I keep getting e-mails asking me if I still think Romney's going to be the Republican nominee. Some seem to feel it's becoming evident he's not and I don't know where they're getting that unless it's that some news outlets are straining to keep the "contest" exciting. For the recent Super Tuesday, you can find a lot of reports that say Romney had a terrible night and you can find others that look at the same numbers and say he's coming ever close to locking it up.
Nate Silver, who's been calling this stuff with a fair degree of omniscience, breaks down polls and says that Santorum can't get to the magic number of delegates and Romney can. But I think you can just look at the guys and see something of that. I suspect a lot of voters just don't view Santorum or Gingrich as presidential material. They may like a lot of what those men are saying but they wish there was another option saying it. You kind of have to look at the person talking the talk and also see someone who looks like they belong in the Oval Office and, more importantly, can win it.
My guess, and this is just a guess, is that Romney either gets enough delegates to win or he gets so close that party elders persuade the others to forfeit, lest a deadlocked convention result in a G.O.P.-wounding convention. Romney does some kind of outreach to those he's defeated, vowing to work on Newt's peachy Moon Colony idea and some equally-practical notion of Santorum's. Someone hugs Ron Paul. Romney picks a veep who's basically Sarah Palin politically but without her shortcomings as a campaigner. And then suddenly, every prominent Republican, including those who called him an Obama clone and flip-flopper, decides Mitt is the perfect candidate and they never thought otherwise.
We can all make up other scenarios that might be more interesting to watch…and a deadlock would give us the first time in about thirty years that the TV coverage of a convention was anything more than an infomerical and therefore worth watching. But though I think I'd rather see Santorum be the nominee (more likely to lose, more likely to prove to the G.O.P. that they need to move back towards moderates), I still think it's Mitt.