Townhall.com The Blogspot for Political, Conservative and Republican Blogs and Bloggers

In light of John McCain’s success, James Joyner wonders:

Perhaps “conservatives” are now a minority, even among Republican primary voters? If so, given that there are virtually no conservatives remaining in the Democratic Party these days and that voters who aren’t aligned with either party are almost by definition non-ideological, that would mean that conservatives are a small minority, indeed, among the American electorate.

Alternatively, perhaps the definition of “conservative” has become so narrow and esoteric that it’s become virtually meaningless?

Here is what bothers me about talk of an “inevitable” conservative “consolidation” around Romney.

Some assume that because conservatives are the largest bloc of GOP voters, their preferred candidate (Romney) ought to win. And that if he doesn’t, this large bloc has slipped into minority status and/or irrelevance. This analysis is fundamentally flawed.

It doesn’t just matter who you win, but how much you win them by. A 15-point lead with conservatives doesn’t do you much good if McCain’s lead amongst the smaller moderate bloc is 30 points. A McCain victory wouldn’t mean that moderates dominate the GOP; it would mean that for whatever reason conservatives didn’t think Mitt Romney was the second coming of Ronald Reagan and were divided.

Isn’t this the same analysis we saw pre-South Carolina? That Obama would win blacks and Hillary would win whites? And that this would be a winning situation for her on February 5th?

Instead, what we’re seeing is that Obama is utterly dominating amongst African Americans and Hillary is barely making up for it with tepid leads amongst whites and Latinos.

Having the biggest bloc is no guarantee of victory. You need to tend to it or else big leads with target groups shrink to small leads. The conservative establishment has taken a lot for granted since late December. They watched McCain win New Hampshire, and waited for South Carolina. They watched McCain win South Carolina, and waited for Florida. They then watched McCain win Florida, and switched into panic mode. In effect, they followed in the electoral footsteps of Rudy Giuliani’s wait-and-hope strategy.

For a long time, I was like most conservatives. I didn’t think John McCain could win. As soon as that assessment changed mid- to late-December, my blogging honed in on McCain. At the time, most of the ’sphere remained obsessed with taking out the niche candidacy of Mike Huckabee. Of the big conservative pundits, I think only Hugh Hewitt and Mark Levin focused on McCain over Huckabee — and even then, there was a fair amount of Huckabashing.

Six weeks later, here we are, with the hated Mike Huckabee with the same shot he had months ago (little to none), but fighting a desperate rearguard action against McCain with less than a week to execute. Sorry folks, but it’s probably too little too late.

The conventional wisdom about moderates like McCain and Giuliani in the GOP primary process is wrong. It’s not necessarily harder for a moderate to win the primary than the general election. Remember that in primary, you only need a plurality of Republicans, including big majorities of moderates, independents, and crossover Democrats, and a minority — perhaps as small as 20% — of conservatives. Blue states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut which the GOP nominee usually writes off in the Electoral College have an outsized say in the nomination process because of winner-take-all (or winner-take-all-by-district) rules. General elections are fought between the 40 yard lines. Primaries are fought over the whole field, with a greater chance of sudden shifts and surprising outcomes.

McCain would have a higher bar to clear in the general than in the primary. In the general, he’d need the enthusiastic support of 95% of conservatives, and every single conservative voter who threatens to stay home is a threat to his electability. In the primary, the bar is set quite low. All he needs now is 30-40%. What we are seeing now is the usual consolidation we see around establishment Republican frontrunners, except at 75-80% strength. So instead of winning 50-20 he’d win 40-30.

My assessment of the unmitigated failure of attacking Huckabee from the other day still stands. If you wanted Romney to be the nominee, you needed to be attacking McCain early and not in the usual ways. You needed to allow for six weeks for a narrative to develop. Huckabee posed a short-term tactical threat to Romney in Iowa; though he hurt Romney, he had no chance of winning the nomination. McCain posed a strategic threat starting in New Hampshire, as evidenced by the floodgates that were opened by that first win. He didn’t hurt Romney so much as he cleared the field of acceptable alternatives for the less partisan rank-and-file.