With a little less than four hours to go until the polls close in the Michigan Republican primary, the temperature at Mitt Romney’s HQ must be reaching fever point.
Following two hugely disappointing performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, states in which Romney spent tens of million dollars of his own money in an effort to score momentum-building wins in early-voting states, he now needs to win Michigan in order to keep his Presidential ambitions alive.
With unemployment in the state running at 8%, largely as a result of the decline of the traditional industries which once made Michigan the manufacturing capital of the world, Romney has made much of his experience of turning around failing companies in an attempt to win the support of middle class blue-collar workers.
This strategy has been tried before in Michigan, with billionaire Dick DeVos making an identical pitch to voters in the state during the 2004 Governor’s race. He lost to incumbent Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm by a 57% to 41% margin. It remains to be seen if such a message will have any greater resonance in a closed, Republican primary.
If he fails to win in Michigan, the state in which he grew up and where is father served as Governor, we will almost certainly witness first major fatality of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Whilst failure to achieve victory in Michigan would likely provide a fatal blow to Mitt Romney’s campaign, one would be foolish to underestimate the damage a loss would also do to John McCain’s campaign.
McCain, whose bid for the Presidency looked quixotic as recently as December, has based his ‘comeback’ strategy on a set of incremental gains over the next few weeks.
Following his impressive defeat of Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire primary, his campaign badly needs to capitalize on his momentum and pull off a victory in Michigan which would, in turn, almost certainly lead to the Senator defeating Mike Huckabee in South Carolina on Saturday. Having mortally damaged Romney in his home state and defeated Huckabee in one of his core-constituency Bible-belt states, McCain would be almost unstoppable come ‘Super Duper Tuesday’, when twenty two states are scheduled to vote (February 5th). A loss in Michigan, aside from boosting Romney and Huckabee's campaigns, would almost certainly offer the struggling Giulaini campaign a lifeline.
Either way, whoever comes in second place will most certainly be the loser.
Full results, as they are reported by the Michigan Secretary of State's office, will be posted online at http://miboecfr.nictusa.com/election/results/08PPR/ from around 2:00am GMT.
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