With the race for the Republican presidential nomination
increasingly looking like a horse race between Mitt Romney and Rick
Santorum, the Wall Street Journal reports that President Obama’s
campaign is looking at ways to soften Santorum for the general election
without giving the nomination to Romney.

“Obama
campaign aides are stepping up their examination of Mr. Santorum’s
record to assess his vulnerabilities and consider how their strategy
might change if he becomes the GOP nominee. For example,
the Obama campaign has criticized Mr. Romney for shifting his policy
stances and painted him as out of touch with middle-class Americans.
That line of attack might not prove as effective against Mr. Santorum.”

Understatement alert: “One
approach might be to highlight Mr. Santorum’s socially conservative
views and argue that they are outside of the mainstream. Another might
be to go after his economic positions.”

Sasha Issenberg: “From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign
will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did. There will not be a
major innovation that seems to herald a new era in electioneering, like
1996’s debut of candidate Web pages or their use in fundraising four
years later; like online organizing for campaign events in 2004 or the
subsequent emergence of social media as a mass-communication tool in
2008. This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be
imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago
headquarters…may be at work at one of the most important. If
successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged
citizen–the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the
volunteer–into a single, unified political profile.”

“More broadly,
Narwhal would bring new efficiency across the campaign’s operations. No
longer will canvassers be dispatched to knock on the doors of people who
have already volunteered to support Obama. And if a donor has given the
maximum $2,500 in permitted contributions, emails will stop hitting him
up for money and start asking him to volunteer instead.”

ABC News
notes that Rick Santorum, a former Republican Senator from
Pennsylvania, has yet to pick up an endorsement from any of his former
colleagues, while Mitt Romney has been endorsed by 14 senators.

“When
asked about Santorum during an unrelated news conference on jobs today,
his former colleagues took pains to avoid comment, awkwardly looking at
each other, with no one volunteering to respond to the question at
first… Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.,  took the chance to speak about his
endorsement of Romney instead.”

However, BuzzFeed suggests one of Santorum’s former colleagues, Mike DeWine of Ohio, may be switching from Romney to him later today.

A new Suffolk University poll in Massachusetts finds Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) now has a 9-point lead over likely challenger Elizabeth Warren (D), 49% to 40%.

Separately, 45% of respondents said that Brown deserved to be reelected, 39% said he did not, and 16% were undecided.

The Maine Republican Party “is reviewing its numbers from the presidential caucuses as pressure grows for a recount,” the Portland Press Herald reports.

“An email sent to county and town chairman this afternoon asks the local officials to resubmit vote totals to the state headquarters… The email does not say when, or whether, state GOP officials will publicly correct or update the results that have been posted on the party’s website since Saturday, when Mitt Romney was declared the winner over Ron Paul by less than 200 votes. Those official results were inaccurate because several communities that submitted vote totals were left out.”

As expected, the television networks called the race for Mitt Romney at 8 pm ET, when all polls were closed.

Exit polls show electability and experience were the most important factors in choosing a candidate.

Top line exit poll results posted by the Drudge Report show Mitt Romney with 52%, followed by Newt Gingrich at 26%, Rick Santorum at 12% and Ron Paul at 8%. If those numbers hold up, it would be a crushing defeat for Gingrich.

Mitt Romney debates himself in this hilarious video compilation.

[Read more…]

iWatch News reports that President Obama’s 445 bundlers raised at least $74.4 million last year.

“More than 60 bundlers have now gathered contributions totaling at least $500,000 for the president, a sharp contrast to the campaign’s claims of reliance on small-figure donors. And as with previous bundler disclosures, the list includes a number of individuals who have received appointments and invitations to the White House.”

“The winner of Florida is in all likelihood going to be the nominee of our party.”

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), quoted by the AP, endorsing Mitt Romney without actually endorsing him.

Amazingly enough, Mitt Romney’s role in George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign was to call challenger John Kerry a flip-flopper.

[Read more…]

“From northern Michigan’s iron mines to Pennsylvania’s natural-gas fields, the industrial heartland of America is humming with jobs again as a region once left for dead recovers faster than the rest of the U.S.,” Bloomberg reports.

“The turnaround may shape this year’s race for the White House as President Barack Obama seeks to reverse Republican gains in the Midwest… The economies of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania — all states Obama won in 2008 — have improved faster than that of the U.S. since the recession’s depth in April 2009, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. Michigan is expected to lead all 50 states during the next six months.”

When David Axelrod tweeted a photo of President Obama and his dog in a car with the caption, “How loving dog owners transport their dogs,” it was clearly shot a Mitt Romney who once put his dog in a crate on top of his car for a family vacation road trip.

But, as Michael Scherer points out, it’s part of a broader strategy of using a dog whistle to paint Romney as uncaring and out of touch.

“Over the weekend, the campaign rolled out the Pet Lovers For Obama Facebook page, which among other things promotes all the Obama dog swag for sale from the campaign. There is the Bo ‘I Bark For Barack’ car magnet, the Obama leash, the Obama dog collar, the Obama dog bowl… It goes on.”

Mitt Romney now says he was “vastly outspent” in South Carolina and that’s why he lost to Newt Gingrich.

Said Romney: “You know, in South Carolina we were vastly outspent with negative ads attacking me and we stood back and spoke about President Obama and suffered the consequence of that.”

But Politico notes independent analyses show that Romney’s campaign and associated Super PACs “spent nearly double what Gingrich’s forces did in the state.”

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I) — who left the Republican Party during his unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate bid — told Chuck Todd that he’d consider voting for President Obama in November.

Said Crist: “Consider? Sure, I would consider that. I really think he’s sincere and genuine. I think we have a lot time, a lot of issues to talk about, but I think, in his heart, he’s trying to do what’s right for the country overall.”

Crist also said he wouldn’t rule out running for office as a Democrat himself in the future.

“Republican leaders in Florida, determined to give the state a big say in picking the nominee, decided having their delegation slashed from 99 to 50 was worth it and set Florida’s primary for Jan. 31. The RNC has said Florida will be a winner-take-all primary, but that decision is still subject to challenge,” the Tampa Bay Times reports.

The challenge could come this summer.

Jim Geraghty notes that if the results “are in line with recent polls, Mitt Romney will win 50 delegates and everyone else will win none. (Thus, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul spent a limited amount of time and resources in Florida.) But if it were proportional, Romney would win about 20-25, Gingrich would win about 14-16, Santorum would win about 5-7, and Paul would win 5-6. In other words, Newt Gingrich may have enormous incentive to file protests and perhaps even legal challenges to the RNC to make Florida allocate its delegates proportionally.”

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo predicted that 2012 will be “the Twitter election,” reports Tech Crunch.

Said Costello: “Candidates who don’t participate on Twitter while the debates are going on will be left behind because the next morning is too late to respond.”