NBC has projected that Arizona Senator John McCain will be the winner of the Virginia and Maryland primaries — and has just projected he will win in Washington D.C. as well, virtually assuring what was already assured: that he will be his party’s 2008 Presidential nominee.
But McCain got good news — and bad news.
The good news is that exit polls shows that a large portion of Republicans — a chunk of conservative voters who don’t go along with conservative talk show hosts and that increasingly vanishing species called “moderate Republicans” — are willing to accept him. The bad news is that a hard-core group of conservatives, most typified by conservative media establishment types such as top radio talk show hosts, continue to reject him.
Despite strong opposition from many conservative voters in Virginia’s GOP primary Tuesday, three-quarters of Republican voters surveyed said they would be satisfied with John McCain as the party’s standard-bearer in November.
CNN has projected the Arizona senator will beat former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and his remaining rival, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, in Virginia.
McCain was racking up large margins over Huckabee in the Washington suburbs in the north and in the counties around Richmond, the capital of Virginia.
But the projected narrowness of the win highlights McCain’s ongoing struggle to win over the party’s conservative base, which made up two-thirds of Virginia GOP voters, according to exit polls. McCain drew the support of only 32 percent of those, according to exit polls.
Self-described GOP Moderates voted more than 2-to-1 for the Arizona senator, but made up little more than a quarter of the electorate.
What it means: More than ever, Huckabee’s talk of a “miracle” that could give him the nomination would be one akin to him parting the waters at San Diego’s Mission Beach. Despite opposition from the hard-right, the results show that McCain does enjoy the (sometimes begruding) support of a large chunk of the Republican party including independent-minded conservatives and conservatives who look at McCain’s overall record.
But he’ll need a unified party to win — unless the Democrats splinter.
And to do that he will have to do what most candidates don’t do during elections: move more to the right to try and appease the hard-line conservatives. UNLESS he ignores them — figuring he can indeed put together a new kind of winning Republican coalition that will not bend over backwards to placate elements of the party that seem to want to resist working with and creating coalitions with other parts of the American electorate that aren’t “pure” in terms of talk-radio-style-defined conservatism.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.