In Need of a Game Change, Santorum Plays Small Ball - New York Times (blog)

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In Need of a Game Change, Santorum Plays Small Ball - New York Times (blog) Mar 17th 2012, 20:57 What was Rick Santorum doing in Puerto Rico this week? Mr. Santorum sparked a controversy by saying the commonwealth would need to adopt English as its primary language before achieving statehood. And a tourist snapped a photo of Mr. Santorum lounging around with his shirt off. But what was he doing there to begin with? Mr. Santorum isn't very likely to win Puerto Rico's primary on Sunday — not when Mr. Romney has the endorsement of Gov. Luis G. Fortuño; he also performed much better than Mr. Santorum among Hispanics with Puerto Rican ancestry in Florida. In fact, although there have been no polls of Puerto Rico, the odds are that Mr. Santorum won't come all that close to Mr. Romney. Ah, but there are delegates at stake. If Mr. Romney wins 50 percent of the vote there, Puerto Rico's 20 bound delegates will be awarded winner-take-all to him, according to the state's rules. If Mr. Romney is held under 50 percent, however, they will be split proportionately among the candidates who get at least 15 percent of the vote. Perhaps Mr. Santorum's campaign perceives that Mr. Romney is close to the 50 percent threshold. If so, spending some time in Puerto Rico could prevent Mr. Romney from hitting that mark, perhaps limiting him to 9 or 10 delegates rather than 20. It's a "small ball" strategy, in other words — one focused on the delegate math. Mr. Santorum is seeking to spend his resources efficiently to limit Mr. Romney's advantage in that department. This kind of strategy, however, misses the forest for the trees. The problem with it is simple: it is almost certain to be a losing one. Of the 928 delegates allotted to date in The Associated Press count, Mr. Romney has 495, or 53 percent, while Mr. Santorum has 252, or 27 percent. That isn't all that close. Moreover, if the remaining primaries and caucuses go anything like the previous ones did, Mr. Romney should continue to obtain delegates at about that pace, according to the detailed projections put together by me and by other analysts. That would put him on pace to clinch the Republican nomination after Utah votes on June 26 or after California and several large states do on June 5. To be sure, there is some uncertainty in these projections. Newt Gingrich could drop out (which would help Mr. Santorum, but not all that much. Some of the remaining states have not received much polling. And the candidates are going to have their stronger nights and their weaker ones. But Mr. Romney has some slack: if he is reasonably close to a majority (and no other candidate is), super delegates and other unpledged delegates will put him over the top. If Mr. Santorum were a little closer to Mr. Romney (say that he had qualified for the ballot in Virginia and won the state) and the allocation rules in the remaining states were a little more favorable to him (say that Texas was winner-take-all rather than proportional), perhaps the small-ball strategy would be worth pursing. But he is far enough behind that he instead needs a "game change" — something that fundamentally alters the dynamics of the race and allows him to substantially improve on his benchmarks from previous states. Game-changing events are not easy to come by, of course. But Mr. Santorum's campaign does not seem so interested in maximizing his chance at achieving one. His travel schedule is one such example: Mr. Santorum spent part of last week in Puerto Rico, and will be spending part of Sunday in Louisiana, rather than focusing on Illinois, a state where polls and demographics give Mr. Romney an edge but only a modest one. A win in Illinois would do much more than anything that might happen in Puerto Rico or Louisiana to alter the momentum in the race. At a bare minimum, it would position Mr. Santorum better for Wisconsin, which votes on April 3 and has 42 delegates — twice as many as Puerto Rico — and awards them on a largely winner-take-all basis. Or, consider the acquiescent attitude that Mr. Santorum's campaign has taken toward Mr. Romney's dropping out of debates and refusing to schedule any more. Rather than hammering his opponent for his unwillingness to confront the voters, Mr. Santorum followed Mr. Romney's lead in withdrawing from an Oregon debate that was to take place next week. Perhaps Mr. Santorum thinks that Mr. Romney is a stronger debater, but the debates have been hit-and-miss for all the candidates and have often shaken up the polls in one direction or another. That kind of high-volatility outcome is exactly what a losing candidate should be pursuing, just as a team that trails late in a basketball game is correct to start trying to shoot more 3-pointers. For Mr. Santorum to have a shot at winning the