And now there’s a possibility that something similar could play out in the near future, this time thanks to the ineptitude of the Maine Republican Party.

The state GOP had given local communities a one-week window from Feb. 4-11 to hold caucuses, with the statewide tally announced last Saturday night. At that point, Romney was declared the winner by 194 votes (or a 3 percent margin) over Ron Paul. But there was a catch. Several communities had flouted the state party’s edict and held or scheduled caucuses outside of the designated window, while one county — Washington — had been forced by threats of inclement weather to postpone caucuses that were originally scheduled for Feb. 11 by a week.

At first, this didn’t seem like too big of a problem. Not counting votes from places that willfully ignored the window seemed reasonable enough; if they’d wanted to be part of the statewide tally, they could have followed the rules. And while Washington County did attempt to follow the rules, it seemed unlikely that the results from caucuses there would, when they were finally announced, alter the statewide outcome, given how low turnout in the county was for the ’08 caucuses and how poorly Paul did back then (eight votes).

But since last Saturday, some major errors in the state GOP’s official tally have come to light. As the Bangor Daily News reported this week:

However, a review of the town-by-town results released Saturday by the Maine GOP suggests that some communities that had caucused prior to Feb. 11 were not counted. Nearly all Waldo County towns held caucuses on Feb. 4 but those towns were blank in the results released by the state party. Additionally, Waterville held its caucuses ahead of time but were not included in the results.

Waldo County GOP Chairman Raymond St. Onge said the results were sent to the state party on Tuesday, Feb. 7. He said those results probably would not have changed the outcome but was disheartened the votes were not included.

St. Onge said he spoke to party officials late Tuesday about why Waldo County’s results were omitted.

“They said it was a clerical error,” St. Onge said. “I’m going to believe them because there were other errors that occurred. I don’t think it was intentional because our results wouldn’t have changed the winner.”

While St. Onge, the Waldo County chairman, says the omitted results wouldn’t have changed the statewide outcome, they could have cut into Romney’s margin. The same is true for Waterville, a city of about 17,000 people (10th largest in the state) in Kennebec County. There are other potential issues too. But so far, the state GOP is refusing to address the complaints or to alter its declaration of a 194-vote Romney victory.

But the questions may not go away. Washington County’s caucuses will be held this Saturday, and media outlets will surely be watching the results closely. It’s true that Paul fared poorly there in ’08, but he clearly has more support now; the question is whether he’s gained enough ground to beat Romney, and if he can do so by a margin big enough to cast new doubt on the statewide totals. The more Paul cuts into Romney’s lead on Saturday, the more pressure there will be for the state party to review the previous results.

The wild card in all of this is turnout on Saturday. Because it was so low statewide — just over 5,000 — a big spike in interest in Washington County could have a real impact. As Bill Nemitz of the Portland Press-Herald said on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, “the amount of attention focused on Washington County is unprecedented and their turnout on Saturday might eclipse the turnout from the rest of the state this past weekend.”

If Romney’s victory is ultimately overturned, timing will be key. Currently, the state GOP isn’t scheduled to meet until March, the Saturday after Super Tuesday. Depending on how the GOP race is progressing, having his Maine win tossed out then could be a serious blow to Romney — or it might not matter at all, if he’s coming off a series of big victories. But the timeline might also speed up. If (and it’s a very big if) Paul scores an emphatic victory in Washington County this weekend, it will be a lot tougher for the state Republican Party to run out the clock on this one.

This, of course, is the formula that Romney relied on to undermine Newt Gingrich when the former House speaker emerged as his chief rival in the run-up to last month’s Florida primary. In a way, Santorum is in basically the same position Gingrich was then, frantically playing financial and organizational catch-up after a breakthrough victory. So Gingrich’s Florida futility seems telling: Even with a major boost in fund-raising and a $5 million check from Sheldon Adelson, he was still outspent by Romney by an estimated $12 million on ads in Florida.

