A slew of polls were released on the eve of sorta-Super Tuesday.\u00a0 It\u2019s not quite the stellar lineup originally planned.\u00a0 Texas pushed its primary back to May because of Congressional redistricting hiccups and Virginia is already in the Mitt Romney column because Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich failed to qualify for the ballot there.\u00a0 Regardless, the signs point to the inevitability of a Romney nomination if he does well on March 6.<\/p>\n
The polling aggregators at both Real Clear Politics and Huffington Post show the closely watched state of Ohio as a dead heat.\u00a0\u00a0 However, the trend lines clearly show Romney gaining and Santorum dropping over the past week.\u00a0 And as we saw last week in Michigan, that trend was predictive of the final outcome.<\/p>\n
Importantly, the March 6 primaries feature the two most socially conservative states to hold contests thus far.\u00a0 These are states where Santorum was expected to do well, but he now clings to a 2 to 3 point lead in Tennessee.\u00a0 Even in Oklahoma, his poll lead has fallen from around 20 points to 10 in the few polls conducted over the past month.<\/p>\n
In the 2008 Republican primaries, two-thirds of voters from Tennessee and Oklahoma called themselves Evangelical Christians, among the highest concentration in the country.\u00a0 Furthermore, more than 4-in-10 GOP primary voters in these two states said it mattered a great deal to them that a candidate shares their religious beliefs.<\/p>\n
These are the voters who have been reticent to back Romney.\u00a0 Forget about the exit poll analysis you have seen claiming that Romney\u2019s weakness is strong conservatives or strong Tea Party supporters.\u00a0 Those groups are important, but when you strip away the political and demographic characteristics of these groups, the one thing that differentiates their vote choice is whether they are evangelicals.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the Mormon thing.\u00a0 Romney\u2019s faith may be a sticking point with Protestants, but it doesn\u2019t really bother Catholics.\u00a0 It\u2019s little surprise that Romney has won every state where Catholics (or Catholics plus Mormons) made up at least 30% of the electorate.<\/p>\n
Other than Massachusetts and Vermont, Ohio is the only state in the Super Tuesday lineup where the Catholic vote is expected to top 25%.\u00a0 [Idaho\u2019s caucuses should have a sizable Mormon vote.]\u00a0 This looks good for Romney.<\/p>\n
It also helps that Santorum\u2019s appeal to blue collar voters fell short in Michigan and looks to do so again in Ohio.\u00a0 And Ohio, like Tennessee, has a significant number of voters who cast their ballots early.\u00a0 The Romney campaign has proven itself effective at pumping up the early vote.\u00a0 In the end, I think Romney will win Ohio by about 4 or 5 points.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s still not enough to get the Romney inevitability train up to speed.\u00a0 It\u2019ll be what happens in Tennessee and Oklahoma that determines whether the storyline turns to WHEN rather than IF Romney will clinch. \u00a0I think Santorum will take Tennessee by 3 or 4 points and Oklahoma by 12.\u00a0 But if Romney performs well among the large group of evangelical voters who turn out \u2013 picking up at least one-third of that vote \u2013 it will be a clear sign that this hold-out group has finally started to accept the idea of Mitt Romney as their standard bearer in November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A slew of polls were released on the eve of sorta-Super Tuesday.\u00a0 It\u2019s not quite the stellar lineup originally planned.\u00a0 Texas pushed its primary back to May because of Congressional redistricting hiccups and Virginia is already in the Mitt Romney column because Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich failed to qualify for the ballot there.\u00a0 Regardless, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":939,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802236035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802236035"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802244219,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236035\/revisions\/40802244219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802236035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802236035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802236035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}