re: #46 wrenchwench

Which is why he won’t be the nominee.

Actually, there are three possibilities, of which we won’t know any for certain till about mid-March next year.

a) The tea party is a strident minority. Given only one non-TP candidate in the race, Romney pulls away from the majority.

b) The tea party is a strident majority, but is split between its favorites. No candidate gets a clear majority, and we go into the convention with Romney holding the plurality but needing the delegates of at least one TP to win. In this case we’ll see two battles possible: either Romney picks a TP VP who brings enough delegates to move over the top, OR there’s a smoky room deal between two or three TP leaders that bypasses Romney.

c) The tea party is a strident majority, and they mostly coalesce around one favorite. In this case we wind up with the Republicans in 2012 looking a lot like the 2008 Obama-Clinton race. It becomes a close run thing between Romney and TP (too close for me to call at this time) but the winner is obvious before the convention. The bad news for the Republicans is that it does for them what 2008’s race did for the Democrats and gives the voters a long, long look at just who the candidates are and where they stand.

My personal guess is we see (b) above, but I could easily be wrong. Thing is we won’t know till we actually start seeing primary votes.