Ron Paul Is Gaining on Mitt Romney for GOP Nod

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By Joseph Lazzaro: Subscribe to Joseph's RSS feed

January 5, 2012 6:40 PM EST

Where does the Republican Party nomination race stand heading into the New Hampshire primary?

Clearly, it's "advantage Mitt Romney," to borrow a tennis phrase. However, the former Massachusetts governor is starting to hear footsteps from Ron Paul and, despite his low support in the state, Rick Santorum.

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According to a Suffolk University / 7 News two-day tracking poll, Romney has the support of 41 percent of likely New Hampshire primary voters; Paul, 18 percent, and Santorum, 8 percent, CNN reported Thursday.

By any modern political science evaluation, a 23-percentage-point lead is an enormous upside. Still, with an electorate that has been as mercurial and as unpredictable as the American electorate has been in the past eight years -- lurching back and forth between the two major parties -- anyone who can say they can predict the final percentage totals for Tuesday night's all important New Hampshire primary is being disingenuous.

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The analysis from this neck of the woods? Oh, Romney is going to finish the primary with the highest percentage of the vote. In the standard sense, Romney will win the New Hampshire primary.

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Ron Paul Should Perform Well in New Hampshire, But ...

However, Romney may end up losing so much of his lead to Paul that Paul will, although finishing second, win the "expectations game," and be declared the de facto winner of the New Hampshire primary by the national media. And if Paul does so, he'll receive all of the benefits that stem from that "expectations game" win -- media coverage, name recognition, and money. How well does Paul have to do to win the expectations game? Roughly come within 10 percentage points of Romney -- say a 40/30 percent finish or a 36/28 percent finish -- something along those lines.

And, by extension, Paul at that point will be a considered "a contender" for the Republican Party's 2012 nomination for president of the United States.

A contender, that is, but not a strong contender. That's because it remains to be seen whether Paul can parlay his limited government / civil liberties / neo-isolationism-bring-the-troops message into a platform that can govern the largest and most technologically advanced economy in the world, in a remarkably diverse nation that's undergoing epochal social changes.

History says Paul will not be able to: the Paul worldview just does not jibe well with a diverse, complex, modern civilization. That is, if you believe that a nation should be governed by the intentions of the majority -- not by a small segment of the ideological spectrum. Moreover, some of Paul's core beliefs are antithetical to modern civilization. His view that the U.S. Federal Reserve should be eliminated is not only not feasible, it's misguided and absurd. There is no modern global financial system without the U.S. Federal Reserve and the tasks performed by companion central banks around the world.

But right now Ron Paul does have "big mo" on his side. Back in the 1988 campaign, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush said he sensed a shift in voter preference that boded well for his November 1988 election, saying he had "big mo" on his side -- mo-mentum.

That momentum should propel Paul to a better-than-expected finish in New Hampshire, which as noted, will enable him to push Romney through at least Super Tuesday on March 6, and maybe for a longer period.

But this GOP nomination race is still Romney's to lose, and the calculation forwarded here is -- he's not going to lose it.

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