Salon: Four Ways to Go for Republicans after S.C.
Steve Kornacki enumerates the possibilities...
1. Mitt rights the ship: Romney did his best to project confidence and steadiness in his concession speech. What he seems to be counting on is that the GOP’s opinion-shaping class will respond to Gingrich’s win Saturday night the same way it responded to his surge in early December: with panic.
Much has been made of the role the pro-Romney super PAC played in undermining Gingrich last month, and for good reason. But his poll numbers didn’t just collapse in Iowa, where the ads aired; they fell everywhere. That points to the role played by many of the right’s leading voices, commentators, activists and elected officials who remember with horror Gingrich’s run as House speaker in the 1990s and who used their platforms to lash out against him. Their warnings trickled down to rank-and-file Republicans, who began to get cold feet. That basic pattern, in fact, has played out multiple times during the GOP campaign, with nervous party elites helping to beat back surges from candidates they saw as unfit for the nomination. Romney clearly hopes the elites – and his super PAC buddies – will do some dirty work for him again now, arresting Gingrich’s post-South Carolina momentum and leaving Romney in position to score a Florida victory that would silence the doubts about his viability.
2. Newt supplants Mitt: On the strength of victories in Iowa* and New Hampshire that really weren’t that impressive, Romney’s national support practically doubled and he opened large leads in South Carolina and Florida. In the wake of South Carolina, though, he’ll experience the flip side of this, with his numbers tanking, just as Gingrich’s rise. So it can’t be ruled out that Gingrich will roll his sudden momentum into Florida, capitalize on the state’s Tea Party-friendliness, and engineer an equally impressive follow-up triumph – one that might lift Gingrich into a clear lead nationally and in the next wave of states.
3. The long slog: Or maybe the Florida result won’t prove much at all. The scenario is that South Carolina firmly establishes the GOP contest as a two-man race, with the Tea Party wing of the party largely uniting around Gingrich and everyone else siding with Romney. The two men would then trade wins and losses through a drawn-out, virtually momentum-less primary season – one reminiscent of Hillary/Obama 2008, Hart/Mondale 1984 and Reagan/Ford 1976. The wild card in this would be Ron Paul, whose strategy of targeting small and midsize February caucus states and gobbling up their delegates could make him much more relevant to the race than he’s been.
4. The chaos theory: This is the really fun one, and the least likely. But after Saturday night, it at least warrants a mention. The basics: What if Romney suffers such a bad loss in Florida that his campaign melts down completely and elite Republicans lose confidence in his ability to stop Gingrich? If they really are committed to stopping the former speaker, these elites would then be in need of a Plan B, leading to the “white knight” scenario – a new candidate drafted into the race who could qualify for the late big-state primaries and to prevent Gingrich from racking up the delegates he’d need for a first ballot nomination. There are many reasons to sniff at this possibility, not the least of which is that it’s unclear if the GOP has any candidate on the sidelines who’d be capable of this. But if Mitt can’t get the job done in Florida, expect to hear it mentioned a lot.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/22/the_gop%E2%80%99s_south_carolina_nightmare/singleton/
I would posit another scenario.....
5. We got nuthin': The Republican Party realizes that its 2012 crop is all chaff and no wheat, let's Ron Paul have the nomination, realizing that Obama's reelection is a mortal lock, then uses its campaign funds for a three-year sabbatical to North Korea in order to learn how to be less tolerant.
= new reply since forum marked as read
