RALEIGH – Here’s what happened Tuesday, according to the exit polls: three-quarters of conservative Republicans voted against John McCain. And he won the Florida primary anyway.
It’s not that conservatives are a minority among Florida Republicans. They made up nearly two-thirds of the GOP primary electorate. But because their votes were split among the four major candidates – 37 percent for Mitt Romney, 27 percent for McCain, 18 percent for Mike Huckabee, and 14 percent for Rudy Giuliani – McCain’s solid showing among moderates give him a plurality of the total vote, though hardly an impressive one.
Remember when Giuliani was the talk of the Republican presidential contest? It wasn’t so long ago, and it’s worth recalling that in addition to winning the “pundit primary,” the mayor had a real strategy for winning the GOP nomination despite being out of step with a key voting group, social conservatives. It was to count on Romney, Huckabee, and Fred Thompson to split the conservative vote in the early states, eliminating the possibility of a momentum candidate and allowing Giuliani to win the biggest January prize, Florida, and thus bounce most of the Super-Duper Tuesday pinballs into his slot, winning the game.
Rudy’s strategy succeeded – but he didn’t. The scenario still required the moderate protagonist to compete in the early states, even if he didn’t win them, in order to stay in the headlines and not fade into the background. McCain lacked Giuliani’s fundraising prowess and campaign pros, but he strode valiantly into the fight, anyway. It was a telling decision for a war hero and famously combative senator, and it worked.
Romney’s people are right to point out that McCain’s winning margin isn’t large, and that next Tuesday’s balloting is the real do-or-die for him, not Florida’s. But Huckabee is staying in (possibly in hopes of winning McCain’s favor when veep selection rolls around), Giuliani is likely getting out (at least tacitly endorsing McCain), and that means a continued split among GOP conservatives vs. unity among GOP moderates and GOP-leaning independents.
The larger significance? I’d say that if the McCain candidacy goes on to dominate next Tuesday’s primaries, we will see something of a return of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. It will be a less ideological party, one drawn more to personalities than to party platforms and conservative principles. It will sound vigorous, even bellicose, but pick more fights with Big Business than Big Government. The Republican Party of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich will sit on the sidelines for a bit, to rest up for the next game.
The mainstream media, a key McCain political constituency, will cheer. It’s important to understand that for many years, McCain has played to the press box more than he ever played to the GOP. The issues on which he deviates most from mainstream Republican politics – campaign-finance restrictions, global warming, and bashing drug companies – happen to be ones upon which the media elite have long been fixated. Even McCain’s laudable crusade against pork-barrel spending dovetails nicely with the kind of fiscal conservatism that reporters most like to cover: relatively small amount of tax dollars misspent on easily lampooned boondoggles.
As for the conservative movement, it will groan, grimace, and then after Super-Duper Tuesday start talking up what many conservatives like about McCain – beginning but not ending with his Iraq policy – while turning their attention back to the manifest flaws of one Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.