But Gingrich has to know that if he doesn’t get elected President (and he has to be realistic enough to realize how unlikely that is at this point) he needs to have a fall-back position as part of the conservative establishment. He doesn’t want to burn that bridge by being seen as the guy that split the party and got Obama re-elected.
I figure at this point Santorum is looking at 2016. He knows Romney will get the nomination this time but he figures he’ll be the second place winner. This is what Romney was in 2008.
So Santorum is figuring he’ll only be 57 in 2016 and it’ll be “his turn”.
I don’t think it’s inconceivable that Newt could bow out if he is defeated heavily in the next set of primaries. He is an egotistical blowhard but you can’t come this far in politics without having some grip of political reality. It doesn’t serve his interest dragging on in the race, frequently coming fourth and being lambasted by hardcore conservatives for helping Romney. A nicely timed exit, an endorsement for Santorum, and sustained attacks on Romney serve his future in the conservative movement a lot better. Plus I get the impression he has genuinely come to loathe Romney.
I thought of it as a natural experiment: it was a 1:1 matchup. If you considered Romney to be the only major candidate on the ballot, then 60% is pathetic. If you think that Ron Paul’s support necessarily has a 25% ceiling, then your hypothesis is falsified. And I thought that Virginia wasn’t an especially unusual state, insofar as it was near the border of the Mason Dixon line.
Yes, agreed: consider that a wisecrack.
Martin: I’m afraid I don’t follow your overall argument, so I’m going to have to resort to tit for tat:
I find this puzzling. If somebody believes that Obama has a 98% chance of re-election then it’s reasonable to point out that he can make big money at intrade. I opine that intrade thereby encourages a degree of humility. I intend to keep alluding to intrade… though I should note that Ravenman has made some excellent criticisms of this approach. Intrade is in the end an aggregator of the opinions of mostly nonprofessional observers. One can think of it as an average subjective probability: the objective probability is something else (and may or may not even exist in a coherent way).
Given the state of the economy, Obama did about 1.5 points better than average in the popular vote, according to the Fair model. He won by 3.4 points, so if his performance was average, yes, he still probably would have won.
My argument doesn’t depend upon demographics (though there is an interesting demographic argument by Judis and Teixeira). My argument is based upon shifts in attitudes and ideology among the Republican base. That’s reasonable right? After all, it is not difficult to point to changes in the electronic media over the past 35 years or so. More substantively, I can compare fiscally responsible Republicans of the 1970s who favored tax increases, to today’s conservatives who feel unbound by grade school budgetary arithmetic. And I can point to the decline in serious scientific policy analysis along the timeline, step by step.
I don’t see why not. You posit a reasonable hypothesis that passes logical consistency checks. Then you test it. Then you keep the same model and test it every four years. Repeat that for 25+ years (with one mild revision) and it becomes difficult to explain alternate hypotheses on a fundamental level. There are critiques that can be made of the Fair model, but I don’t think this is one of them.
I confess that I may be misunderstanding some things in Martin Hyde’s discussion: please accept my sincere apologies.
I was thinking of this as well. Santorum is well-placed to be a serious contender in 2016. He has four years to raise money and build an organization and he will have credibility right from the beginning whereas this time that he was taken seriously only after Iowa. He will have some formidable contenders like Rubio and Christie and I don’t think he will win but I think he has earned himself a ticket straight to the top tier of candidates next time round.
And I wonder whether Pawlenty is regretting his early exit. He clearly underestimated how volatile the race was and how multiple non-Romney’s would get their chance. When he left, he was going nowhere but neither were Santorum, Gingrich or Cain. I think Pawlenty could have made a serious run for the social conservatives in Iowa and done what Santorum did. I think he would have been a steadier, more polished candidate than Santorum and a bigger threat to Romney.
Maybe you’re just dazzled by Pawlenty’s raw charisma.
While the possibility of a brokered or contested convention, always a longshot, has become even less likely lately, do remember that Pennsylvania was represented by Santorum for many years. And what’s that you say about Texas?? Which many of the pundits actually think could go Gingrich if he was viable at that point. So of those New York and California are likely dependable for Romney, the other two not so much so.
Romney didn’t come in second place in 2008. He had significantly fewer delegates than Mike Huckabee.