Now it’s Santorum’s turn to face this kind of disparity. Money has been flowing into his campaign like never before this past week and he’s found his own super PAC benefactor, but there’s just no way he and his allies will even come close to matching what the Romney forces will be able to spend in Michigan, Ohio and any other state they deem crucial to their strategy. What’s worse, the Wall Street Journal reported today that Adelson, who’s been sending signals behind the scenes that he wants to stay loyal to Gingrich but also wants to help Romney, may have found a way to reconcile his inner-conflict — funding ads that are ostensibly aimed at helping Gingrich but that actually do Romney a big favor by bashing Santorum.

If there’s a ray of hope for Santorum, it can be found in the content of Restore Our Future’s new attack ad, which blasts Santorum for votes as a senator to raise the debt ceiling and allow convicted felons to vote and for earmark requests. What’s striking is how little the Romney forces have to work with; after all, you can always find something to put in a 30-second attack ad, but the material being used here has an obscure/random feel to it. Santorum, with his generally consistent conservatism and lack of serious personal baggage, just doesn’t isn’t the same ripe target as Gingrich. When the Romney campaign needed to attack him, the ads literally wrote themselves:

So it’s fair to wonder how much punch the anti-Santorum ads will pack. Plus, Santorum — again, unlike Gingrich — is actually a generally competent candidate running a generally competent campaign. Which means his side wasted no time mounting a response to the Romney blitz:

Santorum doesn’t have the money to saturate the airwaves with ads like this. But his real aim may be to them to generate viral and free media attention and to convince influential conservatives around the country to rally to his defense and push the Mitt-as-bully narrative.

On the one hand, support for gay marriage among New Jersey voters is solid — 52 percent favored it and 42 percent opposed it in one recent poll, while another pegged the margin at 48-37. Among independents, support is even higher. And the trajectory seems clear: Just five years ago, those overall numbers were reversed when the topic was polled. Given how rare Republican victories in New Jersey are (Christie’s 2009 win marked just the fifth statewide triumph for the GOP in 37 years, and only the second that was won by more than a point), Christie has to be very careful as he approaches his reelection race. He doesn’t have much margin for error when it comes to alienating swing voters — one of the reasons he was so colorful and adamant in denying interest in the presidential race last year — and swing voters in New Jersey are generally fine with gay marriage.

But Republican voters nationally are not, and it will be a long time before they are (if they ever are). So if he wants to preserve his viability for ’16, Christie cannot be known as the New Jersey governor who enacted same-sex marriage. But he also can’t position himself as a hard-line, stop-at-nothing-to-derail-it opponent of it; to do so would reek of the cultural conservatism that has made most national Republicans unmarketable in New Jersey and endanger Christie’s reelection prospects. And if he gets the boot in ’13, it could sink whatever ’16 ambitions he has.

Christie’s workaround has been to oppose gay marriage while calling for a public referendum. This has elicited howls from gay marriage supporters, who argue that minority group rights should never be put to a vote, but it has aligned him with a clear majority of voters, who say they like the referendum idea. Of course, a referendum campaign would be long, messy and divisive. And anyway, Democrats in the Legislature have the votes to make sure one never takes place.

But yesterday’s state Senate vote offered another potential way out for Christie: a legislative override. Twenty-four of the chamber’s 40 members — including two Republicans — voted for gay marriage, a surprise result and a significant increase from the last such vote in 2010. It would only take three more votes to reach the number needed to override Christie’s veto. In the Assembly, where the bill will now head, Democrats enjoy a 47-33 majority, with 54 votes needed to override a veto.

