Forbidden Donut

McCain Defeats Romney in Florida Vote
By MICHAEL COOPER and MEGAN THEE

MIAMI — Senator John McCain defeated Mitt Romney on Tuesday to win the delegate-rich Florida primary, solidifying his transformation to the Republican front-runner and dealing a devastating blow to the presidential hopes of Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Republican officials said after Mr. Giuliani’s distant third-place finish that he was likely to endorse Mr. McCain, possibly as early as Wednesday in California. They said the two candidates’ staffs were discussing the logistics of an endorsement.

The results were a decisive turning point in the Republican race, effectively winnowing the field to Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, two candidates with very different backgrounds who have little affection for one another but share a similar challenge in winning over elements of the party suspicious of their ideological credentials.

While most of the attention in Florida was on the Republicans, Democratic voters gave Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a victory in a virtually uncontested race. The Democratic Party had stripped the state of its delegates as a punishment for moving its primary earlier in the year, and the leading candidates refrained from campaigning there.

Mr. McCain’s victory showed he could win among Republican voters. Florida allows only registered Republicans to vote in its primary, unlike New Hampshire and South Carolina, where Mr. McCain’s victories earlier this month were fueled by independent voters.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. McCain had 36 percent of the vote, Mr. Romney 31 percent, Mr. Giuliani 15 percent and Mike Huckabee 14 percent.

“Our victory might not have reached landslide proportions,” Mr. McCain said, “but it is sweet nonetheless.”

After a campaign in which he was often on the attack, Mr. McCain went on to praise his rivals, especially Mr. Giuliani, who he said had “invested his heart and soul in this primary, and who conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.”

Mr. Romney made clear that he would go all-out in the coming week, as the presidential race builds toward its biggest day so far, a set of more than 20 contests across the country on Tuesday. He and Mr. McCain fought an increasingly bitter battle in Florida, and they now seem likely to take their messages to the national stage, with Mr. Romney trying to portray Mr. McCain as out of step with his party on critical issues and ill-equipped to deal with the economic downturn and with Mr. McCain suggesting that Mr. Romney’s principles yield too easily to the political winds and that he cannot be trusted on national security.

The meaning of Mr. McCain’s victory starts with the trove of 57 delegates it brings him, the bounty of a winner-take-all contest and the biggest prize of the campaign to date. But it also gives him a chance to start persuading his party to put aside the deep internal divisions that have been exposed by the campaign and begin coalescing around him.

Mr. Romney was having none of it. He continued to call for change in Washington and got in what sounded like another swipe at Mr. McCain when he said America needed a president who had “actually had a job in the real economy.”

Surveys of voters leaving polling places painted a picture of how successful each campaign was. They found that Mr. McCain not only did significantly better than Mr. Romney among voters who listed the war as their top concern, but also did better than him with voters who said they were most concerned about the economy.

Mr. Romney did significantly better than Mr. McCain among voters who said they were most concerned about immigration.

Both candidates now face the challenge of rallying the fractured party establishment and grass-roots conservatives behind them — or at least not around their opponent.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, emerges from Florida with an opportunity to get back to where he was at the beginning of this roller-coaster of an election season: the anointed front-runner. Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose early goals of winning Iowa and New Hampshire were thwarted, wanted to show he could prevail in a competitive election somewhere outside his native Michigan so he could battle on in the week to come.

But the outcome could be decisive for Mr. Giuliani, who suffered lopsided losses in all the early voting states this year and had staked his candidacy on a strong showing in Florida, where he campaigned more than anywhere else and outspent his rivals on television advertisements over the last month.

Exit polls showed that Mr. Giuliani did not even have a clear edge among voters who were most concerned about his signature issue, terrorism; incomplete returns Tuesday night showed him narrowly finishing ahead of Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who barely campaigned in Florida.

Mr. Giuliani, speaking in Orlando, thanked his supporters and talked about his campaign in the past tense but did not drop out of the race. “The responsibility of leadership doesn’t end with a single campaign,” he said in a serious, gracious speech that he leavened with a humorous asides. “If you believe in a cause, it goes on and you continue to fight for it, and we will. I’m proud that we chose to stay positive and to run a campaign of ideas.”

Surveys of voters leaving the polls found that nearly half of Republican voters listed the economy as the most important issue in exit polls, while 21 percent said terrorism, 16 percent immigration and 14 percent the war in Iraq.

Four in 10 Republican voters said illegal immigrants working in the United States should be deported, while about 3 in 10 said they should be allowed to stay as temporary workers, and the same number said they should be offered a chance to apply for citizenship. Mr. McCain was supported by a plurality of those who favored citizenship, and Mr. Romney by those who favored deportation.

