Romney takes Maryland, DC, talks tough to Obama

DAVID ESPO

KASIE HUNT

Asso­ci­ated Press

MILWAUKEE — Mitt Rom­ney tight­ened his grip on the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion Tues­day night, win­ning pri­maries in Mary­land and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and lead­ing in Wis­con­sin, with time left over to swap charges with Pres­i­dent Barack Obama.

“Four more years?” Rom­ney asked sar­cas­ti­cally of the president.

In excerpts of primary-night remarks released in advance of a late-night cel­e­bra­tion with sup­port­ers, Rom­ney said Obama was “a lit­tle out of touch” and has presided over near-record job losses as well as increases in poverty, home fore­clo­sures, gov­ern­ment debt and gaso­line prices.

The vic­to­ries enabled Rom­ney to pad his already-wide del­e­gate lead over Repub­li­can rival Rick San­to­rum, who is com­ing under grow­ing pres­sure to aban­don his own can­di­dacy in the name of party unity.

Mary­land returns showed Rom­ney gain­ing 50 per­cent of the vote, com­pared with 29 per­cent for San­to­rum, 11 per­cent for Newt Gin­grich and 9 per­cent for Ron Paul.

In Wis­con­sin, with 4 per­cent of the vote counted, Rom­ney had 42 per­cent to 39 per­cent for San­to­rum, 11 per­cent for Paul and 6 per­cent for Gingrich.

With 14 per­cent of precincts counted in Wash­ing­ton, Rom­ney had 68 per­cent of the vote to 15 per­cent for Paul and 12 per­cent for Gin­grich. San­to­rum was not on the ballot.

There were 95 Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion del­e­gates at stake for the day, includ­ing 42 in Wis­con­sin, the only one of the three con­tests that a fad­ing San­to­rum seri­ously contested.

Rom­ney won at least 44 del­e­gates in Mary­land and Washington.

That gave him 616 of the 1,144 needed to clinch the nom­i­na­tion and on a pace to do so before the end of the pri­mary sea­son in June. San­to­rum had 272 del­e­gates, Gin­grich 135 and Paul 51.

Inter­views with vot­ers leav­ing Repub­li­can polling places in Mary­land and Wis­con­sin showed an elec­torate more con­cerned with a candidate’s abil­ity to abil­ity to defeat Obama than with the strength of his con­ser­vatism, his moral char­ac­ter or his stand on the issues. Sim­i­lar sound­ings in ear­lier states have con­sis­tently worked to Romney’s advantage.

Vot­ers in both states were less apt to be born again or evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians than in most pre­vi­ous con­tests — 34 per­cent in Wis­con­sin and 32 per­cent in Mary­land. Based on ear­lier con­tests, that, too, sug­gested an advan­tage for Romney.

Increas­ingly, Rom­ney and many senior fig­ures in his party have begun behav­ing as if the pri­maries are an after­thought, hop­ing to pivot to the fall cam­paign and crit­i­cism of Obama.

“He gets full credit or blame for what’s hap­pened in this econ­omy and what’s hap­pened to gaso­line prices under his watch and what’s hap­pened to our schools and what’s hap­pened to our mil­i­tary forces,” Rom­ney said of the pres­i­dent while cam­paign­ing in Wauke­sha, Wis.

Obama said things could be worse — and pre­dicted they would be if Rom­ney and Repub­li­cans got their way.

In a speech to the annual meet­ing of The Asso­ci­ated Press, he said a House-passed bud­get writ­ten by Repub­li­cans was “anti­thet­i­cal to our entire his­tory as a land of oppor­tu­nity and upward mobil­ity for every­body who’s will­ing to work for it … It is a pre­scrip­tion for decline.”

When he wasn’t focus­ing his rhetoric on Obama, Rom­ney prod­ded San­to­rum to quit the race, sug­gest­ing a refusal to do so could cost the party the elec­tion in November.

“The right thing for us, I think, is to get a nom­i­nee as soon as we can and be able to focus on Barack Obama,” Rom­ney said in an inter­view with Fox News. “You have to remem­ber that it was Ross Perot that allowed Bill Clin­ton to win” in 1992, he added, a ref­er­ence to the Texan who ran as an inde­pen­dent that year.

There was no imme­di­ate response from Santorum.

For Rom­ney, the end of the con­tested pri­mary cam­paign could hardly come soon enough. Obama has gained in the polls in recent months, par­tic­u­larly among women, as Repub­li­cans vie among them­selves for sup­port from a con­ser­v­a­tive party elec­torate. San­to­rum has devoted more time to social issues — includ­ing birth con­trol — than Rom­ney, who has gen­er­ally stayed focused on eco­nomic issues.