nomination, he will need to poll at least 5 or 10 points better across the board than he has so far — and to do so consistently enough that those polls translate into votes and then delegates. But polls usually do not shift without a reason. They change on the basis of news, and Mr. Santorum's campaign has had trouble driving any of it. In fact, the political world's attention has begun to drift away from the Republican nomination fight. The Web site Memeorandum tracks the political stories that are receiving the most attention each day, using a mostly automated process that looks at things like how many bloggers are writing about a subject and how many news outlets are linking to a story. It thus provides for a relatively objective and organic look at what is leading the news coverage. I went through Memeorandum's archive and tracked the lead story at noon each day dating back to Nov. 22 (the Tuesday before Thanksgiving). In the graphic below, I've marked every time the lead story was about the nomination campaign with a yellow stripe, and every time that it was about some other subject (such as a foreign policy development, an economic report or the general election campaign) with a black one. The nomination campaign received wall-to-wall coverage from December through February. During this period, only a very dramatic event — like the death of a major world figure or a major showdown in Congress — was enough to supersede it. In March, however, the nomination campaign has been the lead story just two times in 17 days. Although there have been one or two major news stories during this period, for the most part the campaign hasn't had all that much to compete with. Even when there has been a campaign story, however, it has quickly fallen from the headlines. By noon last Wednesday, for instance, the day just after Mr. Santorum's wins in Alabama and Mississippi, coverage of those victories was demoted in Memeorandum's ranking behind an editorial written by Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs banker. The editorial had little objective news value — Mr. Smith was not ranked especially high at Goldman Sachs, nor did he reveal any proprietary information about the company. But that story, and not the campaign, is what bloggers and readers were most interested in talking about. A bit of fatigue about the nomination campaign is understandable, but is also a bearish sign for Mr. Santroum since it implies that voters have begun to settle for the status quo — one in which Mr. Romney has a solid lead and very probably will win. Although no candidate can completely control the news cycle, campaigns differ in their skill in putting their thumb on the scale and nudging things along. Dropping a piece of opposition research, unveiling a controversial commercial or making a deliberately provocative statement in an interview are all strategies that can shift the substance of the coverage. Mr. Santorum's campaign, however, has been content to let the news cycle take its course. In fact, it has played down expectations in states like Illinois, a strategy that is intended to draw the news media's attention away from those contests and reduce the amount of momentum that is staked upon them. It can be difficult for a campaign to acknowledge when it is losing and adapt its strategy accordingly — especially when news media coverage tends to exaggerate how competitive a race is. A campaign may be in danger of reading only the more favorable headlines and believing its own press clippings. But sometimes a campaign can have a moment of clarity — as John McCain's did in 2008 when it picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate precisely because it knew that it needed to pursue a high-risk, and potentially high-reward approach. When the campaign picked Mrs. Palin in August 2008, Senator McCain was perhaps 3 points behind Barack Obama in national surveys (slightly more than that in some crucial swing states). This was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other events that made Mr. McCain's path almost impossible; betting markets at the time gave him about a 35 percent chance of winning. Mr. Santorum's odds of winning his campaign are nowhere near that good; the betting market Intrade, instead, now gives him just a 3 percent chance to win the nomination. His campaign is in more need of a game change than Mr. McCain's ever was, and has even less to lose from high-risk strategies. There may be some benefit to Mr. Santorum in finishing an honorable second place — he could become Mr. Romney's running mate, for instance, or he could position himself to be one of the front-runners in 2016. His campaign has begun to behave as though it is more interested in those goals than in maximizing its slim chances to actually win the nomination. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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