Hispanics, who made up more than one-tenth of the Republican voters, said they were more inclined to favor a guest-worker program over deportation. Forty-three percent of them said illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain in the United States as temporary workers, while one-third said they should be offered the opportunity to apply for citizenship. Only one-fifth of Hispanic Republicans said they favored deporting illegal immigrants.

Mr. McCain, who last spring supported the immigration proposal that would have created a guest-worker program and a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, won roughly half the Hispanic vote. Mr. Giuliani, who strongly courted Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, won about one-quarter of the Hispanic vote, and Mr. Romney, who took the hardest line on illegal immigration, finished a distant third.

Mr. McCain may have been helped with some Hispanic voters by the endorsement he gained last week from Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida. An even bigger surprise endorsement, by the popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist, also appeared to help him.

More than 4 in 10 voters said Mr. Crist’s endorsement of Mr. McCain was important to them, and just over half of them voted for Mr. McCain.

The exit poll was conducted throughout the state by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool with 1,505 Republican primary voters. To take into account the large number of early and absentee voters in Florida, Edison/Mitofsky conducted a pre-election telephone poll and included those results with the opinions of the voters exiting polls on Tuesday.

Mr. McCain, who ran a more negative campaign than usual against Mr. Romney in the last few days, praised Mr. Romney and his supporters in his victory speech, saying, “The margin that separated us tonight surely isn’t big enough for me to brag about or for you to despair.”

And unfortunately, that wise comment will never spread far outside of FD, Giuliani will probably drop out and throw his support to McCain, and we'll end up with him as the Republican nominee anyway. That's my guess.

How many times do we have to fuck up these elections before we get it right? Just an open-ended question.

Your friend is an idiot. This guy is an awful awful awful awful awful choice! He praises his support of the troops, yet wants to send them all over the world to die in vain. He denounces torture, yet gives the president the final authority to determine exactly what "torture" is. He claims to be hard on illegal immigration, but doesn't really understand how to tackle the problem in the long-term. He outright admits to NOT UNDERSTANDING ECONOMICS! How can you possibly claim to have a long-term legitimate plan to do ANYTHING without first understanding its economic impacts?! That's irresponsible; it is detrimental; it is insanity.

McCain would be an awful president for one term. For two terms, he would simply be twice as bad. Maybe he's an OK senator, but you can't possibly draw a correlation between the two other than the fact that they're elected officials. They do entirely different things; they deal with entirely different issues; they approach problems from entirely different angles. As an executive official, McCain would be horrendous, and you can expect his influence on the US to be equally horrible.

so not fair gov =\
-yes he supports the troops.. so what if he supports a war that you dont
-yes he is against torture... i wonder why. when asked in a debate about the hypothetical situation of having 10 minutes until a bomb goes off he did not rule out torture. what would you have said?
-no hes not hard on illegal immigration =\ at least he says he has learned from the failed Immigration Bill and promises to secure the border before making laws concerning current illegals. sounds good to me
-ok he doesnt understand economics... what does hilary/obama/paul know that he does not? romney might be the only one that has him beat here. paul would "fix" the economy by lowering foreign expenditures but that is not a long term fix. he says the extra money will mean he does not have to end welfare or social security even though he wants to end those. what happens when the extra money runs out as we find more places to use it? besides id rather the fed run the economy than the president and all that takes is nominating the best candidates.
-also all the candidates left are in Congress besides Romney/Huckabee/maybe Bloomberg

im not even sure if im voting for mccain or romney but you blasted him pretty hard =\

so not fair gov =\
-yes he supports the troops.. so what if he supports a war that you dont
-yes he is against torture... i wonder why. when asked in a debate about the hypothetical situation of having 10 minutes until a bomb goes off he did not rule out torture. what would you have said?
-no hes not hard on illegal immigration =\ at least he says he has learned from the failed Immigration Bill and promises to secure the border before making laws concerning current illegals. sounds good to me
-ok he doesnt understand economics... what does hilary/obama/paul know that he does not? romney might be the only one that has him beat here. paul would "fix" the economy by lowering foreign expenditures but that is not a long term fix. he says the extra money will mean he does not have to end welfare or social security even though he wants to end those. what happens when the extra money runs out as we find more places to use it? besides id rather the fed run the economy than the president and all that takes is nominating the best candidates.
-also all the candidates left are in Congress besides Romney/Huckabee/maybe Bloomberg

im not even sure if im voting for mccain or romney but you blasted him pretty hard =\

Um, as far as I know, Guiliani did drop out and is supporting McCain.