Tomorrow night's primaries could end up being anticlimactic after Republicans have spent the past few week fretting about Mitt Romney's inability to win Southern states. So far, the Bible Belt has been his weakest territory to date. While Romney could lose every state in the Deep South and still gain the required number of delegates, conservatives have been worried about the fractured nature of a party where the likely nominee fails to win the most reliably Republican region of the country.

For all of his gaffes and unforced errors, it’s important to remember that Mitt Romney never promised to be a likeable presidential candidate, or someone for whom personality was a selling point. The point of Romney has always been that he is a generic Republican candidate, with the skills and profile necessary to win a general election. He has conventional experience (a business career with a stint in the public sector), a conventional persona (competent businessman), and a standard-issue message—the economy is off-track, and only I can bring it back to station.

As much as some Republicans would like to believe otherwise, the fact is that this primary is dragging down the party. Unlike the 2008 Democratic primary—in which two formidable candidates fought hard, debated substance, and energized voters around the country—this year’s GOP primary has been defined by clownish vanity candidates, divisive bickering, and an unlikable front-runner who—so far—has “won” by not losing.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney demonstrated once again why he has such trouble with his party's base. The issue was a bill in Congress sponsored by Senator Roy Blunt, which would allow any employer who has any objection to any medication, procedure, or treatment—not just objections to ladies doing dirty things with their ladyparts, which is where this all started—to deny their employees insurance coverage for it. Let's say your boss thinks people with diabetes are fatties who deserve to get their feet amputated—no diabetes coverage! Or your boss is one of the nuts who thinks immunizations give kids autism—no coverage for immunizations!

Obviously, it's a truly awful idea, and when Romney was asked about it by an Ohio television host, he said, "I'm not for the bill. But, look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I'm not going there." What happened next was predictable: conservatives squawked, and Romney quickly reversed himself, saying he misunderstood the question, and now he totally, totally, totally supports Blunt's bill.

Maybe he did just misunderstand it. But the reason Romney gets into these pickles is that he just lacks an instinctive feel for what those Republican base voters he's so desperately trying to appeal to want to hear. Given the time to work out his rhetoric and a clear understanding of where the base's sympathy is, he'll deliver the proper message. But on his feet, when confronted with something he hasn't thought much about, his instincts don't lead him to that place.

And oh boy, do those base voters know it. That doesn't mean Romney won't get their votes eventually, as more and more of them realize they just have no alternative. But with every one of these incidents, he saps their enthusiasm for the general election, and reinforces his image as an unprincipled flip-flopper.

Which makes me wonder, what are the people on Team Romney thinking right now? Do they look at their candidate and say, "He'll get better." Do they think they can finesse the character attacks the Obama campaign will make? Do they think that once the primaries are over and he doesn't have to pander to his party's nutball wing, these kinds of problems won't resurface? When you're working on a campaign, deluding yourself about your candidate's skills and chances comes with the territory. But they've got to be getting more and more worried, even as he stumbles his way toward the nomination.

Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll reports that top Republican continue to “whisper” about a campaign to draft a new candidate into the presidential race, should Mitt Romney falter in Michigan:

On CNN Tuesday morning, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chair of the House homeland security committee, hinted at a whisper campaign among “top Republicans” who want a GOP favorite such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to enter the race if Romney loses the Michigan or Arizona primaries or struggles on Super Tuesday, when ten states controlling 437 delegates hold GOP primaries on March 6.

If John McCain weren’t on the ballot in 2008, you could make a strong case that his state, Arizona, would have been in play for Democrats, regardless of who they nominated. Hispanics were a huge share of the population, a significant share of the electorate—at 16 percent of all voters in the state—and a solid block of supporters for the Democratic Party—in 2008, they supported Barack Obama with 55 percent of the vote.