Well, seven fewer. But Romney won more states and had a larger fraction of the vote despite withdrawing much earlier in the process. “The runner up” in a primary is always open to interpretation because candidates end their campaigns at different points in the process, but I think it was pretty clear Romney was in second place in '08.
I guess it depends on whether you’re going by the actual number of pledged delegates or a broader estimate.
It’s not a universal rule, but withdrawing earlier in the process is usually not a sign that you are doing better than a guy who stays in for longer. 
I agree there are different ways to interpret these results and it’s true that Huckabee was always going to have an ability to appeal to non-evangelical voters. That wasn’t Romney’s problem, although his appeal also has some significant limitations. My point here is that I think people who have bought into the “the Republicans always give it to the last runner-up” theory try too hard to make the facts fit the story, which means they pretty much ignore Huckabee, and the fact that his campaign did better than expected while Romney’s did worse.
Riots. Political street riots in Tampa. Like Chicago in 1968 only sillier. Please, Og.
“The whole world is watching! God, how embarrassing! The whole world is watching! God, how embarrassing!”
The upcoming map seems tailor made for Santorum. Gingrich is toast.
What now? Obama led the polls from the moment he became the Democratic nominee until the election, with the exception of a short bounce around the RNC when Palin was chosen as the VP nominee, but before she opened her mouth too much: 2008 General Election: McCain vs. Obama | RealClearPolling.
Newt is saying he’s going all the way to Tampa, and I have no reason to doubt him.
I question the logic in you rooting for this, though. Newt staying in actually means Romney’s nomination will reach the tipping point faster because every contest he loses, his opponents will barely be gaining on his delegate count (for example because of Kansas apportionment method Romney can lose there and Santorum may barely gain relative to Romney.) If Gingrich dropped out it would actually make the real fight for the nomination last a lot longer.
Once Romney reaches some tipping point it’s actually irrelevant if Gingrich stays in, no one will care. Do you remember in 2008 when Huckabee stayed in until McCain had mathematically won more than 50% of the delegates? People were complaining that would hurt the McCain campaign, but the reality as I remember it was no one much cared after McCain broke 600-700 delegates because Huckabee had no chance whatsoever of changing the ultimate outcome.
For pro-Obama people I also question this glee in the lengthy nomination. If Obama wins it’ll be because people want him to be President more than they want Romney to be President, not because Romney will be “weakened” by a lengthy nomination. I actually question the idea that lengthy nomination fights really necessarily hurt you all that badly in the general. If you recall Obama had a very lengthy fight to win the nomination, far longer than McCain.
He will; not worried about that at all. The value in all this is in the damage it is doing to the Republican brand.
What I object to is your analysis that because of some number from intrade you have factual support for the claim that 2012 was a fine year to run for President as a Republican and there was no reason for any prominent Republicans not to throw their hat into the ring. I’m not against talking about intrade, but you cannot use it that way. There is more to being a professional politician than looking at polls 18 months out and deciding if the President is vulnerable or not. A lot of people won’t even consider a run against a sitting President, regardless of the polling numbers or how weak he might seem. Incumbency is incredibly powerful in our system, and your reliance on intrade makes you blind to the fact that some politicians will simply choose not to participate in a fight against an incumbent when they have the option to marshal their resources and wait four years and get another run at it.
I have absolutely no idea how you are addressing the actual part of my post you quoted when you driveled off with these numbers. You need to do a better job of linking numbers you pull from election forecaster’s models and the actual things you are saying. I didn’t make any claims about Obama’s performance, for one. You were quoting me saying McCain wasn’t a dreg of a candidate and respond with something that doesn’t really address that at all.
From what I’ve seen election forecasting is mostly a sham, and it’s obvious you think it is really cool and interesting but actually looking at the history of it, it is simply weak and uninteresting to me.
For one, Ray Fair has been working on his model since 1976. With any of these models, the people making it have an immediate advantage on all of their retrocasts because they develop a model that can predict the very outcomes they use to develop their model in the first place. (That’s perhaps strange to parse linguistically, but essentially the retrocasting isn’t impressive at all.)
