A tale of two winners

ANALYSIS

By Charlie Cook

updated 2:38 p.m. ET Aug. 15, 2007

Charlie Cook • E-mail

AMES, IOWA - It's hard to imagine a more different pair of winners than former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The two emerged from Saturday's GOP presidential straw poll in first and second place with 31.5 percent and 18.1 percent of the vote, respectively.

Romney is the wealthy, Harvard-educated son of a former auto industry CEO and Michigan governor. Huckabee had a considerably more modest upbringing; the son of a Hope, Arkansas, firefighter and part-time auto mechanic, graduate of Ouachita Baptist University and the first male in his family to graduate from high school. Both are winners and impressive, though in very different ways.

Romney critics are quick to argue that he beat a bunch of second-stringers, since his top rivals for the nomination didn't compete. Romney also spent far and away the most money, and there was a diminished turnout in Ames this year. According to the critics, these factors should take away from the luster of his victory.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Fred Thompson in fact did not compete in the straw poll. Giuliani and McCain both announced in early June that they would not participate. Thompson's oft-delayed entry into the race gives him a somewhat more plausible excuse, but still raises questions about his inability to get things going.

NBC News video Romney hails his win in Iowa poll Aug. 13: Mitt Romney talks with TODAY's Meredith Vieira about winning the Iowa Republican Party straw poll. Today show

To say, however, that Romney won because his most formidable rivals did not enter the ring conveniently ignores the fact that both had gone into the building, walked up and looked into the ring at the competition and decided to skip the fight instead. Giuliani and McCain, particularly the latter, had hired Iowa operatives and started putting together efforts early on. Then they opted not to compete. Those decisions were made after Romney began surging in Iowa, both in terms of polling and organizational activity. A glance at the graph of public polls among Iowa Republicans on pollster.com shows that beginning in the middle of last year, Romney began moving up in the polls. Since February, his movement has been significant while, at the same time, Giuliani and McCain have consistently dropped.

Early on, Romney invested heavily in organizational efforts (which is what the Iowa caucus is all about) and used television ads to make up for the name recognition disparity between himself and the two better-known front-runners. Giuliani and McCain didn't compete in the straw poll because they weren't doing well there, not because they decided it wasn't important.

When asked prior to the balloting what would constitute a Romney win, my response was that a clean Romney win would be his receiving over 30 percent with a 10-point spread between him and the second-place finisher. A 31.5 percent showing by Romney clears the first hurdle by a point and a half and a 13.4-percent margin over Huckabee seals the deal.

Historical data compiled by the Washington Post shows Romney's 31.5 percent ranks lower than former Vice President George H.W. Bush's 36 percent in 1987 and the Rev. Pat Robertson's 34 percent in 1991. However, it is a touch above then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush's 31 percent in 1999 and the 1995 tie between former Sens. Robert Dole and Phil Gramm, who each garnered 24 percent. A 13.4-point margin is less than George H.W. Bush's 21-point win over former Texas Gov. John Connally in 1979, but more than George W. Bush's 10-point win over Steve Forbes in 1999, or Robertson's nine point win over Dole in 1987. In short, a 31.5 percent, 13.4-point margin in an 11-way field isn't too shabby by any historical measure. And it does seem a little cheesy for those who declined to get into the ring to attempt to devalue a win.

Did Romney spend a lot of money? No question about it. Anticipating a spending war over the Iowa straw poll on the level of 1999 fight, Romney's campaign spent a lot early, but not out of line with what McCain's and Giuliani's campaigns were expected to spend at the time. It is also clear that the Romney campaign began to scale back that spending some time ago after the McCain implosion and after it was apparent that Giuliani and Fred Thompson would not compete.

A useful comparison might be a Romney breakfast event on the Thursday morning before the straw poll at a diner-by-day, blues-club-by-night establishment in the small town of Tama, with a Forbes event at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in the same town a few days before the 1999 straw poll. The Forbes event featured a level of overspending the likes of which I had never seen in a small-town, run-of-the-mill campaign stop. "First-class" and "overkill" are two terms that come to mind to describe the Forbes event, while the Romney function seemed as if a politically savvy MBA sat down and planned a small-town Iowa Republican event, wanting to maximize support without wasting too much money. The Romney campaign looked like it was spending at the level a top-tier presidential campaign would, not much more or less.

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