Romney's Ideal Victory

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Florida, John McCain, Mitt Romney

Does Mitt Romney have a victory to cling to in Florida? Joshua Trevino, vice president for public policy at San Francisco’s Pacific Research Institute (and one of the founders of the conservative blog RedState), breaks down the numbers on his personal blog.

“Mitt Romney is in a bad way,” Trevino writes. “He blew through $10 million in Iowa and lost; and outspent McCain eight to one in Florida, and lost that too. But for all this, Mitt Romney is not done yet and the reason lies in the breakdown of this evening’s Florida vote.” He continues:

CNN has the exit-poll numbers, and they reveal some surprising things:

• Romney won pro-lifers.
• Romney won the mainstream religious. (Huckabee won the very religious ­ less than one-fifth of the pool.)
• Romney won the Protestants.
• Romney tied Huckabee with Evangelicals.
• Romney won the pro-GWB voters.
• Romney is the primary second choice of Giuliani voters, Thompson voters …. and McCain voters.
• Romney won the immigration hard-liners.
• Romney won the upper-middle class, earning between $100,000 and $200,000 annually.
• Romney won the terrorism-oriented voters.
• Romney won the self-identified conservatives and the self-identified very conservative.
• Romney won the values-oriented voters.
• Romney won the white voters.
• Romney won the tax-cutting voters.

In short, Mitt Romney won the Republican Party’s idea of itself ­ and that, too, is a big deal. If you’re white, Protestant, anti-abortion, go to church on Sundays, think well of the President, want lower taxes, hate terrorists, make a good living, want to do something about immigration, and live in Florida, chances are you voted Romney.

The question before Florida was whether McCain could win a closed Republican race, and now we know he can.

The question now is whether he can win conservatives ­and in Florida, he did not.