Romney rivals’ best hope lies in upcoming debates

Reporting from Manchester, N.H. -- —  New Hampshire is coming up roses for Mitt Romney heading into the nation’s first primary. But could there be some thorns?

The answer should be clearer by Saturday night.

Ed Rogers, a former White House political director under President George H.W. Bush, calls Saturday evening’s televised debate “the most important event of the campaign.” The trailing candidates need “a game-changer,” he said. “If anybody is going to throw tacks in Romney’s road, it’s got to be in the debate.”

Otherwise, the race could effectively be over in as little as two weeks.

Romney is currently riding a post-Iowa bounce. It’s carried over into the first southern primary state, South Carolina, where he’s suddenly the favorite, as Jim Oliphant reported earlier on Politics Now. Winning there would make him the presumptive nominee.

In New Hampshire, he leads the rest of the field by better than 2 to 1, according to a new statewide poll out Friday night from WMUR-TV and the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

And there’s more good news for the front-runner: The latest official NWS forecast calls for dry conditions and above-average temperatures in New Hampshire on election day.

That should generate the record Republican vote many are predicting. Nothing’s happening on the Democratic side to tempt swing independents into picking a Democratic ballot, instead of a GOP one. And while Republican candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. is hoping to pick off some of those indie votes, Romney will probably gain more than anyone from a big turnout.

If Romney wins on Tuesday, much will rightly be made of his first-place finishes in the first two contests (assuming his Iowa victory isn’t taken away, as pointed out on this blog by Mark Z. Barabak and Mike Memoli).

Except for incumbent presidents, no Republican candidate has ever won Iowa and New Hampshire back-to-back. On the Democratic side, the four non-incumbent candidates who finished first in both places all went on to the nomination (Jimmy Carter in ’76, Walter Mondale in ’84, Al Gore in ‘00 and John Kerry in ’04).

Yes, Romney, as former governor of next-door Massachusetts and a part-time New Hampshire resident (he owns a home here), has a huge home-field advantage. But nomination contests are all about momentum. And sometimes, in politics, the obvious becomes apparent.

That could happen very soon. It would be hard to resist the conclusion that, after contests in a pair of relatively small states, his opponents will be out of time. But if Romney also wins in South Carolina on Jan. 21, they could well be.

More than any other factor, televised debates have driven the 2012 GOP campaign. The four nationally televised debates over the next 12 days could shake things up again.

This weekend, there are two broadcast network encounters: Saturday night (ABC at 9 p.m. Eastern) and Sunday morning (NBC, 9 a.m. Eastern; various times in other zones).

In the 1961 film “Saturday night and Sunday Morning,” Albert Finney’s character says, “All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda.” If there are any surprises left in the GOP race, they may emerge on a debate stage this weekend.

If not, the rest could be anti-climatic.

paul.west@latimes.com