The Republican Party in New Jersey has its very conservative pockets, but the cultural moderation of Clifford Case, Tom Kean and Christie Whitman is still prevalent too. There probably are a handful of GOP senators and a scattering of Assembly members who are personally OK with gay marriage and who could survive politically if they voted for it. This presents a Machiavellian possibility for Christie: Wink at them, continue voicing his opposition, then throw up his hands as the Legislature overrides him and takes the issue off the table. As Josh Benson of Capital New York theorizes:

That would be a slap in Christie’s face, for sure. But it’s not clear that it would hurt. After all, if Christie vetoes same-sex-marriage legislation and gets overridden, he’ll be able to tell conservatives one day, when he’s asking for their support, that at least he tried to keep the liberals in check.

The Legislature has until the end of its current term to override Christie — meaning nearly two years. So don’t expect an override any time soon. But if popular support keeps growing and Christie finds himself staring at a difficult reelection race in ’13, it might start to make sense.

But the political world seems to be taking this all in stride. Sure, the newest poll numbers are dominating headlines, but the tone of the coverage suggests that Romney is still seen as the most likely nominee — by far. For all of his woes, Romney is still given a 75 percent chance of winning the nomination by Intrade, with Santorum at just 16 percent. Four factors seem to be driving this conventional wisdom:

1. We’ve been here before: This is the most obvious reason, and it’s been the defining story of the GOP race. One after another, we’ve seen Romney opponents suddenly rise from the back of the pack, vie with him for the lead, promise to unite the Mitt-phobic right, and then … flame out. Significantly, Romney has never experienced the kind of crash that any of these challengers have; he’s had trouble opening up a wide lead in national surveys, but he also seems incapable of falling much below 25 percent. So far, whenever they’ve been forced to focus, Republican voters have ultimately judged Romney’s opponents more unacceptable than him. And when he has scored primary victories, he’s seen his national numbers climb near 40 percent. He’s almost broken away from the pack, in other words. So if past is prologue, Santorum’s surge will prove fleeting, Romney will steady his ship, and we’ll soon be back to talking about Romney’s inevitability. And even if we then go through this cycle again, there’ll still be reason it will end the way it always does, with Romney on top.

2. Money: Romney’s campaign has more of it, and so does the super PAC that’s aligned with him. A lot more of it. Restore our Future, the pro-Romney group, has now committed about $700,000 for television ads in Michigan through early next week, according to the New York Times. A lot more will undoubtedly come after that, since Michigan doesn’t vote until February 28. Restore our Future is also investing in several southern states and in Ohio, where primaries will be held on March 6. Santorum just can’t compete with this. Sure, he’s been on a fund-raising tear since his three-state sweep last week and he has a super-wealthy ally bankrolling a friendly super PAC. But this is similar to what happened to Newt Gingrich a few weeks ago, when a South Carolina victory flooded his campaign with money and prompted Sheldon Adleson to write another $5 million check — and it still wasn’t nearly enough to compete with Romney in Florida.

3. Vicious attacks: They’ve become Romney’s trademark and they go hand-in-hand with his massive bankroll, which can be spent on devastating negative ads as needed. Twice now, Romney and his super PAC have used this technique to combat Gingrich, once in Iowa back in December and again in Florida. And they’re still not letting up on the former House speaker; many of the ads now airing in Michigan are aimed at him. It may be that the Romney forces simply haven’t had time to create anti-Santorum spots yet; or maybe they just want to make sure Gingrich really is marginalized once and for all. Either way, it’s hard to believe that similar attacks against Santorum — who amassed ridiculous popularity in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri by staying out of the Newt/Mitt sniping — aren’t coming. Romney has already begun trashing the former Pennsylvania senator in speeches and public events. And he’s generally been effective at dismantling his opponents in debates, something he’ll have an opportunity to do with Santorum next week.

4. Endorsements: As Jonathan Bernstein has been pointing out, Santorum’s breakthrough last week — like his breakthrough in Iowa back on January 3 — has not resulted in a flood of endorsements from prominent conservatives, or even a trickle. Especially given the financial disparities at work, it’s critical for Santorum to have loud, influential Republican opinion-shapers making his case and defending him against Romney’s attacks. One of the reasons Gingrich was hurt so badly by Romney’s Florida assault was that GOP elites mostly sat on their hands; they were secretly (or not so secretly) happy to see a candidate they saw as unelectable and unreliable cut down to size. The lack of support for Santorum now suggests that may hold similar reservations about him.

