El mejor escenario para Huntsman: suplantar a Romney

Nate Silver:

There was Mr. Huntsman’s tactical challenge. This challenge has a name: Mitt Romney. How was Mr. Huntsman, running at about 2 percent in the polls, going to knock off Mr. Romney, who was running at 20 percent? Especially given that the two have a fair number of biographical and policy similarities, but Mr. Romney has much more money, much more support from the Republican establishment, much better name recognition among Republican voters and much more campaign experience, having run for president before.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman had some running room to Mr. Romney’s left. But running toward a wing of one’s party is a good way to get 15 percent or 20 percent of the vote and no more. Moreover, running to Mr. Romney’s left meant that Mr. Huntsman had little chance of competing in Iowa, an electorate that has very few moderates. Perhaps wisely, his campaign has expended almost no resources there.

But by giving up on Iowa, Mr. Huntsman invited two further problems. The first problem is simply that when you don’t win Iowa, someone else does. If that someone were Mr. Romney, he would probably become his party’s nominee. If it were someone like Rick Perry, that candidate might become the front-runner.

The second and related problem is New Hampshire, where Mr. Romney has something of a home-state advantage and has always significantly outperformed his national numbers. You can’t downplay expectations in both Iowa and New Hampshire and expect to have much of a chance (see: Giuliani, Rudolph W.), meaning that Mr. Huntsman must perform well in the state. But even if Mr. Romney were weakened by a poor showing in Iowa, or by other events during the campaign, he’d have a long way to drop before becoming vulnerable in New Hampshire as well.

Thus, Mr. Huntsman’s campaign was predicated on something of a long-shot parlay. Mr. Huntsman probably did not have the firepower to overcome Mr. Romney all by himself. Instead, he needed some help from another candidate, someone who weakened Mr. Romney to the point that he could lose New Hampshire. The problem is that he also needed the “helper” candidate to be vulnerable as well, and not have a lock on the nomination.

Consider Mrs. Bachmann. She is capable of beating Mr. Romney in Iowa. But a victory by her there might be chalked up to her regional advantage in the state or to her appeal to evangelicals — perceived as a one-hit wonder along the lines of Mike Huckabee in 2008 or Pat Robertson’s second-place showing in 1988. A win by Mrs. Bachmann might thus do little damage to Mr. Romney in New Hampshire or the other states. On the other hand, if a candidate like Tim Pawlenty had won Iowa — someone who had more traditional credentials and more support from the party establishment — he or she might have become the major alternative to Mr. Romney, with Mr. Huntsman playing little role.

The reason why I’ve become less skeptical about Mr. Huntsman’s chances is that he might have found the perfect foil in the current Iowa front-runner, Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich is enough within the Republican mainstream that he can compete directly for some of Mr. Romney’s voters, something which by and large did not appear to be true for candidates like Mrs. Bachmann and Herman Cain who had surged previously.

But Mr. Gingrich nevertheless faces a number of fundamental challenges — including, most notably, that the party establishment is extremely reluctant to nominate him. Mr. Gingrich is exactly the sort of candidate who could substantially harm Mr. Romney’s campaign without locking up the nomination for himself — and the odds of this will increase the more that Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney go after one another.

The best-case scenario for Mr. Huntsman might be if you had a result like this one in Iowa:

1. Newt Gingrich — 25 percent
2. Ron Paul — 22 percent
3. Michele Bachmann — 16 percent
4. Rick Perry — 14 percent
5. Mitt Romney — 14 percent
6. Rick Santorum — 9 percent

(...) Even absent this specific scenario, there are other permutations where Mr. Romney loses New Hampshire but the candidate who beats him does not have a lock on the nomination. If either Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Paul were to win New Hampshire, for instance, Mr. Huntsman could claim that he had supplanted Mr. Romney as the safe and electable alternative with a strong second-place (or perhaps even third-place) showing. Keep in mind that supplanting Mr. Romney would not be tantamount to winning the nomination — it’s possible that the contest could come down to Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Huntsman, or even Mr. Perry and Mr. Huntsman, and that Mr. Huntsman would lose that fight. But at least he’d be in the ballgame.