(Charles Dharapak/AP)
DAVENPORT, Iowa--Mitt Romney bounded on stage at the local fairgrounds here Monday morning with a final request for the voters who braved a wind chill in the single digits to hear him speak.?"This county did good things for me last time around," Romney said. "I need you to go out and do that again, get even more votes, get your friends to go to the caucus with you."
Like the candidate, Romney's advisers have shown signs of confidence heading into Tuesday's caucuses,?going so far as to keep the candidate in the state until Wednesday morning for television interviews with the expectation that he will have good news to trumpet.?But they have also been cautious about seeming overconfident of victory in Iowa, insisting to reporters that their strategy was only to "do well" in the state, not necessarily to win.
Win or lose, the caucuses will be a major test of whether Romney can finally break through with the Republicans who have spent months looking for an alternative to his candidacy.?The big challenge for Romney, who has struggled to move beyond the support of 25 percent of the voters in the polls, is?whether he can finally convince Republicans to coalesce around his bid to be the party's challenger to President Barack Obama.
The biggest danger for Romney, should he become the Republican nominee for president, is that?social conservatives will stay on the sidelines in the general election, according to?Steve Scheffler, an influential Republican National Committee member who heads up the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. (Even though--or perhaps because--Romney ran as a born-again social conservative when he campaigned for president in 2004.)
"He's ignored one whole segment of the party," Scheffler told Yahoo News. "They've made no effort whatsoever, zilch. ? They've dissed them for over a year now, so they are going to have a pretty challenging time getting people on board to volunteer, to man phone banks--the tasks that this segment of the party is usually most enthusiastic about taking on. They are going to be in a world of hurt."
Yet on the stump, Romney and his surrogates almost never waver from arguing that the former Massachusetts governor is the candidate who has the best chance of defeating President Obama.
"Think about who is best positioned, who is best equipped to actually win the election in November and beat Barack Obama," John Thune, a Republican senator from South Dakota and a top Romney supporter, told voters in Davenport on Monday. "That is a very important factor. We have a lot of candidates who are running, but we have to have somebody who can come out of the nominating contests and go toe-to-toe and face off with this president and defeat him this November. ? That's Mitt Romney."
In Iowa, there are some signs of movement for Romney's candidacy. In the Des Moines Register poll released Saturday, Romney's numbers had gone up 8 points among likely caucusgoers in the last four weeks. But he still attracted the support of just 24 percent of likely caucusgoers?putting him in a statistical tie with Ron Paul, with Rick Santorum breathing down the front-runners' necks.
Requesting anonymity,?Romney aides acknowledge their candidate will have to work to win over skeptical Republicans, including social conservatives who have long questioned Romney's positions on issues like abortion and marriage.
But Romney advisers argue that Republicans will eventually unite behind their boss if he's the nominee?largely because they want to see anyone in the White House besides Barack Obama. John McCain faced similar problems with the party's social right in 2008, but Romney advisers argue the 2012 race is different because they have a clear foe with "a proven record of failure," as one Romney adviser, who declined to be named, put it.
"Republican primary voters are looking for two things in this election," Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney adviser, told Yahoo News. "Someone who can fix this economy, and someone who can beat Barack Obama. And Mitt Romney is the obvious answer to both of those questions."
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