By Akeem Mellis
Can a candidate for their party's nomination for President of the United States actually win that nomination without the support of the base of the party? John McCain may surprisingly pull that off.
That is the ugly scenario GOP voters are looking at right now as Super Tuesday is here.
McCain, boosted by victories in the key primary states of South Carolina and Florida, has attained close to unstoppable momentum, a surge of support, votes and delegates that may once again give him the power to thwart the very group he has let down and stabbed in the back for the past seven years in order to get to this point in time:
Conservative Republicans.
They make up the majority of the base of the Republican Party, yet because of a series of misfortunes and surprises, have once again found themselves run down by the Straight Talk Express. But it is not entirely their fault.
One cannot blame them for the fact that the Senator from Arizona has done nothing but ignore them when it mattered the least, and has tried to cozy up to them when it mattered the most.
A cursory look at who in the Republican Party supports McCain is startling. In every primary state that McCain has been competitive in, he has not won the largest share of votes from self-identified conservative Republicans. Not even once.
Instead, it has been liberal to moderate Republicans carrying the day for him – including using Independents in open primary states like New Hampshire – with conservative Republicans doing one of two
things: split their support among the other numerous candidates in the field, or sit and wait for a "truly Reaganesque" candidate to save the day.
For diehard conservatives, the latter was lost when popular GOP Senators Rick Santorum and George Allen lost their Senate seats in 2006. And the former cost them when they failed to see the beginning of McCain's second rise from the pre-Iowa primary ashes to claim victory in New Hampshire.
We as a party knew how bad McCain was, and yet we waited and divided ourselves, especially when we saw that McCain's campaign was imploding in the late summer to fall.
But nobody can count out McCain. The choice is clear, but the time to stop McCain-- who, outside of National Security issues, has consistently failed the party time and time again to curry favor with the media – has passed the Republican Party by.
Some of us now look towards former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as a last hope to forestall a McCain nomination, but if the polls continue to trend against Romney, Super Tuesday could be the knockout blow.
We're now looking at a GOP electorate concerned about electability rather than who can represent conservative values the best. It's exactly what McCain wanted, for he's about to win the Republican nomination without the heart and soul of the party.
Akeem Mellis is the president of the College Republicans. You can e-mail him at amelli3@pride.hofstra.edu.
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