Locking up the GOP presidential nomination shouldn’t be signal to Mitt Romney’s campaign to take it easy. A new analysis finds that most recent candidates who didn’t run up the score in primaries after becoming the presumptive nominee lost in fall election.
Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told Secrets that winning a high percentage of the remaining 19 primaries and caucuses gives Romney good odds in winning the general election.
It worked for George W. Bush in 2000, and his dad in 1988, both of whom won 77.7 percent of the vote in the contests that came after clinching the nomination, as Romney effectively has.
“It seems reasonable to conclude that a good performance for Romney would consist of his winning more than 70 percent of the vote in the remaining primaries, and the higher he goes, the better for his chances in November,” said Skelley, part of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball team.
