McCain and his two top primary challengers. They’ll be joined by country star John Rich at a minor league baseball stadium in O’Fallon, Mo., about 35 miles west of St. Louis.
Missouri was hard-fought territory on Super Tuesday, with each of the three Republicans faring well. So the event would seem to represent a pre-convention unity rally in a swing state where each has a strong following. But Huckabee and Romney can hardly stand one another, and Huckabee has warned twice this month against selecting his once and perhaps future rival.
This gives me another opportunity to explain something that is lost on most people, and certainly something the media won’t explain, as they peddled McCain in the Republican Primary Season. The reason we wound up with McCain as the nominee is for one reason and one reason only: Because the Republicans use a social Darwinist system when handing out delegates for a given state. The winner of a state’s primary or caucus gets all of the delegates.
The inflection points of the Republican campaign earlier this year were New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, especially Florida. In all three contests, McCain beat the second-place finisher by no more than five points, himself drawing no more than 37% of the vote. Yet, McCain gets all the glory, all the delegates, and, since the media were for him all along, all the media attention.
I think McCain won the nomination simply because he won Florida. Florida, IIRC, was the last contest before Super Tuesday. By that time, the media trumpted the fact that he won all the important swing contests that happened before Super Tuesday. Of course, with all that attention, he was going to win the important swing contests on Super Tuesday itself. To wit: The ever-important swing state of Missouri. The results were McCain 33%, Huckabee 32%, Romney 29%. All three of them were bunched closed together, yet, because McCain won, he got all of Missouri’s delegates, and all the media glory.
By the time Super Tuesday was done, McCain was close to the nomination. So the other candidates essentially gave up, with the exception of Ron Paul, who wanted to stay in to garner some high percentages he knew he would get now that the field was essentially him and McCain. Of course, after everyone else but RP gave up, McCain was finally able to start winning states with majorities. But, majority or not, he would have gotten all the delegates.
However, a closer look at the reality was that McCain wasn’t doing as well as the media made it out. For instance, he finished in 3rd place in the Nevada caucuses (a neighboring state for him), behind Romney and Ron Paul. That was a pre-S.T. contest. Also, on S.T., in his own home state of Arizona, McCain didn’t even crack 50%, winning, but beating Romney only by 47% to 34%. The average margin of victory for Presidential candidates in their own home state’s party primary is 50%, and McCain only got a plurality and won by 13%. Obviously, Arizona has a strong Mormon presence, but still, the margin should have been wider.
Plain words, if the Republicans had a proportional delegate distribution system like the Democrats, we would still have a race today, perhaps a brokered convention. The only reason the Democrats don’t have one is that, as Pat Buchanan says, the Democrat Party Superdelegates are spineless wimps, who only settled on Obama after all the primaries were done because he got more delegates than Hillary, even if they weren’t enough by themselves to give Obama the nomination. Barring that, the Democrats would also have a brokered convention.
Considering that McCain, Romney and Huckabee will all be together in the state of Missouri on August 31 is so ironic.
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