Veterans love Ron Paul

Mother Jones:

Paul's anti-war stance is certainly part of the draw. Last weekend, the group Veterans for Ron Paul 2012 organized an anti-war President's Day march on the White House. That organization's leadership includes notable Iraq Veterans Against the War member Adam Kokesh, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a libertarian Republican candidate in 2010, and Jake Diliberto, a former Marine who's previously worked on Rethink Afghanistan, an anti-war project funded by the left-leaning Brave New Foundation. "I have always been a conservative, and I recognize that I am the kind of conservative that doesn't exist anymore," Diliberto told me. As for what unites servicemembers behind Paul, he said, "It is fair to say, we all do not like the current trajectory of US foreign policy, and we are cynical about US national security policy." He added that he's personally concerned about Obama's "targeted killing campaign" against alleged terrorists.

Bloggingheads' Carroll and Weigel discuss the primaries

Michigan polls, polls, polls!

American Research Group: Santorum 38%, Romney 34%, Paul 12%, Gingrich 7%
[Santorum +4]

NBC News-Marist: Romney 37%, Santorum 35%, Paul 13%, Gingrich 8%
[Romney +2]

Detroit Free Press-WXYZ-TV: Santorum 37%, Romney 34%
[Santorum +3]

Michigan Information & Research Service: Romney 32%, Santorum 30%, Paul 9%, Gingrich 7%
[Romney +2]

Mitchell Research and Rosetta Stone: Romney at 32%, Santorum at 30%
[Romney +2]

Rasmussen: Santorum 38% , Romney’s 34%, Paul 10%, Gingrich 9%
[Santorum +4]

Real Clear Politics: (average of other polls) Santorum 33.8%, Romney 33.2%
[Santorum +0.6]

Is anybody tracking Republican delegates?

The Campaign Spot:

A reminder of the official delegate count, as seen by the RNC: Mitt Romney 73, Newt Gingrich 29, Ron Paul 8, Perceived Frontrunner Rick Santorum 3, Jon Huntsman 2.

And:

The AP has Romney at 105, Santorum at 71, Gingrich at 29, Paul at 18, and Huntsman at 2.

Santorum ahead 11% in Washingon

Public Policy Polling:

At least for now it looks like it could give Rick Santorum some momentum headed into the critical March 6th contests. He leads there with 38% to 27% for Mitt Romney, 15% for Ron Paul, and 12% for Newt Gingrich.

A very small number of people are participating in the primaries

The Electoral Wasteland:

Less than 1 percent of registered voters turned out for Maine’s caucus. In Nevada, where Republican turnout was down 25 percent from 2008, only 3 percent of total registered voters participated.

This is not majority rule by any measure; it barely qualifies as participatory democracy.

The electability/competency of Rick Santorum

The Dish brings out three experts.

Steve Kornacki of Salon:

He’s a genuinely competent candidate. Not dazzling, but competent. He’s in line with the party base on just about every key issue, doesn’t have much personal baggage, can think on his feet in debates, and deliver a solid stump speech. This is more than can be said for Gingrich, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. This may be Santorum’s best hope: that the desire of the party base to nominate someone other than Romney is so strong that this basic competency is enough to overcome all of the advantages that Romney still enjoys.

Why does Ron Paul attact young voters?

The Dish analyzes:

But above all, I think it's his foreign policy. The post-9/11 generation has seen what war has achieved - virtually nothing but the death of a hundred thousand Iraqis, 5,000 Americans and tens of thousands of maimed and injured vets - and believe the wars were huge errors. They also rightly understand that the world has changed thanks to globalization of capitalism, and see the Cold War mentality of America policing the planet to be at least condescending, and at worst utterly counter-productive and unaffordable. They see their retirement savings disappearing to fuel neocon fantasies of permanent war.

Samtorum appeals to a different kind of swing voter

NYmag:

Santorum has attracted a terrible reputation among the overclass. He is defined by his crude, bigoted social conservatism, which colors the broader perception of him as an extremist. This in turn leeches out into a sense, often reflected in news coverage, which likewise reflects the social biases of the overclass, that Santorum is a fringe candidate who would repel swing voters.

In fact, there are, very roughly speaking, two kinds of swing voters. One kind is economically conservative, socially liberal swing voters. This is the kind of voter you usually read about, because it’s the kind most familiar to political reporters – affluent and college educated. But there’s a second kind of voter at least as numerous – economically populist and socially conservative. Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Romney appeals to the former, but Santorum more to the latter.

Where will Gingrich voters go if he drops out?

Public Policy Polling:

If Gingrich dropped out 58% of his supporters say they would move to Santorum, while 22% would go to Romney and 17% to Paul.

