Forget the actual losers, like Santorum, or the not-yet losers like Ron Paul. Here's five entities who really suffered from the 2012 GOP primary. Yes, Rick Perry is number one.

5. Tim Pawlenty

The gentleman from Yawnsville, MN dropped out of the Republican primary after a couple of desultory showings in straw polls. Little did Tim Pawlenty know that every GOP candidate got a non-Romney at-bat, and that the chance to ever plausibly become President was not a determining factor in whether voters were willing to be courted. Pawlenty must have watched the surges of Bachmann, Trump, Perry, Cain and Gingrich with a rocks glass full of what-the-hell-was-I-thinking? And while a certain subsection of the evangelical vote was always going to go to Rick Santorum, it's likely that Pawlenty would have soaked up much of the protest vote that ultimately floated Sweater Vest's campaign well beyond his competence level. 

4. Debates

There were not too many debates, as weary political journalists liked to opine around the 21st one, but they were held too close together, exhausting the audience's patience before the race had reached its maturity. Wouldn't it have been much better to have a debate before Romney took Wisconsin—in which he would have had to defend his endorsement of Scott Walker's union busting on the same stage as Rick Santorum, a pseudo-blue collar candidate from Pennsylvania—rather than listen to Perry and Bachmann yakkety-yak through the fall while Hermain Cain 9-9-9ed all the way to the bank? Then there was Newt Gingrich, who made the media his personal pinata, and while the moderators fought back, their gotcha-esque questions were the equivalent of handing him a stick and daring him to take a whack. 

Meanwhile, hullo Republican audiences, nice to know you, too. The rabble cheered Rick Perry's wide application of his authority to execute people, cheered Ron Paul's leaving a dying man on the hospital curb, booed Perry's efforts to help children of undocumented immigrants get a college education, and hollered for every one of Gingrich's anti-media missiles, until it become pathetically clear that he was treating the audiences as his own personal applause button. 

3. Michelle Bachmann

"Crazy," as Keanu would say, "not stupid" is the order of the day for fringe figures looking to increase their stature through a presidential run. See Herman Cain, who, by never taking his campaign or any of his policies seriously, was knocked off the lowest possible pedestal and onto a big pile of cash. Bachmann, meanwhile, made the mistake of believing the crazy stream of nonsense coming out of her mouth. The result: "HPV vaccines cause retardation, I know cuz some woman just told me so, and hey, where'd she go?" Where Cain came across as zany—and since he never got close to being elected, could always slip in a no-harm-no-foul wink with his "Uzbeki-beki-stan"—Bachmann came off as frightening. There was no playfulness behind her angry improvised reality, and as a result she ends the campaign just as fringe as when she started it. 

2. South Carolina Voters

If anybody in this election cycle wants their votes back, it's South Carolina primary voters. Going to the polls before Santorum coalesced the anti-Romney vote, the largely social conservative GOP electorate in the Palmetto State cast their lot with serial adulterer/Tiffanys' ward Newt Gingrich in what remains the most jaw-dropping result of the entire primary. Casting a family values vote for a man on his third mistresswife made South Carolina voters look as if they either hadn't been paying attention, or more likely didn't want to vote for Romney but didn't know where else to park their car. Sure enough, subsequent primaries showed the candidate that South Carolina had meant to vote for was legitimate social conservative Rick Santorum, leaving everyone to wonder why they, um, didn't. Instead, SC breathed life (again) into Gingrich's campaign, and off he went, moon this and media that. Hell, he's still around, despite having only won two primaries. One of those was his home state. The other was South Carolina, which must feel pretty stupid right now.

1. Texas

When Rick Perry announced he was running for president, Texas genuinely panicked, and warned the rest of the nation not to underestimate the three term governor who had never lost an election, less we end up with another George W. Bush.

Turns out, Texas was the only place Rick Perry could win an election, thanks to a complacent electorate and an enervated Democratic party. In fact, it was so easy for Perry to get elected in Texas that he never had to try, something that was revealed the moment his primary campaign required him to put a sentence together. Instead, the Lone Star state now has the distinction of having sent to Austin, thrice, a man who cannot remember the three departments of government he would eliminate when asked in a national debate. Meanwhile, to take down the presumptive frontrunner, other candidates trotted out all sorts of lovely factoids about the state, from its atrocious school funding to its illusory economic success to its "We're number one!" approach to executing people. The entire Perry campaign ended up one giant anti-billboard for the state, the only upshot of which may be that Perry could actually lose his fourth gubernatorial election—by which point it will be far too late to reverse any of the things Texas elected him, three times, to do.

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