Of course, as I wrote last week, there’s one key difference between Santorum and the others who’ve vied with Romney for the lead this year: He’s a genuinely competent candidate. Not dazzling, but competent. He’s in line with the party base on just about every key issue, doesn’t have much personal baggage, can think on his feet in debates, and deliver a solid stump speech. This is more than can be said for Gingrich, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. This may be Santorum’s best hope: that the desire of the party base to nominate someone other than Romney is so strong that this basic competency is enough to overcome all of the advantages that Romney still enjoys.

Of course, Santorum is hardly the only Republican candidate who’s earned an audition for the role of chief Romney rival, and each one before him has proven spectacularly incapable of capitalizing on the opportunity.

Rick Perry surged to gigantic polling leads when he jumped into the race late last summer, then made a fool of himself in debate after debate and became an afterthought. Herman Cain supplanted Perry sometime during the fall, but fizzled when he couldn’t provide a simple, coherent defense of his signature 9-9-9 plan and after a bizarre sexual harassment saga. Then there was Newt Gingrich, whose erratic style and political past gave his (many) intraparty enemies an endless supply of ammunition — enough to destroy him once in December and then again when he somehow rose from the dead in January.

During all of this, Santorum did have one brief moment of glory, when he gained some last-second traction and won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. But his victory wasn’t announced until weeks later, after he’d fared poorly in New Hampshire and while Gingrich was in the middle of his second surge. Only now is he enjoying the sort of attention and momentum that his Iowa showing should have produced.

Against this backdrop, Santorum’s performance at CPAC this morning was very effective in a very odd way. His speech was hardly great, but it wasn’t bad either. It was a generic, competently delivered articulation of the issues and themes conservatives have been stressing in the Obama era.

Santorum sniffed at “the politicization of science they call global warming,” blasted Obama’s healthcare reform law for killing freedom, promoted “supply-side economics for the working man,” and spent considerable time on “foundational principles” — the culture war issues that have suddenly become prevalent in recent weeks. And he took some shots at Romney — “the person in Massachusetts who built the largest government-run healthcare system in the United States – someone who would simply give that issue away in the fall, give the issue away of government control of your health.”

Again, in many ways this was a thoroughly average address, remarks that an entry-level political consultant could have drawn up for a candidate trying to curry favor with Tea Party Republicans and separate himself from a slippery opponent with an extensive moderate-to-liberal paper trail. But it was remarkable because everyone else who’s emerged from the GOP pack to vie with Romney has been incapable of delivering anything like it. Perry couldn’t remember the words, Cain could recite one slogan and nothing else, and Gingrich — the supposedly world-class debater — was either unable or unwilling to communicate a basic conservative case for himself and against Romney when they shared the stage.

For Romney, this is the real threat of Santorum’s candidacy: that for the first time a main challenger has emerged who lacks substantial personal and ethical baggage, whose policy views are largely consistent and in-line with those of the GOP base, and who is a competent communicator. If this sounds like a low standard, it is — and it says a lot about the 2012 GOP field that it’s taken this long for someone with such basic attributes to emerge (and that that someone is the guy who came to the race fresh off an 18-point reelection loss in a swing state).

Romney spoke about two hours after Santorum on Friday. His speech was also a competent expression of conservative grievances with Obama — “the poster child for arrogant government,” as Romney called him. But the message that Republican voters have been sending for more than a year now, in polls and in primary results like the ones we saw this week, is that they wonder if Romney really means it and that they’d prefer to have someone else representing them in the fall campaign. So it was probably not accidental that Santorum began his remarks by reminding the crowd that he’d been coming to CPAC for years — not just after he decided to run for president.

“I know you, and you know me,” he said. “And that’s important.”