"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," Robert Frost wrote. Struggling after two bruising defeats in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney returned to his native Michigan -- and voters took him in Tuesday, granting him a much-needed primary victory. Romney defeated Sen. John McCain of Arizona, 39 percent to 30 percent, largely on the support from rank-and-file Republicans, conservatives and voters who said Romney's home-state ties were important to their vote.

	Could Romney become the candidate of the suburbs and exurbs in non-Southern states?

For McCain, the loss revived some questions about whether he can win support from enough regular Republicans to capture the GOP nomination, which seems completely up for grabs at the moment. McCain's vote total of some 257,000 votes was roughly 60 percent down from the 650,805 he won in 2000, when he defeated George W. Bush in the Michigan primary, 51 percent to 43 percent. Overall, turnout in this year's GOP primary was less than 900,000, according to the unofficial results tallied by the Michigan secretary of state. That's down more than 30 percent from the 1,276,770 votes cast in the 2000 Republican contest.

So far, the GOP presidential race has seen three different winners in its first three key tests: Romney in Michigan, McCain in New Hampshire and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in Iowa. (Huckabee finished third in Michigan, with 16 percent of the vote.) Ahead lie the Jan. 19 Nevada caucuses and the GOP primary in South Carolina, where Huckabee and McCain are on a Dixie collision course along with former Sen. Fred Thompson. The former Tennessee senator is making his stand there; former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani hopes to jump-start his campaign with Florida's primary on Jan. 29.

But given the jumbled nature of the Republican field, GOP strategists wonder whether any of their contenders will be able to score well enough in the coming weeks to take command of the race before Feb. 5 -- when Republicans in 21 states hold 15 primaries, 5 caucuses and one party convention -- to allocate some 43 percent of the total number of GOP national convention delegates.

"It's hard to point to who's got the initiative here," GOP pollster David Winston said.

But Michigan at least allowed Romney to stake a claim on the race. According to Edison/Mitofsky's National Election Pool exit poll conducted for ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC, Romney won 41 percent of self-described Republicans, compared with 27 percent who chose McCain and 17 percent who supported Huckabee. And Republicans were a much larger portion of the primary electorate this year (68 percent) than they were in 2000, when they accounted for only 48 percent of Michigan GOP primary voters. In New Hampshire, Romney only managed to tie McCain among self-described Republicans.

McCain's Weaker Showing
When McCain won the Wolverine State eight years ago, 35 percent of the voters in the Republican primary called themselves independents. But this year, only 25 percent of the GOP primary voters called themselves independents; among them, McCain could only muster a 35 percent to 29 percent advantage over Romney. In 2000, McCain beat Bush among independents by a vastly wider margin: 67 percent to 26 percent.

And although Democrats didn't have a meaningful primary to participate in -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York handily won a contest in which her chief rivals weren't even on the ballot and no delegates will be allotted -- relatively few opted to vote in the Republican primary. (Michigan allows all registered voters to participate in either party primary.) Only 7 percent of GOP primary voters were self-identified Democrats, down from 17 percent who made up the GOP primary electorate in 2000.

McCain's support among self-described conservatives ebbed at the same time, with Romney winning the group by 41 percent to 23 percent over McCain. In the Granite State, Romney only carried 38 percent of the conservatives to 30 percent for McCain. McCain carried moderates in Michigan, 40 percent to 34 percent.

Romney also won the economic vote in Michigan, another reversal from New Hampshire. A solid 55-percent majority of GOP primary voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country; 42 percent of them voted for Romney, while only 29 percent sided with McCain. Once again, in New Hampshire, McCain carried the economy vote over Romney, 41 percent to 21 percent.

Romney's vocal support for tax cuts may have struck a chord among Michigan Republicans. A narrow 51-percent majority of GOP primary voters said the president should place a higher priority on balancing the budget than cutting taxes -- but among the 44 percent who favored the latter, Romney won 44 percent of the vote while McCain won 21 percent. Among the deficit hawks, McCain won a slim 37-percent plurality, just 5 points more than Romney. That's opposite the pattern in New Hampshire, where McCain got a much bigger boost among voters who were concerned about the deficit and Romney fared less well among tax cutters.

Romney Keeps It Local
In economically anxious Michigan, where the auto industry is the central to the state's fortunes, Romney railed against Washington for its indifference to car companies and imposition of higher fuel efficiency standards. Romney said that the industry was in his blood, reminding voters that his father, George Romney, who ran unsuccessfully for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, was head of American Motors before he became a three-term governor of the state. In his closing TV ad (subscription), Romney also featured an iconic image of the go-go '60s: a Ford Mustang.

Not surprisingly, among the 42 percent of the primary voters who said that Romney's ties to the state were at least somewhat important to their vote, a hefty 58 percent picked him on Tuesday.

Around the state, Romney's strongest performance was in suburban and exurban Detroit. He carried Oakland County, just north of the city, with 47 percent of the vote. And Oakland produced more GOP primary votes overall, some 133,000, than any other county in the state. Likewise, Romney handily won the other top two vote producers: Macomb and the Detroit suburbs of Wayne. He carried exurban Livingston and St. Clair counties, and (albeit narrowly) he even won Washtenaw, which is home to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In the Detroit area, McCain's vote was way off from what he captured eight years ago. In 2000, he tallied more than 245,000 votes in the three counties of Macomb, Oakland and Wayne, winning them all over Bush. But Tuesday, McCain only took some 80,000 votes in that area -- a whopping 68-percent decline from 2000. McCain's best region of the state was the traditional Republican southwest, which includes smaller cities like Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. Romney only narrowly carried this part of the state, which was also Huckabee's best turf.

If Romney can become the candidate of the suburbs and exurbs in non-Southern states where rank-and-file Republicans dominate their primaries -- and several states do have primaries in which only registered party members can participate -- he might well emerge as the party's standard-bearer. But for now, like McCain and Huckabee, he only has a toehold in the GOP battle.