In the Mississippi Republican Primary on March 13, Rick Santorum won with 32.9 percent of the vote, Newt Gingrich finished second with 31.3, and Mitt Romney came in third with 30.3. In the Alabama primary on that same day, Santorum won with 34.5% of the vote, Gingrich came in second with 29.3, and Romney finished third with 29.
Now let me say at the outset I that like Gingrich: I always have. But when I look at the numbers from Mississippi and Alabama, I don’t think of what was, I think of what could have been. And what I mean is, how much greater could Santorum’s margin of victory have been if Gingrich hadn’t been in the race? How much greater might it be from here forward if Gingrich gets out?
When Sarah Palin said South Carolinians should vote for Gingrich in their primary, I agreed 100%. Heck, I voted for Gingrich in the primaries here in our state. But politics are fluid in a primary, and when you look at the delegate count and the path to 1,144 delegates, it really looks like we’ve turned a corner where a three man race is a man too much. Especially when one of the three men is the second of two conservatives and his presence in the race is allowing the moderate to rack up delegates.
Think about it this way: Because states like Mississippi and Alabama award their delegates proportionately, even though Santorum won he has to share delegates with Gingrich and Romney. And what this does is reduce his victories to more or less moral ones, because the gap between he and Romney never closes, as they are both receiving a small number of delegates. The only way this gap can begin to close is if Santorum can compete against Romney one on one, and rack up significant numbers of delegates in each state instead of splitting them three ways.
Gingrich knows he can’t win the number of delegates necessary to win the nomination straight out: he knows he can’t. Thus, as Byron York reports, “he now speaks…about a new plan: Keep Romney from getting 1,144 delegates by the end of the GOP primary season in June.” The problem with this plan is that it will also keep Santorum from getting 1,144 delegates by the end of the GOP primary season as well.
Again, with all sincerity, I have the utmost respect for Gingrich. His grasp of history is unequaled and his ability to debate unmatched. Yet this race is leaning toward another conservative, and although Gingrich can’t win, he can at least allow conservatives to win by stepping aside and letting Santorum win by wider margins, thus gaining more delegates in each contest. I fear that unless he does this, he will go down in history as the Mike Huckabee of 2012. You’ll recall that it was ultimately Huckabee who gave us Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008, via his refusal to exit the race when the writing was on the wall.
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