I’m not sure it matters much who wins in Florida. The polls are fairly close, and the final results will probably be close as well.
Unless either one wins by a big margin, the GOP race should come down to a battle between these two candidates going forward. Joe Scarborough just reported that many Huckabee supporters are going for Romney because they don’t want to help McCain, and many war hawks are breaking from Giuliani to back McCain.
McCain probably needs a win more, but I think it will settle down to a battle between the two of them. Romney has more money, so he can weather a close loss better than McCain.
As I’ve been saying for weeks, McCain gives the GOP the best chance to win, but it’s also understandable why many Republicans can’t bring themselves to support him. Romney is a flake, but he’s a talented flake. He keeps changing his message and his positions, but the adjustments keep making him more acceptable to conservatives and primary voters. It’s actually funny listening to him talk about the three pillors of the Reagan coalition – economic conservatives, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks. He panders to each group as much as possible, regardless of anything he said in the past.
McCain looked pretty bad on Meet the Press on Sunday. He was basically caught in a lie about why he supported the tax cuts, and that is a deal breaker for many conservatives.
The fight on the Democratic side has been brutal, but the GOP fight is getting ugly as well. Both sides will have some challenges uniting their respective parties at their conventions.
