Santorum Suspends: A Nomination Race in Context

Well, FHQ will add its two cents. And not surprisingly, we'll look at Rick Santorum's decision to suspend his presidential campaign through the lens of the delegate count.

All too often delegate counts don't matter in the grand scheme of things in most presidential nomination races. To the extent that they do, it is fleeting. Counting up delegates is only consequential and/or necessary in a couple of instances:

1. After the race has progressed far enough that one candidate has effectively taken all/most of the momentum -- or continued riding it from the invisible primary portion of the campaign -- and thus stretched out to a large enough lead to make a comeback unlikely if not impossible.
2. If the race has progressed to a point where two or more candidates are trading primary and caucus wins and staying within range of each other in terms of the delegate count. 

These are the extremes and throughout much of the post-reform era the process has moved ever closer to the former rather than the latter. A constantly frontloading calendar gave, for much of that period, frontrunning candidates a greater and better opportunity to effectively wrap up the nomination early if they had established themselves as the clear frontrunner heading into the contest portion of the race. The nomination races in both parties in 2000 and for the Democrats in 2004 are good examples. But if 2008 demonstrated anything it was that if the invisible primary (fundraising, poll position and endorsement) has proven inconclusive, then true delegate counting may ensue. Certainly, this was more the case on the Democratic side in 2008 than among the Republican candidates.

One easy way of describing the 2012 Republican nomination race is to say that despite all the rules changes and all the calendar movement, it still played out pretty much like 2008. Super Tuesday came and went with one candidate well ahead of the others in the delegate count and a month later it was over. Of course, John McCain was way out in front of his rivals in 2008 after the February 5 Super Tuesday series of contests, but a month later -- after wins in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont -- the Arizona senator wrapped up the nomination. And that's just as it was in 2012. Romney emerged from Super Tuesday on March 6 with a sizable enough delegate lead and eliminated his final viable opponent a month later after wins in Maryland, Washington, DC and Wisconsin.

Now, the explanation is more complex than that. After all McCain surpassed the 1191 delegate mark to officially clinch the nomination a month after Super Tuesday, whereas Romney will continue to march toward 1144 in a semi-contested to uncontested way for the rest of the calendar. The point here is not to minimize that distinction. Rather, the intent is to point out that while delegate counting is fun -- more so for some of us than others -- often these contests for a party's nomination are more a process of elimination. Presumptive nominees don't often have to concern themselves with the sorts of gain-deficit ratios and other delegate calculations Barbara Norrander (2000) so eloquently describes in discussing the end game of nomination contests. No, more often than not, it is simply a matter of a frontrunner eliminating his or her final viable opponent (Norrander 1996).

We counted delegates for a while in 2012, but this one ended like so many other presidential nomination races of the post-reform era ended: with the runner-up withdrawing. In this case, Mitt Romney had established enough of a delegate lead that a Santorum comeback was unlikely if not impossible.


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