Mitt’s support: deeper than you think

By MICHAEL BARONE

To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary of six candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire.

Yes, he is well-known there because he was governor of next-door Massachusetts, had run before and owns a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. But the exit poll indicates Romney held his own among independents, Tea Party supporters and late deciders.

He didn’t lose ground in the heat of the campaign, despite his ragged performance in Sunday’s debate and his Monday statement (instantly regretted if I read the videotape right) that “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

Romney easily exceeded the 25 percent ceiling that many critics perceived, and he’s running at least a bit above that in polls in the next primary states, South Carolina and Florida.

Reporters covering New Hampshire had a hard time getting a feel for why people supported Romney. Polling indicated that his voters were more firm in their support than backers for other candidates. But while Romney had no trouble filling the venues of his relatively few late campaign events, you didn’t encounter many Romney fans at other candidates’ events.

What you did encounter was many voters who said they were undecided and, in the last week, many who said they’d narrowed their choice down to Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum.

My sense is that these were tactical voters, waiting to see which candidate had momentum and gauging their mettle at campaign appearances. In relatively secular New Hampshire, they clearly broke more for Huntsman, who lived in the state and held more events there than anyone else, than for Santorum, who delighted in taking hostile questions on such issues as same-sex marriage, or Newt Gingrich, who alternated between events on such issues as brain science and attacks on Romney’s business career.

The exit poll makes it clear that Romney has connected with many self-described conservative and Tea Party Republicans. His standard speech includes encomiums of the Founding Fathers and quotations from the Declaration of Independence.

As best-seller lists testify, Americans in recent years have a growing interest in the Founders, and one Tea Party movement achievement is that voters are measuring candidates’ policies against the Founders’ principles.

All six candidates have obtained tickets to South Carolina, some first class and some wangled with the political equivalent of frequent-flier miles. Rick Perry flew into New Hampshire for the two debates at which he pitched his appeal to South Carolinians and then flew right back south.

Santorum got his ticket from his tied-for-first finish in Iowa. Gingrich, suspiciously specific about the contents of his supposedly independent super-PAC’s 27-minute anti-Romney film, also is headed down there.

Huntsman did well enough in New Hampshire to get the chance to make his case in South Carolina. Ron Paul, who finished second, was going to keep on keeping on no matter what.

South Carolina Republicans have a tradition of backing winners, going back to Strom Thurmond’s backing of Richard Nixon over Ronald Reagan at the 1968 national convention. In 1988, Thurmond protegé Lee Atwater engineered South Carolina’s early primary to help his candidate, George H.W. Bush.

Ever since, the state, which voted from 88 percent to 99 percent Democratic in Franklin Roosevelt’s days, has clinched the GOP nomination — and not for the candidates deemed most conservative: Bush in 1988 and 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000 and John McCain in 2008.

Romney’s flight path to the nomination seems clear. But he’s going to have competition, which is good for him and for the Republican Party, and victory is not assured. He still must earn it.

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