After Rick Santorum’s exit from the race last week, Philip Klein and HotAir’s Allahpundit considered what would have happened if Sarah Palin rather than Santorum had been Mitt Romney’s right-wing foil. I think that this point from Klein is interesting …
… Had Palin been in the race as the conservative alternative, it would have been very difficult for Romney to attack her given the passionate following she has among many conservatives, because he wouldn’t want to risk alienating them. Even if he had ultimately triumphed after a brutal primary fight, a lot of her loyal supporters would have found it difficult to bury the hatchet for the general election.
By contrast, Santorum came into the race with a very small following and was polling in the low single digits early on … His defeat is a disappointment to his supporters, no doubt, but less likely to sting as badly for as many people as a Palin defeat would have. Now that the primary is over, it will be a lot easier for Santorum voters to get behind Romney in the general election than it would have been for Palin given her built in fan base.
… but it depends on the assumption that a Palin-Romney race would have been even more “brutal” than the Santorum-Romney race we just watched. And as intuitive as that sounds, I’m not entirely persuaded. Here’s the Allahpundit sketch of how it might have played out:
Hard to believe she wouldn’t have given him a much tougher race than Team Sweater Vest: She would have appealed to the same blue-collar and evangelical Republicans as Santorum did while almost certainly being better funded thanks to her supporters’ enthusiasm. The debates would have been an opportunity for her to make inroads with centrists who dislike Romney but were leery of her grasp on policy: Had she done well in those, she could have turned around some doubters while stealing Newt’s thunder as the anti-media candidate.
Where enthusiasm and potential fundraising is concerned, Palin clearly would have had a huge edge on Santorum, giving her the opportunity to build the kind of infrastructure that he conspicuously lacked. But then again, nothing in her post-2008 career suggests an aptitude or appetite for the kind of work required to build a smooth-running (or even occasionally-misfiring) national campaign. Team First Dude and Co. would have spent much more money than Team Sweater Vest, no doubt, but whether they would have spent it wisely is another question. (Recall that Rick Perry spent a lot of money, too.)
Where the debates were concerned, meanwhile, I would give the edge to Santorum. This was a campaign in which individual debate moments mattered, but what really mattered was being consistently solid in performance after performance, — and again, nothing we’ve seen from Palin post-2008 suggests that she would have had the discipline or briefing-book mastery necessary to impress week after week. Santorum, on the other hand, was dogged and disciplined and detail-oriented (even, alas, when the details involved the Cuban-Venezuelan-Bolivian “threat”), which paid dividends for him over the long haul that the debate calendar became. The debates made him seem a more plausible contender; there’s no reason to think they would have the same impact for Palin, and some reason to suspect the reverse.
As for wooing centrists, keep in mind that Santorum was relatively successful at executing a kind of pincer movement in which he won some blue-collar voters to Romney’s left (not all of whom were Democrats trying to sow havoc in the G.O.P.) as well many voters to Romney’s right. The Sarah Palin who governed Alaska as an independent-minded populist might have executed the same maneuver even more effectively. But would the Sarah Palin who’s been branded as the Most Polarizing Woman in America have had the same capacity to win over independent voters in the Midwest? (Do we really think, as a for instance, that she would have outperformed Santorum among Catholics, the obvious place where he underperformed his?) There was a period when pundits were speculating, wrongly but not totally implausibly, that Santorum might have a better chance in the general election than Mitt Romney. Would anyone have argued the same about Palin, given her persistently upside-down approval ratings and the fact that the public’s perceptions of her seem so locked-in and unlikely to change?
The best reason to think that Palin would have given Romney a much longer and tougher fight than Santorum is that she would have polled in the double-digits from the beginning and might have consolidated the not-Romney vote early, by winning Iowa and South Carolina and clearing figures like Gingrich off the decks. But I still have trouble seeing which of the various crucial states Santorum lost to Romney that Palin would have won. Michigan? Ohio? Illinois? It’s certainly possible that she would rediscovered her Alaskan touch, and extended the campaign beyond what Santorum managed or even somehow won it. But I suspect that her trajectory might have looked more like Gingrich’s — some time at the top of the polls, a big win here or there that led the press to briefly anoint her the frontrunner, but then a swift drop-off once the Republican electorate focused on her general election liabilities.
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