Huntsman and Audience

Now that Jon Huntsman has declared that he's withdrawing from the race to be the GOP presidential nominee (and has endorsed Mitt Romney), the postmortems have begun.  Many of them focus on Huntsman's seeming difficulty in finding an audience.

David Frum says that there was a disconnect between Huntsman's personality and his program:

Huntsman offered a critique of what has gone wrong in the modern Republican party: too anti-science, too socially conservative, too militarily interventionist, too hostile to expertise.

He did not however offer a unique selling proposition for his own candidacy. Even supposing a Republican primary voter agreed with every point in Huntsman's critique (and surprisingly many do agree)—what then? Huntsman's answer to the party's problems was himself: smart, sophisticated, worldly, pragmatic. But every one of those characteristics is shared with Romney. What Huntsman did not offer was a programmatic alternative. On the contrary, the Huntsman program doubled down on Norquistism: big tax cuts, Ryan plan, etc.

This program created a contrast with Romney, but in the wrong direction: the least ideological Republican candidate now offered the most ideological economic platform. 

Ace instead focuses on how Huntsman seemed to treat the base:

It's difficult to like someone who clearly doesn't like you. While in the past several weeks conservatives, seeking some alternative to Romney, have started to at least entertain the possibility of backing Huntsman, it was all but impossible given Huntsman's frequent obnoxious signaling that he just doesn't like us.

It's not just an emotional thing, either. If a candidate specifically lays down the marker that he doesn't think much of our opinion but cares a great deal about what the editors of Vogue might think, that's a pretty strong sign that he'd govern in such a way to pander to their opinions and against ours.

Federal Judge Denies Perry, Gingrich et al Request for Injunction in Virginia

Rick Perry, joined by Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, and Rick Santorum, filed a lawsuit challenging the ballot requirements of the Republican Party of Virginia.  Currently, only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have fulfilled Virginia's requirements and will be on the March 6 primary ballot.

U.S. District Judge John Gibney (an Obama appointee) has ruled against these campaigns.  The principal reason for Gibney's ruling seems to be the doctrine of laches (when a plaintiff takes an unreasonable amount of time to claim a legal defense of his or her rights).

Gibney seems to suggest that, in his opinion, Virginia's requirement that only those who are eligible to register to vote can circulate petitions for a candidate is an abridgement of the First Amendment.  However, requiring 10,000 signatures with at least 400 signatures from each Congressional district is not an unconstitutional burden.  If the campaigns had filed a lawsuit against this purported abridgement of First Amendment rights earlier (such as in August or September or October), Gibney probably would have ruled this requirement unconstitutional.

However, the candidates did not do that.  As Gibney writes:

They plaintiffs could have challenged the Virginia law at that time. Instead, they waited until after the time to gather petitions had ended and they had lost the political battle to be on the ballot; then, on the eve of the printing of absentee ballots, they decided to challenge Virginia's laws. In essence, they played the game, lost, and then complained that the rules were unfair.

Because they waited so long, Gibney has denied their request for an injunction.

Some other interesting details come out in this.  One is that the Virginia State Board of Elections does not seem to know the exact number of signatures that either Gingrich or Perry got.  However, Perry's camp only admits that it submitted more than 6,000 signatures, and the Board agrees that it was less than 10,000.  Gingrich's camp says it submitted 11,050 signatures, but the Board determined that fewer than 10,000 were valid.  These details seem to suggest no evidence for a RINO establishment conspiracy to keep Perry and Gingrich off the ballot.

Gibney's ruling also notes that Jerry Kilgore, a former Attorney General of Virginia and the Virginia campaign chair for Perry, got over 13,000 valid signatures on a "shoestring budget" in his race for AG in 1997.

We'll have to see whether/how these campaigns appeal this ruling.

Beating Expectations

If someone had predicted a little over a month ago that Romney would have won in both Iowa and New Hampshire, more than a few people would have dismissed that notion as a little delusional.  Yet here we are.  With nearly around 40% of the vote (and a 15+-point margin), Romney cruises to victory in New Hampshire, becoming the first non-incumbent Republican to win both the Iowa and the New Hampshire primaries.  I thought Romney would need at least a 10-point win to maintain his momentum, and it looks like he got it.

Exit poll data shows what a crushing victory this was for Romney.  Among registered Republican voters, he got 48% of the vote, outpacing by over thirty points his nearest rival (Ron Paul at 15%).  Romney's win did not come purely from a coalition of independents and moderate Republicans (though he did win registered independents as well, beating Paul 32-30).  Self-described conservative and very conservative voters overwhelmingly preferred him to other candidates.  Moreover, he won by eighteen points those New Hampshire voters who support the "Tea Party": Granite State "Tea Partiers" have claimed that Romney is their man.  Ironically, Gingrich and Perry's hectoring attacks upon Romney's record in the private sector may help unify conservative support behind Romney.

Ron Paul's second-place finish was fueled by young people, new voters, and independents.  Among registered Republicans, he didn't get above 15%, but independents and Democrats helped lift him to second place.

Jon Huntsman bet it all on New Hampshire and came in at around 17%---and could only get to 10% of registered Republican voters.  Huntsman has said he's staying in, but he's hovering around 2% or 3% in South Carolina, Florida, and nationally.    New Hampshire was the sort of territory most favorable to Huntsman, so those states will be a long march for him.  We'll have to see over the next few days whether his numbers increase or not---if there's a bump, perhaps we could be seeing the beginning of Huntsmentum.

No doubt Team Santorum finds tonight's results a little unpleasant.  But a near-tie with Gingrich for fourth place definitely keeps his campaign viable.  Unlike either Gingrich or Perry, Santorum has performed very strongly in one of the first two key primary battles and respectably in the other.  He goes into South Carolina with some vigor in his step.  Unlike New Hampshire, South Carolina will be a key testing ground for his candidacy.