Alexander Adranghi

Cross posted from my column at on the Young Fabians blog.

As Obama’s man David Axelrod put it, “Instead of ‘Super Tuesday’ it became ‘Super Glue Day’ for them”. After the rush of primaries in ten states across America came to an end, the results show that Mitt Romney has done enough to keep the chasing pack at bay, but has not completely lost them in his rear view mirror. Romney came away with a total of 415 delegates; Santorum proportionally keeping in tow with 176 .

The Kansas caucuses on Saturday played into the hands of the more conservative Santorum, boosting his delegate count to 217.  Attention has now turned to the next big prize – a winner-takes-all in California on June 5. In order for Romney to secure the nomination by then, he would need to acquire a 60% share of the remaining delegates up for grabs between now and then. This would require a better performance than the one witnessed on Super Tuesday, in which he grabbed nearer 50%.

Furthermore, the upcoming states of Mississippi and Alabama are southern, conservative states likely to play into the hands of Gingrich and Santorum.

On the other side of the sandwich of possibilities, in order for second place man Santorum to win the nomination he will need over 50% of the remaining delegates between now and the convention, and 15% above and beyond the average polling level he has been scoring during his best stretch of the campaign.

Such figures suggest that Romney will inevitably achieve the nomination, but with the contest being drawn out until the very end, unless the chasing pack unify around a single anti-Romney candidate who may be able to command the majority of future delegates. At present this looks like Santorum, although Gingrich may strike back with his plans in the Southern states to place himself in a bargaining position with Santorum.

What is for sure is that if a candidate drops out, the rules are complex in regards to who their delegates then pledge their votes to. These calculations depend on party rules, which vary on a state-by-state basis. Some redistribute the votes amongst the remaining candidates evenly, and others release their delegates from any pledge, giving them the freedom to vote for who they want. Often, these ‘freed’ delegates end up voting for the contender who wins their retired candidate’s endorsement.

It remains to be seen whether any chasing candidate can build up a bloc of delegates to muscle the nomination. Much depends on these delegates’ perceptions of how Santorum and Gingrich perform in the upcoming contests. Once again, the election has become a case of wait and see.

Cross posted from my column at on the Young Fabians blog.

If you believe the American media, Mitt Romney should have had this wrapped up by now. With 123 delegates, he has just short of half of the total number available from states declared so far. This is a far larger lead than that enjoyed by the frontrunner in 2008. John McCain had 95 projected at this stage, with second place Romney at 83.

Today, the question is: what is different this time round? Second place is virtually tied – Gringrich (45), Santorum (44) and Paul (37). There is no-one who directly threatens Romney’s front-runner status. However, there is deep distrust of Romney amongst conservatives . Other serious candidates are not backing down. They are all fighting each other to try and clamber up the ladder to a successful party nomination. Republicans have been murmuring whether a new candidate is needed to rescue them.

Romney is their centrist candidate, which may be difficult for us on this side of the pond to believe. The others have no hope of challenging Obama, not only because they are even further away from the centre ground than Romney, but also because their continuous posturing to differentiate themselves from each other is turning into a freak show. This helps the Democrats tremendously, as whoever emerges victorious from the Republican Royal Rumble will be ‘damaged goods’ in the public eye.

There is no alternative to Romney that will be accepted because the party itself is splintering. The only candidate who is taking action to counteract this fracture is Ron Paul, who has subtly shifted his campaigning away from the front-runner, towards contender-of-the-week Santorum. This not only strengthens Romney by encouraging infighting among the trailing pack, but since the negative campaigning originates from Paul, it forces Santorum to draw his resources away from Romney in the effort to defend himself. Paul is in good shape, raising $4.5 million in January, and he is on track to outperform the competition in the last quarter of 2011. Will we see Ron Paul at the Treasury or even Vice President? We know for certain it won’t be in the State Department.

Santorum by comparison does not have a great deal of financial resources, and such distractions from Paul could be fatal to his nomination hopes. While all this is going on, Gingrich is raising more capital than Romney, and I expect Gingrich to make a charge in the near future.

Last time round Romney dropped out of the race after ‘Super Tuesday’, a day in which a number of states ran caucuses and primaries simultaneously. He won his home state Michigan over McCain, so doing so again is the very least he needs to do to have any hope of preventing this selection process turning into utter chaos.

