Would Perry or Santorum Have Done Better?

Few would argue that the Republican candidates for President in 2012 were the most abysmal selection of candidates either party has put up in generations.  With that said, the Obama campaign was practically licking their chops the entire campaign over the prospect of taking on the guy who was the party's ultimate nominee Mitt Romney.  It was easy to understand why even then, despite the insistence by the GOP establishment that Romney was moderate and electable.  Not only was Romney and awkward and impersonal politician, he was also the avatar of a corporate villain who made his fortune by destroying the working class.  And Romney didn't disappoint on living up to the stereotype and then some, getting caught on tape expressing his dripping contempt about the very people whose lives he destroyed during his tenure as a jobs assassin.  He will go down in history as one of the most ill-conceived Presidential nominees a major party has ever put up, even though he managed 47% of the vote due to the epic polarization of the country.

With that performance in mind, I'm surprised that there's been so little speculation about whether one of his primary challengers could have done better in the general election, and possibly even beaten Obama.  The consensus opinion is that the three most believable alternative nominees (Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich) were so personally volatile and unprepared for the national stage that they would have imploded over the course of a general election campaign.  Perhaps.....but could they have really managed to do worse than Romney did?  Gingrich probably could have given his loose-cannon tendencies, but I'm not so sure Santorum and Perry could have stumbled as consistently as Romney did.  Aside from one solid debate performance, Romney didn't do a single thing right in the 2012 general election campaign.  Would Perry and Santorum really have done that badly that consistently if they had gotten the nomination?

My guess is they would have done comparably badly if not worse.  The supposed feather in the cap of both Santorum and Perry was their ability to appeal to working-class whites, the demographic Romney was expected to have the biggest problems after spending his entire professional life using working-class whites for target practice.  But Romney didn't have a problem with working-class whites in the 2012 election, holding Obama to numbers not seen since Walter Mondale in a much less diverse period of American history.  Now perhaps in some corners of  white working class areas north of the Mason-Dixon line, it would have been possibly for a Republican to do a little bit better even than Romney did among working-class whites.  Rick Santorum, for instance, may have seen significant gains over Romney in Ohio and Pennsylvania had been the nominee, but I still suspect he and Perry would have been so radioactive in upscale suburban areas that their advantage among white working-class voters would have been canceled out and then some.  In most bellwether suburban counties, Romney did better than McCain did four years.  In some cases, it wasn't by much, but in others it was a decisive improvement.  It's hard to imagine Santorum or Perry doing three points than McCain in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, as Romney did, as just one example.

So overall, I still suspect that alternative-scenario GOP candidacies would have been beaten by Obama in 2012, that says less about the infallibility of Obama in 2012 as the nearly unthinkable weakness of the GOP's 2012 Presidential candidate slate.