Governor Romney’s success in Michigan last night suggests that the great vote winning alliance that Ronald Reagan forged at the beginning of the 1980s is fast splitting. The splintering of conservatism in the wake of seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency leaves the prospect of a brokered deal at the Republican convention in Minnesota-St. Paul more likely than ever.

For Mr. Romney, the win provides some return at last for an estimated investment of $40 million so far toward his ambition to succeed where his father failed. George Romney, who died in 1968, was governor of Michigan for six years in the 1960s and, like his son, tried to leverage his stint in a state governor’s mansion into a term in the executive mansion in Washington.

Mitt Romney therefore had a lot more riding on the voters of Michigan than the rest of the field. All presidential races are personal, but his determination to win in Michigan, the state in which he grew up, was also partly dynastic. He entered the primary as a favorite son, a strength to which he played while on the stump, but if he were to have lost last night, it would have been a blow from which his campaign might never have recovered.

Mr. Romney’s personal connection to the state was not the only strength he played to. Whether America is undergoing a recession is open to question, depending on what competing economists consider the definition of recession to be. But Michigan is undoubtedly suffering from a form of depressed economic activity. The unemployment rate is the worst in America, 50% more than the national average, and 200,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.

As President Clinton’s campaign aide James Carville so astutely recognized with his mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” in normal times pocketbook issues preoccupy voters. Mr. Romney recognized that the election in November is likely to be dominated by the faltering economy, and, while Mr. McCain highlighted his undoubted superiority in foreign policy and national security, the former Massachusetts governor convinced the people of Michigan that he could restore the jobs that had been lost to free trade and foreign competition. As the economy comes into focus as the most important issue that will face the new president, Mr. Romney must now expand on his ideas. As a self made multi-millionaire who can claim to have personally created thousands of new jobs, he must now explain how a president, not least a conservative president who believes in the virtue of the free market, can improve the health of an economy teetering on the edge of recession. Unless he can convincingly do that he may easily be portrayed as a waffling panderer, and Michigan will prove to be both the first and the last state to back him.

One of the unsung stars of Mr. Romney’s campaign was Dan Jansen, an Olympic gold medal winning speed skater. It is significant that Mr. Romney chose as his unlikely champion someone from the world of winter sports as his heroic rescue of the stumbling 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is one of his shining executive achievements. It took four attempts before Mr. Jansen succeeded in winning an Olympic gold, an example which seems to have inspired Mr. Romney’s rhetoric as well as his campaign.

Having won, in his words, two silvers, coming second in Iowa and New Hampshire, and a little noticed gold in the Wyoming caucuses, Mr. Romney has finally won an undisputed gold medal. It puts him in a good position to resume his flagging interest in the races in South Carolina and Nevada and mount a confident run at the delegate rich Florida race on January 29.

The result is a disappointment for Mr. McCain, who had hoped to end Mr. Romney’s run in Michigan while regaining frontrunner status by winning two primaries in a row. The senator must now try to recover, which will be far from easy, in South Carolina, his Waterloo in 2000, where his silent partner and friendly rival, Senator Thompson, is quietly prospering.

Mr. Romney’s victory is barely more heartening to Governor Huckabee, who made a considerable effort to show that he could win in a cold weather state and who appeared to enjoy making the patrician governor of Massachusetts a particular target. Mr. Huckabee tried to convince Michigan’s workers that they would be better off with someone, like him, that they might meet on the shop floor rather than someone like Mr. Romney who has the smooth demeanor of someone born to the board room. The Romney victory has also shown that Mormonism is not the terminal inhibition to the governor’s hopes that Mr. Huckabee had hoped it would be.

Mr. Romney’s success is also bad news for Mayor Giuliani, whose strategy of making a late entry into the race and scooping the pool of big state delegates is looking foolhardy. At first Mr. Giuliani spent considerable time and money in New Hampshire specifically to destroy Mr. Romney’s chances of viability because he understood the governor’s many strengths as a general election candidate.

That Mr. Romney is still standing despite the concerted efforts of five powerful rivals who have taken it in turns to pound him is a testament to the governor’s unexpected grit and persistence.

nwapshott@nysun.com