Why People Are Warming Up To Mitt Romney

While Mitt Romney is getting slammed from both the left and the right over the unveiling of his new health care plan, the American people are warming up to Mitt Romney. Why are people gravitating towards Romney?

The recent surge in Mitt Romney's popularity is occurring for many reasons.  Donald Trump, Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee has dropped out of the race. He's raised $10.25 million dollars in one day. But perhaps people are starting to warm up to Mitt Romney because he's confronting the major issues of the day with a level of maturity that is rare among the Republican 2012 contenders. 

Brian McGrory over at the Boston Globe makes this point:

Maybe I missed something here, but isn’t personal responsibility something that Republicans generally support? The alternative, mind you, is that people who either don’t bother paying for insurance or can’t afford it clog emergency rooms — the most expensive entry point to the health care system — to receive care that’s spread among taxpayers who have already paid for insurance on their own. That’s really what Republicans support?

So to the point, Romney stood up and stood tall last week and defended the Massachusetts law, with the caveat that it was never meant to be a national plan. The authority to tackle health care, Romney said, resides with the states, and what fits well in Massachusetts may not be the best solution in Montana or Mississippi. This is reasonable and practical.

Meaning that conservative commentators just about broke their legs rushing to their keyboards and cameras to tear the speech apart. “Mitt Romney’s Illogical, Terrible Health Care Address,’’ was how the National Review termed it. And that was one of the kinder takes.

Think about this for a brief moment: The first time Romney has refused to disavow the past or contort himself in a way that defies the physics of successful politics, he is slammed by his own party for daring to be true to a belief. But in that, amid the waterfall of negativity that has rained on his camp ever since, Romney may find the exact message he needs in his eternally uncertain campaign.

The fringe philosophers of each party get the most attention by throwing juvenile tantrums, but it’s the adults in the center who end up handling the arduous work of government and, occasionally, reform. The public gets this. For the moment, anyway, voters are done with radicals with all the answers. They want honest brokers.

As a result, people are rallying around Mitt Romney despite what the political elite of the left and the right think about RomneyCare. In fact, many voters are willing to vote for him because what Romney did in Massachusetts has no effect on how they feel about him:

Yet, a majority of respondents (53 percent) said that Romney's involvement in helping to pass Massachusetts' universal health care law would not affect their decision to vote for him. Among those who identified as Undeclared/ Independent (roughly 40 percent of all likely GOP Primary voters), some 20 percent said Romney's involvement in passing Massachusetts' health care bill would actually make them more likely to vote for him, and similarly 50 percent said it made no difference.

Given the influence of New Hampshire's Presidential Primary and that independents and new voters who register at the polls may choose a Republican ballot, it's beneficial to Mitt Romney that these voters are not holding his Massachusetts health care legacy against him.

It would be easy to dismiss Romney's numbers in New Hampshire given its proximity to Massachusetts -- especially considering that the state's main population center resides within Boston's media market. However, given that our Florida numbers match New Hampshire's (vote/lean Romney -- NH GOP: 38 percent, FL GOP 33 percent) it's clear that Romney is finding some strong baseline support from Republican voters in key areas.

Further, Suffolk University Political Research Center (SUPRC) New Hampshire study found the two most important qualities for a presidential candidate among potential voters were honesty (29 percent) and integrity (10 percent). And, while pundits have slammed Romney for his failure to clarify this or denounce that, he certainly hit these notes on the head, saying "A lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake... There's only one problem with that: It wouldn't be honest."

Those journalists, bloggers and political junkies who are honest in their observation are seeing what the American people see. Mitt Romney isn't the perfect candidate but that's what America needs right now. America needs a candidate like Mitt Romney who isn't afraid to offer honest solutions to the biggest concerns of our day.  That is why they're not holding RomneyCare against him. They see him as a man who is not perfect but is unafraid to be a leader America yearns for.