On Wednesday night, Romney debated his formerly conservative self.

On Wednesday night, Romney debated his formerly conservative self.

By most accounts, Mitt Romney scored a clear victory over President Obama at the first presidential debate this past Wednesday evening. The jury is still out on how much polling bounce, if any, the Republican nominee will gain from his performance: Good debate performances don't necessarily translate to improvements in poll numbers, after all; and while the Romney campaign will certainly enjoy a boost of energy, media fact-checkers were none too pleased with his outright mendacity on many issues, while President Obama's campaign is already trying to make up for an uninspired performance by hitting Romney hard on his desire to take Big Bird off the air.

In the context of Mitt Romney's quest for the presidency, however, a debate win is a debate win, no matter what. If Romney had been perceived to have lost on Wednesday night, pundits would have been hammering even more nails into his campaign's coffin. Regardless of whatever fact-checks and recriminations may follow, then, Romney did what he needed to do. But the larger problem for his party and his ideology (or at least, what everyone thought his ideology was) is that his win came at the explicit cost of conservatism.

The past few months of campaigning had left one thing crystal clear: The severely conservative version of Mitt Romney stood very little chance of winning. Before his most recent upgrade, the previous release of Mitt Romney featured a pick of the arch-conservative Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee. His signature economic policy was a $5 trillion tax cut that would somehow pay for itself. He, like his party, had been a crusader against regulation. He famously wrote off 47 percent of the American population as being lazy moochers, and then defended those comments. The severely conservative Romney wanted to repeal Obamacare because it was a massive government intrusion, and if that meant elimination of coverage for pre-existing conditions, well, too bad.

According to master prognosticator Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, severely conservative Romney had a roughly 13 percent chance of winning the election as of Wednesday night. So picture this: It's 34 days before the election, and you're Mitt Romney. The poll numbers are looking bleak, and unlike the conservative base, you know they're not skewed. Donors are on the verge of abandoning your race. You have one last best chance to impress the American people and win them over. So what do you do? Why, abandon conservatism, of course.

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