Comment Romney could have won if his guys hadn't cheated. (Score 1) 292
IMHO Romney could have won it if his supporters hadn't cheated the Ron Paul supporters so blatantly, publicly, and sometimes violently, that they alienated, not just them, but many of the other factions of the Republican Party as well.
Many Paulites (and others) will never again vote for Romney, or any candidate supported by the Neocon machine (alias the "GOP Power Structure) or at least by a number of major figures who were involved in the corruption. The thinking is "If that's the way they treat their own party members in a primary/caucus, they can NOT be allowed to control the mechanisms of the Federal Government."
There are five states that Romney lost by substantially less than the number of people who actually voted for Paul in the primaries/caucuses, with an aggregate number of electoral votes to give him the win. If you assume that these Paul people would have voted for Romney if he'd won the nomination without massive cheating (as he probably would have) and instead sat it out (or enough other Republicans behaved that way to make up for Paulites who didn't) it would have been President Romney.
On the other hand, if Paul had managed to win the primary he'd likely have trounced Obama. He can pull support from much of the Democratic Party's base and enough of the typical Republican voters to make up for any that might have sat out HIS run.