You would expect anyone with time on their hands and an ability to do stat work would be able to create a model that can mostly successfully retrocast an election. However even some of the prominent models miss on a few elections they retrocast when the model was developed.
To get back to Fair, when he isn’t retrocasting his model actually failed to accurately predict the outcome of both the 1992 and 1996 elections.
By and large though a lot of the election forecasters get to maintain legitimacy because of the following reasons:
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The models are tail loaded to place more importance on data later in the election cycle. This makes sense, but it also means it’s a much less impressive feat to say they successfully projected an election based on October data than on June data. Since they can revise their predictions throughout the cycle and their models place more important on tail end data this decreases substantially my interest in these models anytime prior to September or October.
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Most of them actually produce a series of results out of a few different versions of their models. Some of the forecasters of the 1996 election then significantly publicized the results that very closely mirrored the results, and basically de-emphasized all the other iterations of their model that missed the mark.
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Most of the models have “special exceptions” or “special factors” added in to elections that they can’t really explain. It’s been a long time since I’ve paid attention to election forecasting, but the last time I read about Fair he had a special variable for elections where he felt war “improperly affected the results” (1920, 1944, 1948.) However he doesn’t use this variable in many other war elections, so it almost feels like these econometric forecasters simply throw special variables and such in whenever it fixes the predictive power of their model. That’s fine, but it also makes me trust them far less when it comes to being able to provide meaningful basis for discussing an election months before the fact. In one of his models Thomas Holbrook added a special variable for “extremism” to explain why Barry Goldwater and George McGovern lost in landslides that his model failed to accurately explain.
So what it really comes down to is you have a bunch of college professors that release a bunch of predictions over and over, most of them placing increased weight to more recent data (which means the models tend to be more accurate in September and October because the professors know studies have shown late polling data is more meaningful than early polling data.) The predictive ability isn’t impressive much in such a scenario because it is like me predicting who will win the AL East after 145 games have been played and the team in first place is up 5 games. That’s a much easier prediction to make than one made in June, and the value of a model that could predict the outcome of the AL East race in June would be immensely higher than one that only really gets very accurate around August.
Additionally, the college professors follow the practice of cold readers, in that they actually release tons of predictions and then highlight the successful ones. That’s precisely what happened in 1996 (the first election I really knew about election forecasters), guys like Holbrook and Wlezien released tons of predictions some which showed Clinton winning close and some showing him winning big, then they emphasized their prediction that showed him winning big and basically ignored the slight variations in their model that showed other things.
As I think I’ve mentioned in another thread, even if we take the models at face value all they do is use econometrics to get “kinda close.” In a Presidential election things are often decided by very small overall percentage differences in the popular vote, so the value in being able to predict the vote within a few percentage points isn’t that exciting to me at all because depending on how things shift in certain states that wobble room can be the all the difference between who is President or not and whether the election is considered a landslide or not in the EC.
There isn’t a lasting brand in politics. You probably remember the “irreparable harm” the latter years of the Bush Presidency did to the Republican brand. After the 2006 elections we have never recovered.
Oh wait, we actually recaptured the House since then in a damning condemnation of the Democrats by the electorate. I think Obama is going to win the election too, but I view political parties as a lot more fluid than you do. I don’t know how old you are but I’m old enough that I’ve seen both parties change dramatically multiple times in my lifetime, and it has dramatically impacted how strong they are in one election to the next.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but if the majority of America moves in a direction that isn’t hospitable to the Republicans getting elected, then you’ll see the Republicans shifting in their politics. You can observe this having happened to both parties many, many times in my life time (since the 1950s.) So this concept of “damaging the brand” is just simply irrelevant. Our system is always going to have two viable parties.
No, it’s a real factor. Look at Obama’s campaign. Most people barely even notice that Obama is participating in the primaries but he has to as a technicality to be renominated. But he’s just coasting along with no serious competition (Obama currently has 527 delegates to Randall Terry’s one).
So while Romney is spending his campaign money in the primaries, Obama’s is sitting in the bank. Who’ll be in a better position for the general election?
The 1972 campaign and the visibile takeover of the more-or-lefty New Politics Movement did, in fact, do the Democratic brand electoral damage from which it took decades to recover. The GOP now faces an internal crisis on that scale.