Time to unite the party,”
State sends message to Santorum: ‘Throw it in’
WAUKESHA, Wis. — Ashley Szmanda wanted the same thing Tuesday that Mitt Romney did: a decisive-enough win in Wisconsin’s primary election to solidify his grip on the GOP presidential nomination.
“I’m ready for the race to be over,” said Szmanda, 30, a nurse. Romney, she said, is moderate enough to give him the best chance to beat President Obama.
“This really has been quite a night,” Romney said at his victory party in downtown Milwaukee.
He didn’t exult for long, though. He quickly launched a critique of Obama’s economic policies, advising supporters to check gas prices on their way home. “Four more years of that?” he asked.
With 42 delegates to the Republican National Convention at stake, Wisconsin didn’t get Romney to the 1,144 he needs to secure the nomination. They could, however, add to a growing “perception of inevitability,” said John Mcadams, a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Maryland and Washington, D.C., also held primaries Tuesday; Romney won both.
Mark Boever, 56, a mortgage broker, voted for Rick Santorum, “because he’s more conservative and has stronger stands on issues over time” — particularly on abortion, the issue that matters most to him.
He doesn’t think Santorum can win the nomination. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll be voting for Romney.”
Romney’s win here suggests that Republicans don’t “want to take this to the convention and duel it out,” said Brandon Scholz, a political consultant and former state GOP official. The message from Wisconsin voters to Santorum, he said, is: “Throw it in.”
Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-milwaukee, said Romney won because he had plenty of money and voters here are not as conservative as those in the states Santorum has won. It was supposedly Santorum’s last stand, she said, but “if he is bound and determined . . . he’s probably got enough steam where he can keep campaigning for a couple of weeks.”
Wisconsin has not backed a Republican presi- dential candidate in a general election since 1984, when Ronald Reagan was on the ballot. Obama beat Republican Sen. John Mccain here in the 2008 election 56% to 42%.
In 2010, the state elected a Republican governor, Scott Walker, who faces a recall election June 5.
Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-madison political science professor, said Wisconsin could be “a key turning point” in the presidential campaign. “The Republican establishment seems to be rallying around” Romney, he said.
Two voters here, Bob Bohmann and Bud Sielen, had never met, but they gave the exact same answer when asked which Republican candidate got their vote: Both said Romney, “because he has the best chance of beating Obama.”
Sielen, 72, a retired welding engineer, said he hoped the Romney win here would prompt his rivals to drop out. Bohmann, 38, a banker, said it’s “prob- ably time to unite the party behind Romney.”
The economy prompted Sandi Hammersley, 60, an independent, to vote for Romney. She runs an insurance brokerage; her husband has a job now but was unemployed twice in the past few years. “We need somebody who really understands business,” she said. “This rookie we’ve got now is mortgaging our children’s future.”
Aaron Walker, 41, a salesman, came to his polling place to vote for his alderman, not any of the Republican candidates.
“I couldn’t be less impressed with any of them,” he said. “I’m just sick of the Republican version of smash-’em-up derby.”
Although he’s “sort of a Republican,” Bob Rand, a school bus driver who turns 72 today, voted for Obama.
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney swept primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, scoring a hat trick that bolstered his delegate lead and signaled a new chapter in the 2012 campaign.
Romney hammered President Obama in a victory speech in Milwaukee, blaming him for “mistakes and failures of leadership” that had made Americans’ economic travails worse. “It’s enough to make you think that years of flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of True Believers telling you what a great job you are doing, well, that might be enough to make you a little out of touch,” he said.
Obama went on election footing, too. He delivered a sharply partisan address to a luncheon sponsored by the Associated Press, decrying the House-passed GOP budget as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would widen income inequality. He ridiculed Romney by name for his choice of words in defending the plan.
“He even called it ‘marvelous,’ which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget,” Obama said of his likely Republican foe. “It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”
In a speech to supporters in Mars, Pa., Republican hopeful Rick Santorum said he was ready “to kick off the second half” in Pennsylvania’s primary on April 24. “Half the people in this country have yet to be heard.”
However, he is likely to face growing pressure to cede. “I would suspect the discussions that will center around the idea of starting to put an end to the Republican primaries are going to be happening at a much higher level,” Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus said.
Romney was boosted in Wisconsin by an electorate that included fewer of the voters who had helped Santorum win primaries in the South. Less than four in 10 were evangelical Christians, and Romney expanded his appeal to beat him among voters who said they were very conservative. Voters in exit polls cited the economy as the most important issue determining their vote.
Eight of 10 predicted Romney would be the party’s nominee, and two-thirds said they would be satisfied with that. Even so, nearly half called him “not conservative enough.”
Romney, who on Monday reached the halfway point for the 1,144 delegates necessary for nomination, was poised to claim the overwhelming majority of the 95 delegates at stake in the three states voting Tuesday.