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DES MOINES, Iowa — The week after Christmas was supposed to be the most triumphant time of Michele Bachmann’s Republican presidential campaign — she planned to finish her 99-county tour of Iowa and ride a wave of positive publicity and goodwill to a solid finish in Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses.
Instead, the week was dogged with staff defections and poor polling results and an overall negative trajectory heading into Tuesday’s must-win contest.
On Wednesday, Bachmann’s Iowa chairman, state Sen. Kent Sorenson, left the campaign to endorse Ron Paul. Sorenson was one of Bachmann’s first Iowa backers and a high-profile member of her leadership team, often moderating conference calls between Bachmann and her supporters.
Bachmann accused the Paul campaign of paying Sorenson off, which elicited a rebuttal, distributed by the Paul campaign, from her Iowa political director, Wes Enos. By Thursday, he was off the campaign. The staff turnover caused a news cycle vacuum, completely eclipsing the final day of her whirlwind Iowa tour.
Saturday brought more bad news: Bachmann came in sixth among the seven GOP presidential candidates in the last Des Moines Register poll before the caucuses. Only 7 percent of likely caucus-goers say Bachmann is their first choice, and the guts of the poll don’t look much better for her:
• She’s viewed as the least knowledgeable in the race (26 percent say so);
• She’s tied with Newt Gingrich as the least able to bring about real change (21 percent);
• And outside of Ron Paul (29 percent), she’s viewed as the least electable in the general election (28 percent say so).
In the background of all of this is Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who is the only other candidate to traverse the entire state this cycle. Santorum is the latest (and in Iowa, it appears the last) Republican to see a surge in support as conservative voters look to find an alternative to the more moderate Mitt Romney. Santorum’s surge has hurt many of the other candidates, but perhaps none more than Bachmann.
He and Bachmann have pursued the same voters — the evangelical Christian conservative base that is so pivotal to the Iowa electorate — and he received the endorsement of this state’s prominent social leader Bob Vander Plaats. At the time, Vander Plaats reportedly asked Bachmann or Santorum to back out and support the other candidate to consolidate support, a call that was repeated last week by a pair of conservative religious leaders here.
Polling suggests that message may have gotten through to voters. Santorum’s supporters like Bachmann — among those who plan on caucusing for Santorum on Tuesday, Bachmann is the second choice of nearly half of them, per a poll of Iowans released Sunday night. As Santorum rises, he’s leeching votes away from Bachmann at a very high rate.
Bachmann has remained positive throughout, predicting an acceptable finish in the caucuses this week and vowing to head to South Carolina afterwards.
“What we’ve been doing is exactly what we needed to do,” she said on the CBS Early Show on Monday morning. “We have literally seen thousands of people flip on the ground.”
She said her campaign has “bought our tickets to South Carolina,” which holds its primary on Jan. 21, and she plans on going there no matter the results Tuesday. Twice last fall, Bachmann’s campaign said its path to victory depended on a victory in Iowa to boost its standing in that state.
Bachmann’s diminishing support has lead pundits to write her off in the Iowa campaign’s final days. The Iowa Republican predicts a sixth-place finish. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza gives her 50-1 odds of winning the caucuses. The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog predicts she’ll receive only about 9 percent of the vote here on Tuesday, and gives her a 0 percent chance of winning.
Combine it all — an embarrassing staff defection, the ho-humming of the 99-county tour and polling that suggests eroding support as social conservatives coalesce around someone else — and you have a very bad final week for presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.
Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry
It ain’t over until the fat lady sings. Bachmann is out of voters, out of money, and out of time. The fat lady has begun to sing. In the republican tradition of saying one thing and doing another Bachmann won’t be able to live within her means after Iowa and she will limp along, go to South Carolina still looking for the miracle that will never happen. Her campaign debt will mount. She will be unable to admit her philosophy is way out beyond right field where there aren’t any voters. It is time for her to find something different to do with her titanium spine.
Apparently some conservatives don’t believe in a free market for campaign staffs.
Someone accepted a higher bid.
The horror!
“She will be unable to admit her philosophy is way out beyond right field where there aren’t any voters.”
Nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with her philosopy. Her problem is she doesn’t have the same leadership experience or legislative accomplishments her opponents do.
Unlike democrats, republicans actually consider what you’ve done in addition to what you stand for before nominating you for president.
Bachmann was on C-span last night preaching in an Iowa church. I don’t know if she ever got around to mentioning her campaign, but she preached up a mighty storm. She could be the next Pastor Melissa Scott!
God told her to run, he didn’t say she’d win.
What does it say about conservative voters that they would vote Bachmann #1 in the Iowa straw poll just a few months ago, and now she has zero percent chance of winning the caucuses there? We talk a lot about the candidates, but what does this say about GOP voters? Fickle? Impulsive? Emotional? Misguided? Gullible? Disloyal?
We are in the era of boom-and-bust Republicanism. This narrative is so evident and oft-repeated at both the national and state level that it is drowning out whatever else the GOP wants to communicate. Amy Koch is only the latest and most close-to-home example.
Maybe she’ll pull a Pawlenty on Wednesday.
#3
There is obviously something wrong with her philosophy. That is why she is dead last in the polls. You don’t go from first to last without the message being a problem. She makes up facts to suit her needs. In her case it is the message as well as the messenger.
There’s nothing wrong with her philosophy if you’re looking to repeal the 20th century. However, I think the rest of us would prefer a candidate who doesn’t think that the Flintstones was a documentary.
The great Republican dilemma has always been how to get enough bodies to win elections while still being the party of the rich. The great solution was to become the party of Jesus and bring the fundamentalists in as a voting bloc.
The polls consistently show that any anonymous competent Republican could beat Mr. Obama, and yet after a solid year of looking hard for one, the Republicans haven’t been able to find one to offer the voters. All we’re given, in terms of candidates with any serious party backing, are slick politicians and buffoons.
Oh well; according to some of the more liberal wing of the Democratic party friends, Mr. Obama is ruling like a Republican anyway.
About to meet her Waterloo?
Richard–
Let’s say that Obama is governing
(I don’t think that ‘ruling’ is really an appropriate term)
the way Republicans used to.
#6–with a hat tip to #2–
“What does it say about conservative voters that they would vote Bachmann #1 in the Iowa straw poll”
It says capitali$m was at work because votes were bought at the straw poll. The candidates purchased tickets that enabled people to vote and gave them away.
Plus, apparently, people were swayed by the great party she threw in her tent with country music singer Randy Travis as the main attraction. Perhaps her next gig will be to succeed that other Iowa favorite daughter Elsa Maxwell, the hostess with the mostest.