Can the Economy Save Mitt Romney?

Until he pulled into his home state of Michigan, Willard Mitt Romney was the Frankenstein monster of the 2008 Republican sweepstakes. The former Massachusetts governor at times seemed less like a real person than a strange, inauthentic collection of market research, body parts and DNA that had been borrowed from past G.O.P. campaigns and assembled in a lab by the party's mad scientists. Romney had the overpowering optimism of Ronald Reagan, the family values of Dan Quayle, the hair and handsome looks of Jack Kemp and the manners of George H.W. Bush. On paper, each piece of the Romney contraption was designed to appeal to a different part of the scattered G.O.P. coalition. But the overall formula wasn't working as expected. Romney placed second in Iowa and New Hampshire, despite pouring millions of his own fortune into the race. His rivals among the other candidates neither liked nor respected him, and that dynamic was beginning to show up in televised debates. Michigan would be where he regained his footing — or just got buried.

Then, in just the latest in a string of unexpected developments in the G.O.P. race, Romney found himself — after a fashion, anyway — and began to talk more naturally, like a candidate who knew why he was running, after all. He crisscrossed the state telling its depressed electorate that the auto industry was not dead and could be revived with the help of government investment and eased federal standards for fleet fuel economy. He turned down the social-values music and amped up the optimism. Romney was aided in the gambit by rival John McCain, who was delivering a much grimmer message: the lost jobs were gone forever, and Michiganders needed to think harder about worker retraining. McCain — who had joked in New Hampshire that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book" — seemed to have little feel for Michigan's pain or the forces that were driving it.

Given that choice, Michigan primary voters, who picked McCain over Bush in 2000, abandoned their hero in droves. The result was a decisive victory for Romney, who took 39% of the vote to McCain's 30%. (Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee won 16%.) "Tonight," Romney declared in Southfield on election night, "marks a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism."

Romney, attuned to the state's love-hate relationship with Washington, promised to protect Detroit from higher government fuel-efficiency standards. But in a move that may not play so well with small-government Republicans outside the state, he also suggested that the feds could be Detroit's savior, by bringing in billions in new federal investment. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Romney demanded to know, "How in the world can the Federal Government sit back and watch a state suffer year after year after year?"

Romney 3.0
What happened in Michigan may be a signal of how the presidential race unfolds in the months to come, first as each party picks its nominee and then as the two winners square off in November. The pocketbook is back in a big way on the presidential campaign trail, rocketing past the Iraq war to the top of voter concerns. "For every candidate in either party, this is the supermarket-checkout moment: Do you get it? Do you understand what people are going through?" says Bruce Reed, who ran the policy shop for Bill Clinton's It's-the-economy-stupid campaign in 1992. "Candidates who feel voters' pain and have a plan to deal with it will do well in this environment. And those who don't, won't."

Romney, the Harvard M.B.A. and longtime venture capitalist, has always been more comfortable talking about economics and solutions than social issues or foreign policy. With its punishing 7.4% unemployment and its automobile industry in a tailspin, Michigan was as friendly an environment as he was likely to find. It is one of only two states in the country that lost population last year, as job seekers fled elsewhere, and the only one in the country with a shrinking gross domestic product. Macomb County, whose swing voters were the original "Reagan Democrats," once led the state in housing starts; it now sets the pace for foreclosures in Michigan.

And then there were the candidate's boyhood roots. Romney grew up in opulent Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit, at a time when Michigan was one of the most prosperous states in the nation. His famously moderate Republican father George had been elected governor three times in the 1960s and had run against Richard Nixon for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1968. Even after 40 years, the family name retained some brand value. At every stop he made in his Mitt Mobile (a souped-up RV), Romney drew on his memories of those days and reminded voters that if elected President, he would not "need a compass to tell me where Michigan is."

But for the normally stately Republicans, Romney's rebirth plunges the G.O.P. race deeper into chaos. The party has now held three major contests in three weeks and each has produced a different winner. Though Romney leads in the delegate count, he is not well positioned in the next big primary, in South Carolina, where Huckabee and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson have grassroots support.

After that, the race moves on to Florida, where Rudy Giuliani, who largely skipped the first three states, has parked himself for several weeks, is spending heavily from a war chest thought to be at least $4 million and hopes to catapult ahead of his rivals with a win. Then comes the 21-state vote on Feb. 5, where some, but not all, of the states award their delegates on a proportional basis. Depending on who wins what, all that could prolong the search for a winner, raising the possibility that the party might enter its August convention with no candidate having captured a majority of the delegates.