Within the Margin

New Hampshire feels like an interregnum, between an interesting Iowa and a possibly-climactic South Carolina.

I think Matt ably summed up what New Hampshire will look like when the results come in tonight: Romney gets an easy win, but he’ll still be hard-pressed to crack 40%. Nate Silver projects him to come in around 38.5%, and I’ll take the over on that – but just barely. It’s not as good as McCain’s 48% in 2000 or Reagan’s 50% in 1980, but it will surpass other recent winning New Hampshire totals on the Republican side.

Coverage this week has focused on three themes:

• Huntsman is generating some momentum, but too little and too late to ensure even a distant second-place finish.
• Santorum followed his Iowa surge by stalling out in NH ahead of what many see as a must-win in South Carolina. Santorumentum looks to be over unless he can get a head-to-head matchup with Romney in South Carolina (see below).
• There are still too many non-Mitts to derail Willard’s path to the nomination.

I concur with all three of these, as well as with the notion that New Hampshire was never really going to matter. New Hampshire, by virtue of being one of Romney’s de facto home states and by showcasing a slightly more libertarian brand of Republicanism, cannot serve as a winnowing force in the field. That’s apparently now the role of South Carolina, where Perry will make his last stand. One imagines that Santorum and Gingrich will also both head to SC, with one perhaps dropping out and endorsing the other sometime between now and January 21st. I’m not betting on it, though. The idea that conservative leaders will coalesce around a non-Romney in time to do some damage in SC is somewhat plausible, but the idea that individuals as stubborn as Newt or Santorum would subsume themselves for the good of a wider movement strikes me as laughable – even in the context of their mentor/protege dynamic. Newt was a distant 4th in Iowa, and that was an opportune time to drop out if he wanted to give Santorum some space. He didn’t.

I’ll conclude with the estimates – whereas in Iowa I was banking on Santorum outperforming his polling by a decent margin (and he in fact exceeded even my generous figure), I don’t see anyone doing so tonight.

Mitt Romney: 39%
Jon Huntsman: 19%
Ron Paul: 18%
Rick Santorum: 12%
Newt Gingrich: 10%
Buddy Roemer: 1% (I overshot in Iowa on this one…Buddy won’t let me down this time.)
Rick Perry: 1%
Others – <1%