March 21, 2012 08:16 PM UTC

Sealing The Pyrrhic Deal

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• by: Colorado Pols

Chicago Tribune:

Mitt Romney’s commanding win in the Illinois primary stamps him — once and for all — as the overwhelming, indisputable and probably uncatchable favorite to lead Republicans into the fall campaign against President Obama.

There are two tracks to the GOP race, now in its third month of balloting, and the former Massachusetts governor is winning both.

The most important is the fight to accumulate the 1,144 convention delegates needed to secure the nomination. Romney has done consistently well in that effort and helped himself greatly Tuesday by winning the overwhelming majority of delegates…

Rick Santorum was again forced to cede a significant chunk of Illinois delegates when he failed to qualify for the ballot in four of the state’s 18 congressional districts. Slowly but inexorably, that organizational disadvantage is undermining Santorum’s slim chances of overtaking Romney and snatching the nomination away.

Next up is Louisiana, another conservative Southern state where Mitt Romney is not favored to win–illustrating that even as Romney consolidates enough support to likely win the GOP primary without a brokered party convention, he still can’t close the deal with the conservative wing of his own party. This deficiency will remain painfully visible for Romney as long as Rick Santorum stays in–no matter how much “inevitability” Romney gets from big states.

And for a host of reasons, it’s support that Romney may not recover. It’s not that conservatives would vote for Barack Obama, of course, but they might really be okay with not compromising.