Wide-open GOP race off to S. Carolina

THE GOP race for president just became about as clear as the Detroit River.

Last night's come-from-behind victory for Mitt Romney in Michigan - where his dad ran an auto company and served as governor in the 1950s and 1960s - makes the Republican contest more wide open than any White House primary race in modern memory.

Ironically, most pundits thought Romney could be all but knocked out of the primaries last night with a loss, after spending millions in Iowa and New Hampshire but placing second both times.

Instead, the former Massachusetts governor finds himself in the middle of what is stacking up - for now, anyway - as a three-way race with Arizona Sen. John McCain, who placed a strong second with help from independents, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who rode his army of evangelical supporters to another third-place finish.

"It's a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism," Romney told the Associated Press by phone last night, minutes after he was declared the winner. "The people of Michigan said they believe in someone who is going to fight for them."

G. Terry Madonna, the political scientist and pollster from Franklin and Marshall College, said last night that Romney won in part by emphasizing his know-how as a millionaire businessman and promising to revive Michigan's auto industry.

But McCain, he noted, offered a gloomier message, expressing doubts that American car manufacturers can be easily jump-started, and advocating tougher steps on climate change, a tough sell to Michigan voters.

"McCain is the big loser," said Madonna, noting that the former Vietnam POW won there as a maverick against President Bush in 2000. "I think he seriously misread Michigan, going with the pablum that you'll never get those jobs back."

Yet, also still hanging around are two one-time media darlings now gambling everything on future states - former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson on Saturday's South Carolina primary and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on Florida on Jan. 29. In any other recent race, such a strategy would have been political suicide, but maybe not this year.

In fact, the lack of a clear front-runner or GOP voter enthusiasm - turnout in Michigan was low yesterday, as light snow apparently kept some voters home - could even mean a wide-open convention when the party convenes in Minneapolis-St. Paul in early September. The Twin Cities could see more action than a Larry Craig layover.

But that is more than seven months away. The next stop for the GOP is that South Carolina showdown, where several of the candidates are strong, including a Bible Belt base for Huckabee and a veterans population sympathetic to McCain. And Thompson has campaigned there the most.

The Democrats also had a primary last night, except that it didn't count. But maybe it did.

The national Democratic Party was angry that Michigan leapfrogged ahead of South Carolina, which had been set up as an early test of strength among Southern voters, and took the stern step of stripping the state of its delegates to the August convention in Denver.

That seemed to render the primary meaningless. Sen. Barack Obama and ex-Sen. John Edwards actually dropped out, although others, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, did not, and she got about 70 percent of last night's vote.

The assumption was that the Democrats would ultimately seat the Michigan delegates, but only after a nominee emerged from the primaries, at which point there would be no political consequence. But at the rate that Clinton, Obama and Edwards are gaining delegates, no such clear choice could emerge, creating a massive convention floor fight over whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, which faces similar sanctions from the party. *

The Associated Press contributed to this article.