If the GOP try and get MA by nominating Mitt, then they’re utter morons. Mitt spent his governorship campaigning for president in other states by badmouthing Massachusetts. He pretty much sank any chance his lt. governor had at keeping the office Republican (although she ran an awful campaign). I predict that Romney, if nominated, would actually do worse in MA than most Republicans, even if you could somehow correct for the residual anti-Bush backlash.
As for Giuliani, MA residents seem to either hate NYC with unreasoning fury, or know that city well enough to remember what he was like September 10th. As will most of New York.
Thompson has been a big disappointment so far. I originally thought he could come in and really shake up the race, but he hasn’t done that. I’d now consider him a longshot.
That really leaves Rudy and Mitt as the front runners, with McCain and Huckabee pulling up the rear.
I wouldn’t quite count McCain out yet - if either Rudy or Mitt make some missteps, I could see some votes heading McCain’s way.
Huckabee is the Bill Clinton of this election for Republicans - the charismatic governor of a small state polling behind the field and potentially poised to break out. However, it remains to be seen if he has Clinton’s political savvy. So he’s still a longshot.
So… 1.5:1 on Rudy. 1.5:1 on Mitt. 5:1 on McCain. 5:1 on Huckabee. 10:1 on Thompson.
It’s this very thing that leads me to believe Hillary & Obama won’t be the nominee.
All I heard and read for 2 years was Howard Dean this, and Howard Dean that. “Can Howard Dean be stopped” and so on. Then he fell flat on his face. Dem voters didn’t vote who they liked, they voted who they thought could beat the Republican candidate. And that wasn’t Dean.
I think the National Preference polls are a bit misleading. When you look at the likely Republican voters in January (1st Primaries) I think they tell the tale that if the elections were held today Romney will be difficult to beat - especially if he can win in Iowa which is a toss up - & South Carolina where he still leads but it is close - he would win every primary going into Super Tuesday except Florida (where he would be smoked) & NV he is 1 point behind Rudy in a caucus state… that kind of Big Mo’ can be hard to beat & I think the general news & National preference polls diss Mit’s positioning a bit
Super Tuesday - February 5th
Alabama, Alaska , Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado , Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas , Minnesota, Missouri, Montana , New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia
Rudy has more $$. The Primaries are ~10ish weeks away and alot can change - but I think Mit is well positioned to be the likely to be the nominee & Rudy needs to work to change this.
There’s certainly no inevitability on the GOP side, when the most popular candidate has the support of only about 28% of GOP voters, and most of them have reservations about him.
Hell, the whole point of this thread is that there are no guarantees on the GOP side. I honestly have no idea how long it’ll take to settle this contest (though I strongly believe it won’t be settled on Feb. 5, just winnowed down a bit) or who will win. I think I can eliminate McCain and Thompson without much risk of being wrong, but that’s as far as I’m willing to take it.
So the whole Dean thing is: well, yeah. We don’t know who’s going to win. But waving Dean around in the manner that multiple posters have done in this thread would apply to either party, any year. It’s the nomination contest equivalent of “Dewey Beats Truman” in general elections. But absent any reason why it should be particularly relevant to this party, this cycle, my reaction is: big deal.
Meanwhile, fully 50% of the respondents to a new Zogby poll say they would never vote for Clinton as president. That’s up from 46% in March. Not only that, but she led the field on the question, “Whom would you NEVER vote for for president of the U.S.?” (Just slightly less objectionable were Kucinich, Gravel and Paul; the least objectionable candidates in the field were Obama, Huckabee and Richardson.)
But just like most fundies have gotten over their dislike of RCs in the course of making common political cause with conservative Catholics over abortion, homosexuality, and the range of “moral” issues, they’ve also been making common political cause with Mormons for some time.
Having spent much of my life around evangelicals, my semi-informed guess is that they’ll have a lot more problem with Rudy being pro-choice and pro-gay (not to mention having a thing for dressing up in women’s clothes and getting smooched by Donald Trump, if that ever becomes common knowledge among them) than with Romney being Mormon.
I’m pretty sure the evangelical leaders will try to organize a third-party run if Rudy wins. Who their candidate would be, and how many votes it would take away, I can only speculate. Well under 5%, I’m sure, but Bush beat Kerry by only 2.5%.
