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Romney wins Michigan Primary

BY CRAIG GORDON AND TOM BRUNE | craig.gordon@newsday.com, tom.brune@newsday.com

11:45 PM EST, January 15, 2008

WASHINGTON - Republican voters just can't seem to make up their minds.

They once again refused to crown a front-runner last night, delivering a badly needed Michigan win to native son Mitt Romney and sending a scrambled presidential race south -- where Rudy Giuliani hopes the chaos can pay off for him. Romney became the third different GOP winner in three major contests -- denying John McCain and Mike Huckabee any claim to a lead in the race, or any momentum heading into Saturday's wide-open South Carolina showdown.

"Tonight is a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism," Romney said at his victory celebration in Southfield, Mich.

Romney led McCain 39 percent to 30 percent, with 94 percent of precincts reporting last night. Huckabee had 16 percent. Romney also dealt Giuliani a crushing sixth-place finish with just 3 percent of the vote, behind both libertarian Ron Paul and Fred Thompson.

But in the topsy-turvy world of GOP politics this year, even some Giuliani aides were quietly rooting for a Romney win -- to take the edge off McCain's New Hampshire victory and Huckabee's Iowa success.

Three winners means no real winner at all, and gives the ex-mayor's all-or-nothing bet on Florida's Jan. 29th primary a chance to succeed, especially if a four- or five-man field splinters the Sunshine State vote.

But Giuliani's strategy is running into doubts among some donors and supporters, who are growing worried as they watch Giuliani's repeat single-digit finishes and fourth-place standing in some national polls. He came in sixth place in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire.

"Romney's win helps Rudy because it muddles the race," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

But he said, "Finishing 6-4-6 isn't likely to help him convince Floridians that he is likely to be the nominee. It is very difficult to be in low single digits in state after state, lose to Ron Paul and then make the argument with a straight face that you should be the GOP nominee because you are the best candidate in November."

Giuliani made no comment on the results last night after campaigning in Florida.

His top adviser, Steve Forbes, said on CNN: "Rudy realized this was going to be an intense marathon, rather than a one- or two-state sprint. If you've got momentum out of Florida, you're going to be in a very good position on February 5th," when more than 20 states hold primaries.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Rodham Clinton was winning in Michigan -- but with only 56 percent of the Democratic vote, despite being the only top-tier candidate on the ballot.

That compared to about 39 percent for "uncommitted" -- and about 70 percent of those said they would have voted for Barack Obama had he been on the ballot, according to exit polls.

The race was rendered largely meaningless after national Democratic leaders stripped Michigan's convention delegates to punish the state for jumping its primary ahead to last night.

Some supporters of Barack Obama and John Edwards urged their voters to choose "uncommitted" as a sign of anti-Clinton sentiment, but none of the candidates campaigned there ahead of Saturday's Nevada caucuses.

For the Republicans, Romney's win boosted a campaign on life-support after back-to-back second place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. He denied McCain a repeat of his 2000 win, mainly because independents and Democrats who helped McCain then largely stayed away. Romney also neutralized Huckabee's strength among religious voters by running even with him among white evangelicals.

Now the race moves on to two other contests Saturday -- caucuses in Nevada that Republicans have largely bypassed and the main event in South Carolina, which had been shaping up as a McCain-Huckabee face-off. McCain's presidential hopes crashed in South Carolina in 2000 in a campaign marked by dirty tricks and personal innuendo aimed the Vietnam veteran -- and already yesterday, McCain's campaign was complaining about a mailer from an unknown group claiming McCain left fellow prisoners-of-war behind in Vietnam.

Huckabee hopes to take advantage of a Republican primary electorate that could be as much as 50 percent evangelical Christians, and even Fred Thompson is showing signs of life there. Romney would struggle to repeat a Michigan win in South Carolina but has the money and organization to be a factor in Florida and perhaps going forward.