Tuesday, December 04, 2007

It's The Flip-Flop, Stupid

"Romney's Mormonism certainly comes up on the GOP presidential campaign trail - someone in nearly every audience he addresses asks about his faith. But it pales in significance next to his flip-flopping in recent years on issues such as abortion, gay rights and gun control.

Huckabee has jumped to 38 percent support with born-agains, from 18 percent in October. Meanwhile, Sam Brownback has dropped out of the race, Fred Thompson's support has collapsed and ever-fewer voters remain undecided. "It's less of a negative reaction to Romney and more of a positive reaction to Huckabee," Ann Selzer, the director of the Register poll, told me yesterday.

What people don't seem to realize, she says, is that Romney's support has been pretty soft all along. "Romney was sort of there by default. He spent a lot of money. He got a lot of attention," Selzer said. "He has many of the appearances of a good candidate and a good president, except that when people really think about it, there's someone else they'd rather have."

As evidence, she points to a question on her October poll. This asked voters: If you didn't have to worry about whether your candidate would do well in the general election, is there someone else you might choose? Romney took the big hit: His support dropped nine points, to 20 percent from 29 percent, with no one candidate picking up the lion's share of his support. (Huckabee had yet to break through.)

How big a role is Mormonism playing? Polls don't tell us much, because people tend to hide from pollsters anything that might seem like bigotry. But another question on the October poll at least scratched the surface.

This asked people who weren't voting for individual top-tier candidates what they didn't like about them. For Romney, 51 percent of voters not choosing him said that his flip-flopping on issues like abortion was a "major" factor in their decision.

Asked if Romney's Mormonism making him potentially less electable would be a problem, only 19 percent said that affected their votes - on par with the share of voters citing negatives like Giuliani's divorces and Thompson's late entry into the race.

This certainly matches up with the conversations I've had over the last year with Religious Right leaders such as Gary Bauer, who heads up an informal group of Christian activists who had been looking to get behind a candidate. Romney - with his big money, smooth talk and good hair - could have been the consensus candidate early on. But there's just too much concern about the sincerity of his various "conversions."

Romney senses some of this. In discussing a potential Mormon speech with National Review's Byron York recently, he said: "I know there are some people hoping that I will simply declare in some way that my church is all well and good but that I don't really believe it . . . That's not going to happen."

In other words, Romney shouldn't have too much trouble addressing fears that he believes too strongly in one thing. What he's really got to worry about are the concerns that he doesn't believe sincerely in anything much at all."

And then there were none.

Fred Thompson isn't getting ANY Yellowstream Media support because they know full well that he'd demolish Mrs. Bubba in any head-to-head debate format imaginable, as long as she didn't send a ringer for herself of course. The rest of the pack is eminently assailable so every week finds another RINO featured as the "ONE". This week its Huckleberry, and who knows, Ron Paul might even have a moment or two in the sun.

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