The prolonged Republican presidential contest is causing some anxiety for supporters of Mitt Romney, but they have chosen to stoically endure it, arguing that Romney’s nomination is inevitable and that it’s best for the party to have a battle-tested contender for the main event this fall.
Assuming Romney outlasts his three rivals, the question that can’t be definitively answered until next fall is whether the Republican war of attrition will have made Romney a more appealing or less appealing candidate against President Obama in battleground states such as Virginia and Wisconsin.
The 20 televised GOP candidate debates have given Romney “a good sense of how other people would come after him and what responses work well and which ones don’t,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, whose firm did polling for Jon Huntsman who has withdrawn from the race. “So in that sense he’s farther down the road to being a strong national candidate than he was in January”
Ayres said Romney has “obviously suffered some increase in his negatives as a result of the primary campaign – particularly among independents but they will re-evaluate after the conventions and I feel very confident should Romney be the nominee, he’ll be able to do very well among independents.” That’s partly because, Ayres said, “independents are disgusted with the president and his record on the economy and on fiscal responsibility.”
If Romney he doesn’t win Ohio’s primary on Tuesday – the most critical contest in the multi-state Super Tuesday lineup -- Romney ally Sen. Rob Portman, R- Ohio, said, “I think he still will be the nominee. He is not winning in Ohio right now,” according to polls showing Romney trailing former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.
Portman pointed out that in Ohio Romney “will get a lot of delegates no matter what, because it’s a proportional state and in fact Sen. Santorum is not on the ballot for district delegates in three of the 16 congressional districts. You’ll see Gov. Romney maybe even get a majority of the delegates even if the popular vote doesn’t go his way.”
But the weeks of advertising and attacks on Romney over his support for Massachusetts health insurance mandate and other vulnerable points, have led Romney supporter Sen. John McCain of Arizona to worry about the toll that the campaign is taking.
“This primary has turned into mud wrestling and has driven the unfavorables up of these candidates and has been very harmful,” he said Thursday.
McCain said this isn’t what happened when he ran against Bush the for 2000 nomination. “We had a couple of spirited debates… but nothing like this,” he said. He called the current Republican battle “very harmful in the long run to our chances of defeating President Obama.”
Portman voiced similar sentiments: “To the extent Republicans are attacking each other, some voters, particularly independent voters, are beginning to form an opinion. And so we need to be careful.”
He said, “It is time for us to begin to coalesce and to talk more about what our proposals are and what the Democrat administration is doing wrong, rather than attacking each other.”
Freshman Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has not endorsed any of the GOP candidates, said that Republicans’ economic message was sometimes drowned out by issues such as the conscience waiver for religious-affiliated employers that object to being forced to cover contraceptive coverage through their insurance plans.
The GOP candidates need to keep focusing on the economy, entitlement reform, and the $15 trillion in national debt, he said.
“We are bankrupting this nation and our economy is almost in a coma and we need to start creating jobs -- those are the number one issues I think the candidates should be highlighting,” Johnson said.
He said the GOP candidates probably are highlighting those issues when they’re out talking to voters, “but let’s face it, they don’t control what the press covers. So the press coverage is centered on some of these corollary issues,” he said. Asked which issues were “corollary,” Johnson said, “Let’s face it -- the conscience clause – this is not about contraception, but that’s the way the press paints this religious freedom argument, and the candidates are forced to respond to some questions. I’m sure they would probably pivot to getting back on point” and talk about deficit reduction and economic issues, he said.
“But again we don’t control the media,” Johnson said. “And it is kind of hard sometimes to totally control the message.”
Message control -- “getting back on point,” as Johnson calls it -- is an essential candidate skill.
Santorum went off message, or at least created self-damaging distraction, when he called the president a “snob” for his education message and said reading John Kennedy 1960 speech on separation of church and state made him want to “throw up.”
And it was Romney’s unforced error this week on whether he supported the amendment giving a conscience exemption to contraception coverage that caused some Republicans to worry anew about his competence as a candidate. No matter the outcome in Tuesday’s contests in Ohio and other states, Romney will confront those lingering doubts.