Addi­tion­ally, sur­veys indi­cate Amer­i­cans are grow­ing more opti­mistic about the over­all state of the econ­omy. Unem­ploy­ment has fallen in recent months, but it is still at a rel­a­tively high 8.3 per­cent of the work force.

San­to­rum made lit­tle or no effort in Mary­land, was not on the bal­lot in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and con­cen­trated much of his time in Wis­con­sin in rural areas.

He all but con­ceded defeat in advance in Wis­con­sin, retreat­ing to Mars, Pa., for an elec­tion night appear­ance in his home state.

Wis­con­sin was the fourth indus­trial state to vote in a lit­tle more than a month after Michi­gan, Ohio and Illi­nois, a string that Rom­ney has exploited to gain momen­tum as well as a grow­ing del­e­gate lead in the cam­paign for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nomination.

The for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor won a close Michi­gan pri­mary on Feb. 28, then an even closer one in Ohio a week later, fol­lowed by a con­vinc­ing vic­tory in Illi­nois on March 20. At each turn, he was backed by his own robust, well-financed orga­ni­za­tion as well as a deep-pocketed super PAC that assured him of an over­whelm­ing advan­tage in tele­vi­sion advertising.

In Wis­con­sin, Rom­ney and the super PAC, Restore Our Future, spent roughly $3 mil­lion on tele­vi­sion ads com­pared to about $850,000 for San­to­rum and the Red, White and Blue Fund, a super Pac that sup­ports the for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia sen­a­tor. Much of the Romney-aligned super Pac adver­tis­ing con­sisted of attacks on Santorum.

As was the case in Michi­gan and Ohio, pri­vate polling showed Rom­ney trail­ing in Wis­con­sin a few weeks before the vote. But he over­took his rival in pub­lic sur­veys as the tele­vised attacks took their toll.

The sur­veys of vot­ers in Maryland’s and Wisconsin’s GOP pres­i­den­tial pri­maries were con­ducted for AP and the tele­vi­sion net­works by Edi­son Research. They included pre­lim­i­nary results among 1,153 vot­ers inter­viewed Tues­day as they left polling places at 25 ran­domly selected sites in Mary­land, and among 1,063 Wis­con­sin vot­ers as they left 35 polling places across that state. Results from both states had a mar­gin of sam­pling error of plus or minus 4 per­cent­age points.

There was no sur­vey in Washington.

Already, the early out­lines of a gen­eral elec­tion ad war are vis­i­ble. Obama’s re-election cam­paign is air­ing com­mer­cials in a half-dozen bat­tle­ground states that accuse Rom­ney of sid­ing with Big Oil “for their tax breaks, attack­ing higher mileage stan­dards and renewables.”

The ads are a rapid response to $3 mil­lion in com­mer­cials aired by an out­side group, Amer­i­can Energy Reliance, blam­ing the pres­i­dent for ris­ing gaso­line prices.

In his cam­paign for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion, Rom­ney has col­lected endorse­ments from for­mer Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a tea party favorite, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wis­con­sin, author of a con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get that Repub­li­cans pushed through the House last week and is cer­tain to play a promi­nent role in the fall cam­paign for the White House.

At the same time, Rom­ney con­tin­ues to strug­gle for sup­port from some of the party’s most reli­able con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers. In the past five weeks, while win­ning across the Mid­west, he has lost to San­to­rum in Alabama, Mis­sis­sippi and Louisiana, all part of the tra­di­tional South­ern polit­i­cal base.

Penn­syl­va­nia is one of five North­east­ern states with pri­maries on April 24, the next date on the Repub­li­can cal­en­dar after a three-week intermission.

San­to­rum has con­ceded he’s not going to amass the del­e­gates needed to win the nom­i­na­tion by the time con­ven­tion opens, but his strat­egy — and hope — is to pre­vent Rom­ney from doing so. Cam­paign­ing in Apple­ton, Wis., on Mon­day, he said a strug­gle at the con­ven­tion over the nom­i­na­tion would be a “fas­ci­nat­ing dis­play of open democ­racy” and would encour­age more Repub­li­can vot­ers to par­tic­i­pate in the election.

Rom­ney wants no part of an open con­ven­tion, and increas­ingly, senior party lead­ers agree and are will­ing to say so.

Posted by AP News on Apr 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.