Of the four major candidates still competing in tomorrow’s Super Tuesday primaries, only Republican John McCain seems confident of securing his party’s presidential nomination.
“I assume that I will get the nomination,” McCain told reporters in Tennessee over the weekend.
The Arizona senator went even further in a speech at a Nashville rally.
“I know that I can win the presidency once I win your nomination,” he asserted.
That sounded like overconfidence to Republican rival Mitt Romney, who insisted that conservatives were having serious doubts about nominating McCain. The Republican base has tangled with McCain on such issues as immigration, tax cuts and campaign finance.
“We cannot let our party take that left turn,” Romney told reporters in Illinois. “If we become so much like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that on key issues we’re indistinguishable, we won’t win the White House.”
He added: “If it’s a race between a Republican acting like a Democrat, and a Democrat, the Democrat always wins.”
Although McCain is leading Romney by nearly 20 points in most national polls, Romney is within striking distance in California, the biggest prize on Super Tuesday. Romney was actually three points ahead of McCain in a California poll released Sunday by Reuters, C-Span and Zogby.
But McCain hopes to break the back of Romney’s campaign by beating him in Massachusetts, which would be an embarrassment to Romney, the state’s governor until last year. McCain even went to Massachusetts Sunday to campaign and watch the Super Bowl, although he declined to echo Romney’s endorsement of the New EnglandPatriots.
McCain could be helped by Republican Mike Huckabee, whose decision to remain in the race has resulted in him splitting the conservative vote with Romney. Huckabee vowed to win as many delegates as possible Tuesday while making sure that “nobody has the magic number of 1,191.”
“Somebody would have to sweep all of them and even then wouldn’t have enough to take the nomination Tuesday,” he told reporters in Georgia.
But the winner-take-all nature of the Republican primaries makes it at least possible that one candidate will emerge with an insurmountable lead over the others. By contrast, the Democratic primaries award delegates proportionally, making it difficult for Clinton to eliminate Obama tomorrow, when voters cast ballots in more than 20 states.
