If John McCain wins the nomination, he’ll do so on the backs of older belligerent men.

What is this new swing voter bloc? It’s something I’ve teased out from exit polls and anecdotal observations. It helps explain why McCain has decent enough conservative appeal to keep racking up pluralities in places like South Carolina and Florida.

First, the exit polls. McCain does best with older voters. He does better with men than women. He wins military veterans and those who believe the war in Iraq is the most important issue. None of this should be surprising. All of these qualities apply to McCain personally.

But there is something more raw and instinctual at work here too. Older belligerent men are not afraid of confrontation, either personally or politically. I’ve heard more than one guy mention McCain’s volcanic temper as a positive. They equate this with toughness against our enemies.

A commenter on my previous post also reminded me again of McCain’s family origins: like many Southerners, he’s Scots-Irish and has the temperament to match. If you’re not an ideologically driven activist, and you fit the profile of an older belligerent man, you’ll probably end up choosing the Jacksonian flag & country candidate over the corporate titan.

And what of Romney? While McCain promises to kneecap anyone causing you problems (doesn’t matter it it’s terrorists or pharmaceutical companies) Romney pledges to manage them away with quiet efficiency. This has led to some harsh assessments from the Tough SOB caucus, starting with Steyn:

This problem is entirely of Romney’s making. He needed a Mister-Moderator-I’m-paying-for-this-microphone moment, and every time McCain offered him one, with some contemptuous snarl in his direction, Mitt would put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression and say prissily that he wasn’t going to descend to personal attacks. It’s never good to play to your caricature, and Mitt’s caricature (as Kathryn well knows) is that he’s an insipid technocrat Ken doll propped up by a lavishly funded campaign. I mentioned a day or two back the Powerline post about McCain’s willingness to knee his opponents in their privates. By just taking it, debate after debate, Mitt gave the impression that, like Ken, he didn’t even have private parts to be kneed in.

Indeed. Remember that ad up in New Hampshire in which McCain called Romney a phony? Responding to this exact situation eight years ago — when McCain lost it and compared Bush to Clinton — an angry, steely faced George W. Bush went on camera and cut an ad that won him South Carolina. Romney sent out a press release comparing the two, but there was no indignance from the candidate, and no response ad.

It was the same with Giuliani. Rudy stood by and took it as McCain injected Bernie Kerik in a fairly personal critique of Giuliani’s leadership, and even raised the Ground Zero swiftboats as an issue.

In a previous post, Hugh equates the current struggle against McCain with Harriet Miers and the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill. But there seems to be a misapprehension here about how information moves from opinion leaders to the base, and who the target audience is.

In the Miers case, it was a fight amongst legal elites. Having no dog in the fight, the general Republican electorate eventually fell in line with the anti-Miers forces. Likewise, immigration was a tiff between party activists and Congress; our levers of influence were clear.

Changing the trajectory of this primary is a lot trickier. Like Miers and immigration, the argument has been won amongst the activist class (this is why establishment conservatives are finally falling in line, and why Romney wins caucus votes everywhere but the South). The problem is that we also have to convince a plurality of 15-20 million primary voters with countervailing interests, starting in 22 states, not just that McCain is wrong but that Romney is the answer. And the lines of influence aren’t always clear. Do radio hosts based in DC, New York, and Palm Beach matter as much in places like Huntsville, Alabama and Murfreesboro, Tennessee — where McCain is good enough for many war-minded, loosely attached conservatives?

This is not a call to despair. It’s a call to get to work. Whatever the outcome on Tuesday, it’s time to reconnect the movement we all know from the blogosphere and radio with its rural, Jacksonian base.