The reason I believe this is that, as Kos frontpager Kagro X recently said, guys like Dobson and Robertson have traded on their influence in the GOP for all this time as part of their fund-raising appeal. They’ve supposedly been remaking the GOP in their image, and IMHO, they’ve been pretty successful. But if a pro-choice, pro-gay candidate wins the GOP nomination, it’ll look to their followers like the evangelicals’ moral agenda counted for bupkis this time.
So they’d have to do something else to make sure it looked like the GOP still had to dance to their tune. And that would be to at least make it appear that the GOP didn’t win the Presidency this time on account of their desertion.
They may well not expect the GOP to win this time anyway - lots of conservatives of various types are concluding already that while it ain’t over, 2008 sure doesn’t look like their year - so it wouldn’t exactly be tossing away much.
I largely agree with your thesis, but I want to point out that while New Hampshire hasn’t officially changed their primary date from January 22, they’re committed to being at least a week ahead of any other primary (Michigan) - and ideally, before any non-Iowa caucus as well (Wyoming). It’s generally expected that they’ll schedule their primary for January 8, although there’s reason to believe that they may jump it all the way up to December 11.
Was gonna add this to the last post, but was too slow for the edit window:
I wouldn’t rely on any single poll in this primary season. I’m particularly leery of ARG and Zogby (Zogby was pretty scattershot last year, and ARG’s polls see too many things that only they see), but I wouldn’t rely on any one poll even if it was Gallup or Pew. Both RealClearPolitics and Pollster.com have multi-poll averages that I’d consider more trustworthy.
That wasn’t two years, it was about six months. People started talking him up as the frontrunner in mid-'03, and he was done by the end of January '04. The unprecedented length of the campaign this year makes it harder for somebody to come out of nowhere, so I think it’s going to be Clinton against Romney. Once the actual voting starts, I look forward (not really) to a long stream of uncomprehending stories about Ron Paul’s “surprisingly strong” showings.
The likelihood that Massachusetts will vote for Romney as a favorite son in a general election is approximately nil, especially because, as Menocchio points out, Mitt’s been crapping all over them. And there have been multiple polls of NY state that show Hillary beating Rudy pretty solidly there.
And every time I see one of those polls, I think: they really need to poll NJ and CT. Rudy plays better in the NYC 'burbs these days than he does either in NYC proper or in upstate. CT and NJ have a lot of NYC 'burbs, but none of NYC to counterbalance them in the vote totals. What polling I’ve seen suggests that among New Jersey residents, our friend What Exit? is far from alone in being a Rudy fan.
The NJ Polls seem to have him at 49%. You know what New Jersians love best about NJ, the easy access to visiting NYC. Rudy made it a lot safer to visit.
Your assessments are correct, but Rudy is leading in the National polls, I don’t understand why the fact Mitt is polling well in the first few states, is enough to overcome the National polls. I thought McCain won New Hampshire without any long term success.
No, I first started hearing a lot about Howard Dean In November of 2002. I recall this VIVIDLY
because it was Thanksgiving weekend, I was in Miami by my Father-in-laws house and there was some show on TV talking about him and how he could/should run, and people were calling in about him saying they really liked him and blah, blah, blah.
What I remember the most is that none of us really knew anything about Howard Dean EXCEPT my F.I.L.'s lady friend who was from Boston.
That was the last time we spent Thanksgiving in Miami, and that was in 2002. I remember hearing all sorts of shit about him after that.
Ok. I think you heard very early, and you made it sound like everybody was proclaiming him the favorite back then. I don’t remember it that way at all, and I was on a college campus at the time - where people gravitated to him a little earlier. Nationwide, he was the favorite from mid-2003 until the Iowa caucus ended.
Ok, and it was a span of 2 calendar years (2002-2004) not actually “2 years” as in 24 months, so I guess I was off on that. But I remember hearing so much about him I thought I’d puke. He may not have been in the actual lead for 2 years, but it was more than 6 months that I was hearing about him.
I opened this thread to advocate for the Tonya Harding technique, but now I can’t stop thinking of those poor, poor multiton mammals, stuck in a barrel, crushed beneath each other’s weight. Won’t someone please think of the elephants?
Rudy made it a lot safer to visit.