John McCain is now the heir apparent for the Republican presidential nomination.
Florida, a largely urban state with a diverse population, mirrors the biggest states in the nation. And so the Arizona senator's victory here yesterday is likely to be repeated in California, New York and elsewhere on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, where he's leading in the polls.
Mr. McCain finally proved that he can appeal to Republicans themselves. For Florida is a so-called closed state. Independents cannot vote, as they did substantially in his favour in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Yet Mr. McCain took the state square and mostly fair.
Further, there were reports last night that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is going to drop out of the race and endorse Mr. McCain before tonight's debate in California. Finally, in Florida, momentum ceased to be an endangered species. It is flourishing, within the tent of Mr. McCain.
That does not mean this contest is over. The result was close, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has the resources to carry on the fight. But he has lost most battles outside his home state of Michigan. And teams that can't win on the road don't take the cup.
For Mr. Giuliani, last night was cause for despair and shame. Having spent much of the past year campaigning here, he finished barely ahead of Mike Huckabee.
This teaches us two things: First, and most obviously, that the big-state strategy doesn't work in the new primary format. Mr. Giuliani believed that Florida voters would ignore the verdict of such pipsqueak states as Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, they followed those races intently. When Mr. Giuliani failed to be taken seriously up there, he stopped being taken seriously down here.
Second, it teaches us something about the depth of the conservatism - no, the reactionary redneckism - that characterizes a large chunk of the Republican Party.
Mr. Giuliani offered the GOP a modern prescription for conservatism: one that emphasized a tough law-and-order stand and a minimal state constrained by deep tax cuts, but that also embraced the reality of Latino immigration, showed no particular interest in God or guns, and even displayed a marked tolerance for sexual minorities. In other words, he offered the Republican Party his version of New York.
As far as Republican voters were concerned, he might as well have offered them Gomorrah.
Since the only real conservative in the race, Fred Thompson, had trouble getting out of bed in the morning, and Mr. Huckabee's alarming tendency to spend money on schools and roads while governor of Arkansas disqualified him, Republican voters were left with two choices: Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain.
Both men are intelligent, urban, moderate conservatives. Both are running from that truth as fast as they can.
Mr. Romney has switched his stand on abortion, gay rights, illegal immigration, public health care, gun control, stem cell research and taste in fiction. (Last spring he revealed in an interview that his favourite book was Battlefield Earth, by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. His campaign headquarters quickly clarified: that was Mr. Romney's favourite science fiction novel; his favourite regular novel was the much safer Huckleberry Finn.) Mr. McCain, for his part, would rather you forget about his championing of campaign finance reform; his co-sponsoring of legislation that would have created a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants and his steadfast opposition to the Bush tax cuts.
Now it's all about his opposition to abortion, his support for the buildup in the war in Iraq, and his own plan to cut taxes.
Yet in the end, last night demonstrated that the Republican Party's most conservative wing does not get to entirely call the tune. Exit polls showed that people who identified themselves as moderate Republicans emphatically supported Mr. McCain. In effect, they believe Mr. Romney truly has reshaped his soul, and become a conservative Republican. At their core, no one believes Mr. McCain has gone there. To the extent that moderates helped a closet moderate win Florida, this is good news for the Republican Party.
More good news: According to the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald, Mr. Romney ran more than 4,400 ad spots in Florida, paid for by $5-million (U.S.) of his own money. Mr. Giuliani ran just more than 3,000, while Mr. McCain had 470, all of them this month. And look who won.
The mouthpieces of the conservative wing of the GOP have declared Mr. McCain intolerable. Much of the party's establishment is no more comfortable with this maverick - though in Florida, at least, endorsements from key Florida Republicans, especially by Governor Charlie Crist, suggested the establishment is hardly monolithic.
Regardless, the old guard may have no choice but to heave a heavy sigh and welcome this least predictable of Republicans into the pen. And they may need to reshape that pen, to make their party welcoming to conservatives as enlightened, or at least as unorthodox, as Senator John McCain.
