Mitt Romney’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad night on Tuesday was especially awful in Minnesota — where he didn’t just lose to Rick Santorum, but came in a distant third behind both Santorum and Ron Paul.
Moreover, this was a contest that Romney won back in 2008, when he had become the alternative for conservative voters who didn’t like establishment frontrunner John McCain. Romney took that contest by a 41%-22% margin. But this time, Romney got less than one-third the number of raw votes as he did before, with overall caucus turnout declining.
So how did this happen? A deep-seated dissatisfaction among conservative base voters — and a state whose system is ideally suited to make that dissatisfaction heard.
Unlike other states, caucuses in Minnesota are not a quadrennial occurrence. In fact, they go on every single election cycle, for offices ranging from city councils up to Congress.
As such, the party bases in these states remain much more tuned-in and active, compared to other caucus states — but also still far more exclusive and ideologically oriented than a primary state.
And with Santorum hammering the message that Romney is the true creator of “Obamacare,” from his Massachusetts health care reform, and slamming Romney on other issues, Minnesota proved very worth his time and investment.
The Star Tribune encountered one lonely Romney supporter, who used perhaps only a slight amount of hyperbole to describe the problem he was facing that night:
“I’m probably going to be the only Mitt guy,” said Meyers, the chair for the House District 50B Republicans. “For a lot of people, he’s not conservative enough.”
Meyers said he has had trouble convincing Republican friends that Romney, unlike the other Republican presidential candidates, may be the most electable of the candidates. “It’s not resonating right now, for me, with my circle of people,” he said.
The Pioneer Press also points out that this night was especially embarrassing for the state Republican establishment, which was backing Romney — including former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who ran for president last year, then dropped out of the race and began campaigning heavily for Romney:
His poor showing also was a political black eye for former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Romney’s national co-chairman who failed to deliver his homestate Republicans. It also may dampen the influence of former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, House Speaker Kurt Zellers and the rest of the state party establishment that backed the former Massachusetts governor.
And not only that, but the Star Tribune reports that Pawlenty wasn’t even in the state to vote last night — he was in Kansas. Finally, this was Pawlenty’s second failure to deliver his state caucuses — in 2008, he was a major endorser of John McCain, who lost the caucuses to Romney.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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