Santorum's Super Pac and Ron Paul have been running ads here for weeks while Romney and his super pac just started last week. He also made a brief appearance here but Santorum's focus on here along with his ground game in Iowa helped him quite a bit. Also the MN Republican party is made up of either Paulites or Michelle Bachmann types so this isn't necessarily surprising. In addition to Romney the guy who really should be hurting is Tim Pawlenty who is backing Romney and has been campaigning for him nationally. That Pawlenty couldn't deliver a strong showing for Romney in MN just shows how little relevance he has even in the MN Republican party.
Romney's banking for a loss unless Denver votes crushingly for him. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2012/jan/03/gop-nomination-2012-primary-results#state=CO 43% reporting, but Denver hasn't yet. Still, Santorum up by 1000+ votes. surprising.
I totally agree with everything you said. Romeny's saving grace is none of the marginal candidates have deep support either. At least Romney has the "wide" thing going for him, LOL!
I think the vote so far in CO is irrelevant - we have 47% of the precincts, but only 10,000 total votes or so. 2008 had 70,000 votes. Even if we drop turnout to 50,000 this year, we only have 20% of the votes, and the remaining is mostly urban, which should favor Romney substantially. I'd love to see Romney lose CO, but I don't see it yet.
With Denver coming out Romney in spades, I'd guess you were right, though if memory serves remaning districts like Colorado Springs still have Santorum marked on them. Gonna be a close one, I think. intresting to say the least.
538 agrees with you on Colorado Springs. They have a reporter saying early reporters are that Santorum is winning by 1700 votes there. If true and all the little nowhere counties that haven't reported all favor Santorum, it's possible. I have no idea if Denver and all the other suburbs have reported in full yet or not.
I think the Northwest of Colorado, Boulder and Denver are still reporting, Romney seems to be edging upwards in official results. If however, Colorado Springs yields a 1500+ vote differential for Santorum (which I just saw confirmed on the Guardian as well), it's hard to see how Romney could bridge that gap.
Guardian has called it for Santorum...though more out of laziness than anything. Seems to indicate Denver has not finished reporting, and Colorado Springs is the bombshell waiting to explode. amusing though...
Santorum is going to get Colorado. The remaining areas that haven't reported are all looking like they'll help him. I'm so happy this clown show is going to continue. :grin: EDIT: The Colorado GOP just called it for Santorum (40 percent to Mitt Romney's 37 percent). It's over.
... this phrase is so full of win. From remanning all the way through to the santorum stained districts at the end.
This is like watching a Jazz vs. Lakers game going into triple overtime right before the Rockets are about to play each one of them.
Well this race has now officially gone into crazy land. I'm not convinced Santorum can win, but Newt seems to be cratering, and I'm still not convinced the party base will nominate Romney. One possible (though still unlikely) outcome now is a brokered convention. If Santorum can dominate the midwest and Newt can take the south, and Ron Paul can win the forgotten caucuses like Maine, it might just be enough to prevent Romney from collecting 50% of the delegates. This race certainly is nowhere close to over anymore.
AND THE WINNER IS--- rick perry for getting more votes than "unpledged". but man, it just goes to show you, Santorum can bring the pressure, and come out on top. Romney must feel dirty after that come-from-behind thrashing.
i have no idea what you are getting at but I do wonder, could Santorum really slip and slide his way out towards the light of real relevance, after being obscured for so long?
Google "santorum" and you will. Rick Santorum sweeps. Wow. This is the race that keeps on giving. You'd have thought it just had to be over when the only competition Romney still faced was: - Ron Paul: the Don Quixote of the GOP, a candidate that's not even trying to win. - Newt Gingrich: pretty much the most unlikable guy in the world for pretty much every possible reason. And... - Rick Santorum: a guy whose name was made synonymous with "The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" in response to his being the most hateful of all R's when it comes to social issues. (This definition, on the "spreadingsantorum" site is the #1 hit on google for his name and appears above his campaign website.) A guy who says it should be criminal for women to have abortions even in cases of rape or to save the woman's life, though his own wife had one. A guy who won't stop comparing gay relationships to bestial ones. And, finally, a guy that lost his last election by 18%. The guy that is I suppose the new presumptive front-runner or at least the front-runner's main competition. But if you thought it would be over just because all the lame but half credible competition had dropped out and all the real contenders chose not to run, you forgot to factor in Mitt's actual greatest foe: himself. An ABC poll recently showed that the more people get to know Mitt Romney the less they like him. That is what is happening right now. People turned out in force to vote against the man that said he likes firing people, doesn't care about the very poor, corporations are people and that the foreclosure crisis should have been allowed to run its course sending thousands of people into homelessness. The man that joked that he too was unemployed while holding more cash than the last 8 presidents combined times two(!), the man that makes $57K per day for sitting on his ass. The kind of man that strapped his dog to the top of the car for a cross-country trip into Canada. You know what? When this thing started, as a Democrat, I thought Romney was the second most dangerous person running after Jon Huntsman. (Boy, did he turn out to be a dud.) And I'd have thought Santorum would have been the person against whom I'd most want Obama to run. Yes, even more than Cain. Even more than Gingrich. Even more than Bachmann. But it turns out Romney is such a deeply flawed and deeply unlikeable man, so out of touch with the common man at a time when people are hurting so badly... I can't even believe I'm saying this. I'd rather run against Mitt Romney than Rick Santorum. I think Romney would be easier to beat. And I think it would be a landslide like we haven't seen since 1972. We might even take back the House. This is an amazing race.
As others have mentioned (and many far more articulately, I might add), it appears that the GOP is truly in a crisis. They've got just the right mix of biblical fundamentalists, hate-mongering pseudo-bigots, and crushingly naive dystopian economists to really splinter the hell out of things. The tenuous cabal orchestrated during Reagan's years of resurgent "conservatism" is starting to collapse under the now-unavoidable reality that a centrist president is the only "safe" bet in the actual election. Ironically, republican fury (in it's many varied forms) is directing itself almost as much internally as externally - although that's not all that surprising given the above comment about centrism in the presidential race. However, this irony should be tempered by the other side of the coin, namely that democrats have lost their own internal battle for true progressive leadership - but I think that phrase is, and always has been, a giant joke in perennially-biased-to-the-right American politics so... ..democrats have the upper-hand by selling out far more willingly.
The problem is that you're looking at just looking at nothing more than breaking the Republican-Democrat monopoly, and completely fail to understand that when you break down one of those parties, another one will simply emerge. That is what happened in the early days of the Republic which libertarians like yourself glorify so much. The Federalists fell, the Whigs took their place. The Whigs fell, the Republicans took their place. If the Republicans fall, there will be another broadly conservative party that will appear in order to take votes from the more conservative members of the United States. The Constitution, after all, states that a president must get the majority of the electoral votes in order to become president, which is something we all acknowledge. So, suppose you have three parties, each with 33% of the popular support. The fact is that in order to get reach that 50% mark, two of those three parties will inevitably try to work together, meaning that two inevitably becomes one. The alternative is to have all three factions somehow bitterly hating one another so much that they refuse to reconcile - see ethnic parties in third-world nations. And that's just a whole different mess of its own, and is hardly something anyone would want to see happen in this nation. I think.