Romney is "severely" unable to relate to conservatives

Hot Air analyzes his rhetoric:

The takeaway line emerges at 14:15 when he describes himself — the architect of RomneyCare, remember — as having been … a “severely conservative Republican governor.” The awkwardness of that phrase is Romney’s whole candidacy in a nutshell. The word “severely” is almost always used colloquially in a pejorative or clinical sense (“severely unhappy,” “severely handicapped”), yet he’s using it here in a boastful way, as if to say that he can be as strident and unreasonable as he thinks the crowd needs him to be to give them comfort on his ideological bona fides as nominee. I go back and forth between being annoyed that a guy as intelligent as he is can’t even fake his identification with the right more effectively and feeling sympathy for him that he can’t connect with his audience on a gut level. That’s a tremendous retail disability for a politician and it must cause Romney no little agony, but he limps on towards the nomination regardless. If he ends up winning in spite of it, even with all his other advantages it’ll be an achievement.

Four factors align for third-party candidate's win

A reader at The Dish:

A survey of applicable academic research establishes that the success of an independent presidential candidate primarily depends on four factors: (1) whether the candidate’s campaign is well-funded; (2) the degree to which voters have grown cynical and politically-alienated; (3) whether voters like, i.e., feel warmly towards, the Democratic and Republican candidates; and (4) whether voters like the independent candidate.  While one cannot profess to be able to accurately predict the future, it appears likely that, in 2012, these drivers of independent voting behavior will align in an unprecedented manner that could propel an independent presidential candidate to unexpected heights.

The primary race is not "over" - and won't be for a while

I first must thank Weigel for pointing this out:

Political reporters make for lousy gravediggers. Find a primary, pick a day, and I can point you to a story pronouncing the campaign “over” or “almost over” or over, pending the judgment of a proverbial Fat Lady.

The important part of his article:

We know the race will last to April thanks to pure, heartless algebra. The 2012 Republican nominee will need to win 1,144 delegates. The number of delegates semi-officially pledged to candidates as I type this out: 161. The number of delegates that will be pledged by the end of Super Tuesday, one month from now: 662. Rick Santorum could take every single delegate away from Mitt Romney (Good luck in Massachusetts!) and be barely halfway to the nomination.

It feels slower than the last primary. Because it’s much, much slower. A catastrophic and months-long leap-frog competition forced 21 states into 2008 Super Tuesday primaries or caucuses. By Feb. 5, 2008, 1,069 of the GOP’s delegates—41 percent of the total—had been chosen. It was a fluke, no one wanted it to happen again, but it turned out like a childhood trauma in reverse. So much fun was had, the “this can wrap up in a hurry” concept stuck around.

Romney's frontrunner status depends on the Michigan primary

from Commentary Magazine:

The irony for Romney is that of all the upcoming primaries, Michigan may be the best suited to respond positively to Santorum’s paean to rust belt values. Romney’s inability to connect with both conservatives and ordinary voters has handicapped him throughout the race, but in Michigan, with its depressed economy and dependence on the auto industry, it is as much of a hindrance as in the general election. Michigan, with its high unemployment and working class electorate, provides Santorum with a receptive audience for his own version of class warfare politics.

2012 is not about jobs, it's about the culture war

Business Insider analyzes:

Everyone thought that the 2012 election would be about jobs, jobs, jobs.

They were wrong.

First corporate profits went up. The market has been strong for almost two months. Unemployment is falling. And there are even signs of life in the housing industry.

Yes, America still has long term debt problems. And Americans are saddled with lots of household debt.

But the last three weeks prove that what gets Americans really fired up is the culture war.

Yesterday we saw the 9th Circuit Court overrule the popular referendum in California that banned gay marriage. Rick Santorum, who defined his career in the Senate as the point man for conservatives in the culture war is suddenly surging in the GOP nomination contest. The nation and its media had a week-long freakout over a minuscule $700,000 grant from the Komen Foundation to Planned Parenthood. And now the Obama Administration and the Catholic Church are in open conflict over whether religious institutions should be dragged into the bedroom to pay for their employees' contraceptives of choice.

Who are the Obama Independents?

The Third Way reports:

The Obama Independents are practically a mirror image of America, while the McCain Independents mirror Idaho.4 McCain Independents are almost exclusively white, with a small slice of Latino voters. By contrast, 74% of Obama Independents are white, with near parity in every category to the electorate as a whole.

In short, they are idealogically moderate, were hit hard by the recession early on, are younger, are slightly more female, and are less likely to attend religious services.

Starting in around 2000, Democrat and Republican partisans began seeing the economy differently

The Washington Post:

Super PACs are really changing the presidential race

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Two years ago, that money bomb would have been illegal. Now, it's a prominent feature of Campaign 2012, in which unlimited sums of money donated to "super political-action committees" – not directly to a candidate's own campaign – can, in an instant, reset the odds for a race.

So far, these outside groups – super PACs, for short – have collectively spent $40.9 million to influence 2012 presidential and congressional races. That's twice what had been spent by outside groups at the same point in the 2008 campaign cycle, when both parties had competitive presidential nominating races, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

Is the Tea Party dead?

The Daily Beast asks:

“The Tea Party movement is dead. It’s gone,” says Chris Littleton, the cofounder of the Ohio Liberty Council, a statewide coalition of Tea Party groups in Ohio. “I think largely the Tea Party is irrelevant in the primaries. They aren’t passionate about any of the candidates, and if they are passionate, they’re for Ron Paul.”

How conservative/moderate/liberal is your state?

From Gallup: