Terry Mitchell

How SC Social Conservatives Can Consolidate



Posted: Wednesday, January 18, 2012

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

Social conservatives in South Carolina are on the verge of shooting themselves in the foot – again. In the 2008 South Carolina Republican primary, supporters of the two social conservative candidates, Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson, easily had John McCain’s supporters outnumbered. However, McCain, a moderate, still won that primary, and ultimately the GOP nomination, because social conservatives split their votes between Huckabee and Thompson. And it looks like history is about to repeat itself four years later.

This time, we have moderate Mitt Romney who has won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, becoming the first non-incumbent Republican to win both in the same year. Now we come to South Carolina where Romney is also leading in the polls, but not by an overwhelming margin. There are three social conservative candidates, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry, whose combined South Carolina poll numbers currently exceed those of Romney. The problem for social conservatives is that they seem headed towards splitting their votes again, giving the state’s primary, and likely the nomination, to Romney.

The only way Romney can be stopped at this point is if these social conservatives decide to consolidate their votes before it is too late. If Romney wins South Carolina, most political experts agree that he will be virtually unstoppable in his quest to win the GOP presidential nomination. Therefore, the time for consolidation is running out. But with the clock ticking, South Carolina social conservatives appear to be more splintered than ever. Gingrich is currently far exceeding Santorum and Perry in the South Carolina polls. However, a group of influential social conservatives meeting in Texas this past weekend chose Santorum as their man. And Perry, although still in single digits in South Carolina, continues to campaign vigorously.

So what can the good South Carolina social conservatives do to effectively consolidate before the clock strikes midnight on their dreams of stopping Romney? Well, here is my humble suggestion, for all it’s worth. They should stick with the candidate of their choice, until Saturday morning, when the primary voting begins. At that point, they should check the Real Clear Politics average of polls for their state and vote for whomever among their three candidates is polling the best. While I’m not normally an advocate of pragmatic voting, I frankly don’t see any other way to stop Romney from winning this primary.
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

This Article has been viewed 179 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Christofer French
 114 days 12 hours ago.
74 fans.
I welcome your commentary. It keeps me up on things I don't think hard about. Thanks much.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.