With John McCain's 5-point victory in Florida's Republican primary, he appears all but unstoppable. The momentum that this win, wider than expected, gives the Arizonan going into Super Tuesday means that only a massive mistake would derail his candidacy now.
The vacuum that existed in the GOP field, unfilled by Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Fred Thompson, remained open long enough to bring McCain back to life. It turns out that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. McCain likes to joke that he has more scars than Frankenstein's monster. They also seem to share the ability to rise from the dead.
But what about Romney? He'll soldier on for a while -- he has the personal money to persevere. Presidential candidates are rarely forced out by primary and caucus losses; they normally get out when they run out of money because repeated losses have convinced donors of the hopelessness of the cause and they close their checkbooks.
Romney's own financial resources are sufficient to fund him through several more bleak Election Nights and allow him to keep hoping that McCain either can't break the 50 percent mark because of his deep unpopularity with certain factions of the party, or will make some fatal mistake. But neither is likely. Despite having many shortcomings -- make that many, many shortcomings -- McCain rarely makes a serious misstep. And more and more Republicans are coming to the realization -- unpleasant though it may be to many -- that McCain alone has a realistic chance of beating the Democratic nominee.
McCain can reach out to the middle of the electorate. And among the GOP contenders, only he can attract enough independents to have at least a 50-50 chance, give or take 5 percent, of winning the general election. Many conservatives and party establishment members don't trust or like McCain, but if he's up against Barack Obama or, especially, Hillary Rodham Clinton, they'll show up at the polls for him, even if they have to hold their noses.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the Clinton victory in Florida's "beauty contest" doesn't affect the race much because no delegates were at stake. Obama grabbed early momentum with his Iowa win. Clinton reclaimed it with her shocking comeback in New Hampshire, followed up by another win in Nevada. Obama's impressive win in South Carolina is discounted a bit, because 55 percent of the Democratic voters participating were African-American. And Obama's 78 percent to 19 percent victory over Clinton among blacks (John Edwards received only 2 percent of the black vote) isn't any more predictive of what will happen next than were Jesse Jackson's Palmetto State primary victories in 1984 and 1988.
Racial voting patterns are the elephant in the Democratic living room. Entrance and exit polls indicate that Obama won just 36 percent of the white vote in the New Hampshire primary, 34 percent in the Nevada caucuses, 24 percent in the South Carolina primary, and 23 percent in Florida. The point is not his downward trend, though that is curious, but that no one can win the Democratic nomination by attracting so little of the white vote.
Obama does win the African-American vote impressively -- 83 percent in Nevada, 78 percent in South Carolina, and 73 percent in Florida -- but that isn't enough, particularly when Hispanic voters broke 64 percent to 26 percent for Clinton in Nevada, and 59 percent to 30 percent for Clinton in Florida. The long-brewing rivalry over which will be the dominant minority within the Democratic Party is finally coming to a head in this Clinton-Obama contest. Simply put, for Obama to win his party's nomination, he has to substantially improve his performance among white voters. And one question raised by the withdrawal of Edwards on Wednesday is, "Where do Edwards's white supporters go?"
The Gallup Organization's nightly national tracking poll shows that, heading toward Super Tuesday, Obama was narrowing the gap: Clinton held a 17-point lead in January 20, 22, and 23 polling -- 48 percent to 31 percent. But her edge was only 9 points -- 43 percent to 34 percent -- in the January 26-28 three-night moving average.
If Clinton can hold on until February 5, we just might end up next November with the Clinton-McCain matchup that a year ago looked like a safe bet.