US Elections

More meaningless stats, stat!

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

22 January 2012

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I daresay we'll hear it said a lot over the next few days: No Republican has won his party's nomination without winning South Carolina since 1980. In fact, here's a New York Times report on Saturday's South Carolina contest, won resoundingly by Newt Gingrich, saying exactly that:

And after being so confident just 10 days ago, the Romney campaign is now fighting not only the perception that Mr. Romney cannot consolidate broad support among conservative voters, but also at least one troubling fact: No Republican has gone on to win the party’s nomination without winning South Carolina since before 1980.

Meaningless statistic is meaningless! We're talking about five races in which an incumbent Republican president was not running — hardly a decisive precedent. (Make it six if you consider Pat Buchanan's challenge against President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to have actually stood a chance.) And remember a week ago, when Mitt Romney was thought to have won Iowa and been all but a sure thing for the nomination, how commentators were fond of saying that, in the modern primary era, no Republican challenger had won both Iowa and New Hampshire? It was as if the eight votes by which Romney had been thought to have won by actually indicated some exceptional electoral strength that proved his competitiveness.

South Carolina's track record in picking winners is aptly explained by Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect:

After defecting from the Democratic Party over civil rights, Senator Strom Thurmond argued that the state’s whites should direct their political activities toward amassing as much influence as possible in the national GOP. “That notion, that you wanted to have maximum influence on what the national Republicans believed, tended to produce a kind of caution in supporting an insurgent nominee for president,” says Lacy Ford Jr., a historian of the South and Southern politics at the University of South Carolina. “A lot of people outside of South Carolina thought that Bob Dole would be vulnerable in 1996 to such a candidate, but that wasn’t the case at all—he took out Pat Buchanan decisively by beating him in South Carolina.”

 This year, however, says Bouie, South Carolina Republicans were looking to buck the trend and follow their political instincts to a hard right conservative:

[Tea Party Republicans] see this contest as an opportunity for finding a more ideological nominee. “I go to a lot of party meetings and party functions, and it seems like voters are looking for people who match up with their values first and can win last,” says Edward Cousar, second vice chair to the state GOP and head of the Black Republican PAC, a group devoted to supporting Afri-can American candidates in South Carolina and across the country. Karen Floyd, a former state Republican Party chair, agrees. “I think the grassroots effort is crucial in the state of South Carolina, and I think some consultants can help deliver that, but really, it’s all about message. Most people are looking for the person who is most authentic and can help us get out of the situation we’re in.”

Gingrich had been assidiously courting such voters all week, and his efforts bore fruit today. But not too much has changed. Gingrich is still a severely flawed candidate, and though his rival Mitt Romney might have had a truly awful week, Romney is still better organised, better funded, and, with Florida, Michigan, and Nevada set to vote in coming weeks, looking at a more friendly electoral calendar. South Carolina might well have lengthened the GOP race today, but Romney is still the favourite, and Gingrich is still as non-viable as ever.

Tags: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican Party, Republican Primary 2012, South Carolina, South Carolina Primary

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