All the failed GOP candidate strategies

Michael Barone:

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Every Republican candidate's strategy failed. Including John McCain's. Remember his original strategy: run as the party's heir apparent and bank on the benevolent neutrality of the Bush White House (obtained by the emotional reconciliation of John Weaver and Karl Rove) to raise large sums of money. This failed spectacularly at the end of June 2007, and the McCain campaign had to reboot. Its strategy: keep the candidate in the field and hope that other candidates would screw up and that external events would strengthen McCain's appeal. I have always been wary of campaign strategies of which one essential step is, "The other guy screws up." In McCain's case there were many steps, not just one. He was like the safecracker who must tackle an unfamiliar safe and must get one tumbler after another to fall in place. But for McCain it looks like all the tumblers fell into place.

Of the other candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson had great potential and at various times led the Republican field in national polls—Giuliani for most of 2007 in most polls, Thompson in Scott Rasmussen's polling in late spring and early summer. But Giuliani never found an early state in which he was comfortable competing, and his strategy of betting everything on Florida turned out to be a loser.

As for Thompson, why didn't he get into the race earlier? He spent more time (the six months from March to September) as a noncandidate than as an actual candidate (the four months from September to January). My sense is that Thompson was deterred from a circa July 4 announcement by the pendency of the Iowa Republicans' Ames straw poll in the second week of August; Mitt Romney, Sam Brownback, and (although no one was paying much attention) Mike Huckabee had been organizing intensively for this event, and Thompson evidently thought he couldn't catch up. A mistake, I think. A lackluster finish could have been explained away, and the heavy personal campaigning necessary would have served Thompson well in January.

Mitt Romney's strategy was to sweep Iowa and New Hampshire and lock things away in the other races in the run-up to February 5. But he lost Iowa to Huckabee and New Hampshire to McCain. Since then he's been scampering. He won three asterisked victories: in the January 5 caucuses in Wyoming (where his sons campaigned in every county), in the January 15 primary in Michigan (where his Michigan roots were important to about half his voters), and in the January 19 Nevada caucuses (where his fellow Mormons accounted for half his votes). None of these results was duplicable elsewhere (except Utah, which votes February 5 and in which presumably all three special factors are present). Romney has probably outspent all the other candidates combined on television and organization, but that brought him only an out-of-the-money finish in South Carolina and the short end of a 36-to-31-percent count in Florida.

Huckabee's strategy also failed. In Iowa 60 percent of the caucusgoers were self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians, and 44 percent of them voted for Huckabee, giving him a big margin over Mitt Romney. He has been unable to duplicate or build on this showing since. He has gotten respectable percentages from evangelicals/born-agains in New Hampshire (where there aren't many), Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida, but so have Romney and McCain, leaving Huckabee with little or no net popular vote margin from his core constituency. And he has signally failed to extend his appeal to Republican primary voters or caucusgoers who don't classify themselves as evangelicals or born-agains, winning between 4 and 12 percent of their votes in the different contests. Huckabee soldiers on, hoping to carry congressional districts in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri, though he didn't carry any CDs in Florida (he carried only four small counties in a state with, as we so well recall from the 2000 recount, 67 counties).

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The role of events. McCain's success was due not just to the failure of his opponents' strategies (something he could never count on, but which happened) but also to what the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan referred to as "events, dear boy, events." Notably the success of the surge in Iraq....

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He also explains the failed Democrat strategies. Certainly the success of the surge did help its most staunch supporter. McCain was helped most by the failure of conservatives to coalesce around a single candidate allowing him to pick up wins with a third of the votes in three states which made him look like a winner. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.