Cross posted from my column at on the Young Fabians blog.

Two weeks, and two primaries later, we’ve seen dynamics of the GOP nomination race violently flip flop from Romney, to Gingrich and back, getting more polarised as the campaign progresses.

Gingrich took a decisive lead with South Carolina, returning four times the slice of the pie he achieved in New Hampshire. This week Romney reversed that with a win in Florida. What is clear is that this is fast becoming a two horse race. Both Sanctorum and Paul have been left to fend in a second division. This is ultimately good for the Republican

Party in that the debate will help establish a clear leadership candidate.

Returning briefly to my previous entry, in South Carolina, the predicted Colbert protest vote through campaign surrogate Herman Cain, registered only 1.1%, with 6,326 votes. This was enough to be classified in the results, which is an achievement in itself. After the suspense of the build up to the vote, Colbert’s fictional exploratory committee was hastily dismantled after accomplishing its goal to raise awareness of the bizarre role of the Super PACs.

Florida also gave some insight to the politics within the Republican party itself. The state party voted to pull their primary forward, aiming to benefit from an early influence in the race. The idea was to bank more revenue from advertising, with the hunch that this race was going to come down to momentum of the candidates rather than counting individual votes at the national convention. The state paid a price with this rebellion to party line, with the national party wiping out half of the states delegates at the national convention. This is just short of the total number of delegates of Iowa and South Carolina combined. What would you think if you were an ordinary Republican from the sunshine state?

This penalty resulted – by state party regulation – to Florida keeping a winner-takes-all delegate allocation, which again broke national party rules regarded holding winner-takes-all prior to April 1. In response, all the national party could muster is to give the Florida delegates, inconvenient hotels, and the worse seats at come the national convention – which will be held in Florida. I kid you not. Gingrich announced he is appealing this decision, but it’s not the hotel or the seats he cares about.

I am starting to see faint comparisons with the last Labour leadership election. Here, as in then there are two leading candidates, one has popularity with core grass roots, while other is criticised to be too far towards the centre, but is seen by many as more electable chief executive. It will be interesting to see which way they will choose.

Cross posted from my new column at on the Young Fabians blog.

We’ve seen intriguing developments in the past week concerning the greatest non-candidate of the Republican presidential primaries, satirist Stephen Cobert.

Real-life Democrat Cobert, host of fake right-wing news show ‘The Cobert Report’, has been poking fun at federal laws concerning the funding of political campaigns.

While donations to candidates’ campaigns are regulated, two recent federal rulings have encouraged the rise of the so-called ‘Super Political Action Committees’ or ‘Super PACs’. These allow corporations to raise unlimited funds to campaign in support of a candidate- without the need for there to be regulated coordination between the actions of the ‘Super PACs’ and those of the official campaign itself.

What may seem bizarre to the British is that this ‘freedom’ stems from a 19^thcentury ruling of the Supreme Court which counts corporations as individuals in terms of freedom of expression. The ruling prohibits infringement on their ‘free speech.’ The power of corporations over elections was further reinforced in a 1976 ruling, which formally equated money with ‘free speech’.

Last week a poll in South Carolina placed Cobert at five percent, ahead of major candidate Jon Huntsman who subsequently dropped out of the running at the weekend. This led to Cobert’s announcement that he was exploring entering the race in South Carolina, placing his own ‘Super PAC’ into the hands of fellow satirist- and ‘Daily Show’ host- John Stewart.

This ‘Super PAC’ has already launched TV adverts in South Carolina portraying race leader Mitt Romney as a serial killer. This mocks the notion of corporations equalling people in terms of freedom of speech, using Romney’s career as a successful management consultant (where he liquidated troubled companies) to illustrate the point.

With no option in South Carolina to write-in names on the ballot, on Monday Cobert called for those who support him to place a vote for ex-contender Herman Cain who is ironically still on the ballot paper.

With wild media coverage of the faux possible candidacy, comes the real possibility of a ‘Cobert Effect’. There is speculation that Cobert could hurt libertarian Ron Paul due to their mutual appeal to younger independent voters.

We’ll just have to see if a protest vote materialises this Saturday.