Net Results

One conclusion that can be drawn from today's Republican presidential voting events in Nevada and South Carolina is that the jumbled contest still lacks a single candidate who has a reliable national following. If you don't show up and tell GOP primary and caucus goers that you want their vote, you probably aren't going to get it.

Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was the only GOP candidate who campaigned heavily for votes in the Nevada caucuses -- in part because his status as the best-funded Republican candidate makes him the only one who can afford to stage serious campaigns just about everywhere, and because other candidates assumed that the large numbers of Mormons who vote Republican in Nevada would benefit Romney, also a member of that religious faith.

The fact that Romney pretty much had the state to himself was borne out in the results. He romped with 51 percent of the vote. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who beat Romney in the New Hampshire primary and ran a competitive second in Michigan, did little campaigning in Nevada and took just 13 percent -- finishing narrowly behind Texas Rep. Ron Paul, whose maverick libertarian campaign has drawn him enough activist followers to break double-digits in two caucus states (though he has drawn much lower shares in higher-turnout primaries). Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and ex-Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson did worse.

But in order to ensure that Nevada landslide, Romney de-emphasized his campaign in South Carolina, where McCain, Huckabee and Thompson went all out. Not surprisingly, Romney was pulling just 15 percent of the South Carolina vote in late returns, running well behind McCain and Huckabee and narrowly trailing Thompson.

No candidate so far better exemplifies the risks of not being there than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Though the publicity and name recognition he received for his image of standing strong after his city suffered the terrrorist attack of 9/11 enabled him to lead national Republican preference polls through most of 2007, his left-of-the-rest-of-the-candidates views on social issues contributed to his lag in the early-voting states' pre-primary and pre-caucus polls. So Giuliani has retrenched to Florida -- a state with a number of former residents of his home city and state -- in hopes of shocking the field with a breakthrough win there in the state's Jan. 29 primary, the next event on the Republican calendar.

He will need it, because the impact of this unorthodox and extremely risky strategy have been devastating for his campaigns in the earlier states. On Saturday, he took just 4 percent in Nevada and was running with 2 percent in South Carolina's incomplete returns.