John McCain's victories stretched from New York to California and he piled up more delegates than his two rivals combined. But he didn't seal the deal for the Republican presidential nomination and that's a problem for him and his party.
The 71-year-old Arizona senator is more than halfway to the number of delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, but he hasn't been able to shake Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The three-way race has exposed deep fissures within Republican ranks. Even Mr. McCain's loud critics concede he will be contesting the general election in November, but he risks doing so without an energized base of loyalists, the people who make the telephone calls, knock on doors and donate money.
It is a dangerous scenario.
Mr. McCain has secured at least 703 of the 1,191 delegates needed for nomination, largely with the votes of independents, moderate Republicans opposed to the Iraq war and crossover Democrats. "Which is kind of insane if you think about it," said his biographer, Matt Welch, noting that voters hostile to the war are backing "a potential commander-in chief who makes [President George W.] Bush look gun-shy."
After his victories in South Carolina and Florida, Mr. McCain should have been able to scare up enough votes on Super Tuesday to put him over the top. But Mr. Huckabee kept enough evangelical Christians at his side to win five states (and up his delegate total to 190), while Mr. Romney continued to show his talent for winning states in which he used to live with ones so remote - hello, North Dakota and Alaska - that no one bothered to campaign there. He now has 269 delegates.
Mr. McCain has won more than 37 per cent of the vote in just eight of the 29 states in which there have been primaries so far and in seven of those jurisdictions, places like Massachusetts and New York, Republicans are candidates for the endangered-species list. In other words, his performance indicates that he can't win in Republican states.
Mr. Huckabee's surprising revival on Tuesday confirms that. Even after his victory in Iowa in January, his campaign was nearly broke and running on fumes. But he presented himself as a social conservative and swept not just in his home state of Arkansas but also Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and West Virginia.
His upside is limited but he's hanging in there because he's having so much fun. He is this year's Ross Perot, spoiling Mr. Romney's chances to attract conservative voters. Besides, there is an immense amount of speculation that he's angling to be Mr. McCain's vice-presidential running mate.
Mr. Romney is staying in the race, as well. He has put $35-million of his own money into his campaign and no one expects him to drop out until the math makes his fate clear. "We have a very fluid race right now," his press secretary, Kevin Madden, said yesterday.
As the new face of the Republican Party, Mr. McCain continues to face bitter opposition from conservatives who believe his ideological apostasies are too numerous to count. "John McCain doesn't adhere to conservative principles," said Jed Babbin, editor of the conservative magazine Human Events. "I think his record proves that."
The big question is whether conservatives will see that perfect can be the enemy of good, and vote for Mr. McCain. The candidate gets a chance to woo them today when he speaks to 6,000 activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. (His rivals will speak later.) Mr. Babbin said he needs to promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court judges, lay out how he would win in Iraq and reject his liberal views on illegal immigrants.
Six primaries in the next week, from Washington, D.C., to Washington State, will show whether conservatives are warming to him. If all else fails, he can start talking about the front-runner in the Democratic race. "Hatred of Hillary Clinton transcends everything else," Mr. Welch said.
With reports from Associated Press and the Guardian
