Tres escenarios ganadores para Romney

Ross Douthat:

The Cakewalk: My colleague Nate Silver gives Romney a 32 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses outright, behind Ron Paul but well ahead of the rest of the field, Newt Gingrich included. In the Real Clear Politics average of multiple polls, Romney trails Paul by less than two points for the Iowa lead. If the libertarian congressman dips just a bit, which is easy to imagine, since both the press and his rivals are only now beginning to highlight his more extreme views and dubious associations, Romney could plausibly squeak out a victory.

If that happens, the battle for the nomination will be all but over. Paul, Gingrich and Jon Huntsman have decent numbers in New Hampshire, but Romney has held a solid lead for months, and the state’s famous contrarianism notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine his edge evaporating after an Iowan win. The South Carolina primary would then become the last real chance for an anti-Romney to emerge – but even if one does, they’ll be easily pigeonholed as a regional candidate, destined to succumb by spring. And Romney’s numbers in South Carolina are respectable enough that it’s also easy to imagine him riding the Iowa-New Hampshire twofer to victory there as well, effectively wrapping up the nomination at the end of January.

The Paul Scenario: If Ron Paul wins Iowa, expect a lot of talk about how his unexpected success promises to “scramble” the Republican race. There will be murmurs of a brokered convention and a final spasm of chatter about somehow drafting a Jeb Bush/Mitch Daniels/Marco Rubio savior figure as the nominee.

Don’t pay any attention. Unless Paul can follow up with a victory in New Hampshire – which seems like an enormous long shot, given his many as-yet-unexploited liabilities – his triumph in the caucuses will mainly serve to undercut the hopes of the other not-Romney candidates, turning the primary campaign into a two-man race in which the former Massachusetts governor will almost certainly prevail.

Pundits and political professionals have consistently underestimated Paul, and his supporters insist (vocally!) that he has a higher ceiling than many observers think. That may be so, but it won’t be enough. As Salon’s Steve Kornacki suggests, the absolute best-case scenario for Paul is a kind of right-wing version of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign – potent enough to give his party’s establishment heartburn, but ultimately too outside-the-Republican-mainstream to keep Romney from cruising to the nomination.

The Long Slog: It’s still possible that a non-Paul, non-Romney contender will win Iowa. Newt Gingrich’s numbers have sagged, but he’s still competitive. Rick Perry and Rick Santorum have both shown some life in recent polls. If that happens – if a candidate who has a higher ceiling among Republicans than Paul wins the caucuses – then the winner could perform impressively in South Carolina and Florida as well, potentially drawing Romney into a grinding battle that isn’t settled until the spring.

But even then, the design of the primary season heavily favors the former governor. As Sean Trende explained in a Real Clear Politics piece last week, the Republican National Committee “looked enviously at the lengthy Democratic primary from 2008 — which strengthened the Democrats by forcing candidates to conduct registration drives and set up infrastructure in all 50 states — and decided that a longer primary system would benefit the G.O.P. as well.” To that end, they required early states to allocate their delegates proportionally, rather than holding winner-take-all contests. But they also didn’t want the race to drag out too long, so they allowed later states – those voting after April 1st — to continue to award all their delegates to the first-place finisher.

Because the early states aren’t winner-take-all, there’s no chance of a Gingrich or a Perry doing what John McCain did in 2008, and building up an insurmountable delegate lead by March on the strength of a string of narrow victories. And the winner-take-all contests that follow are mostly in regions that seem likely to break for the former Massachusetts governor – the Northeast, the West Coast and the Mormon-heavy Mountain West. If it’s a two-man race in April, in other words, Romney will (still) have the inside track.