That won't stop me from throwing out my opinion.
Josh Marshall was reviewing some charts of approval polls for each of the Republican candidates for the nomination, and reported his 'epiphany.' [Click through to TPM, click on each of the charts, and then go down to the charts by candidate for the most interesting view.] The polls show that Giuliani has been dropping continuously since 2006, while Romney has been increasing in approval. Josh's 'Epiphany' was that Romney was going to go into the actual primaries with surprising power. Josh considers it most likely that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.
I don't. I still think it will be Giuliani. Here's why.
I think that the evangelical Republicans will look at the threat of nominating a non-Christian, a Mormon, and as a block, reject him. I think that enough of the evangelicals will shift over to Huckabee to throw the nomination to Giuliani. The New York Times today has a report that the Mormon issue is hurting Romney in Iowa, and the beneficiary is Mike Huckabee, the ordained Baptist minister from Arkansas.
I think that Huckabee will draw enough evangelical votes from Romney to throw the nomination over to Giuliani.
But then Huckabee is going to suffer the same fate as Reverend Pat Robertson did when he ran for President in 1988. Huckabee is going to look good in Iowa, as Robertson did twenty years ago, but when he runs out of evangelical voters and people take a serious look at him he won't go the distance to the nomination. It's still a Romney - Giuliani race. So Rudy is going to pick up the evangelical vote as the least of all evils.
The only other Republican of any interest is Ron Paul. The Libertarians love him, and they have a large on-line presence. Dr. Paul is, however, the favorite of a small constituency, and when they run out he peaks out. The average Republican is not going to vote for him, and he has zero chance at all in any general election. Dr. Paul also ran for President in 1988 and attracted very little interest. He gets more interest today because Libertarians and the Internet seem made for each other, but a quick review of his record of bills presented in the House of Representatives show that he is not a viable candidate for President. I described Dr. Paul as a fruitcake in an earlier post and I stand by that description.
The only other two candidates of any interest, McCain and Thompson, have both seen their campaigns collapse over the Summer. McCain can't interest enough Republican voters favorably to fill a school bus, and his inability to raise money means that isn't going to change. The graph of Thompson's approval shows that the interest in him as a candidate peaked about the time he announced he was going to run and has gone downhill since.
So that's it. The only two real candidates remaining are Romney and Giuliani. Both are acceptable to the Republican money donors but they seem to prefer Rudy. Texas and Southern Republicans already appear to be coalescing around Rudy. Rick Perry, Republican Governor of Texas has come out strong for Guiliani.
If there is to be a real surprise that changes this evaluation, I think it will appear in the South Carolina primary. That primary is going to clarify all the muck and the Republicans will then know who to coalesce around to avoid a brokered convention next Summer.
Addendum 6:37 PM CST
Looks like I posted my opinion a few hours too early. From TPM election Central we get a report that Rudy is way down in South Carolina.
"On the heels of polls showing Rudy dropping fast in New Hampshire and out of contention in Iowa, a a new poll finds him sinking fast in a third key state: South Carolina. The Clemson University poll finds Mitt Romney now taking the lead with 17%, followed by Fred Thompson at 15%, Mike Huckabee with 13%, John McCain at 11% — and Rudy at only 9%.So it looks like the winner of Iowa, New Hampsire and South Carolina will be Mitt Romney. Rudy is going to find it difficult to convince Republican voters that they should nominate the guy who lost the first three contests.
It's definitely not a good result for Rudy, especially in light of recent polls showing him in third in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And it's great news for Romney, who apparently now leads in all three of the key early contests.
I still see the size of the vote for Huckabee to be an indicator of how many evangelical Republicans will sit out the 2008 Presidential Election and not vote at all rather than vote for a Mormon. Also, I still DON'T see the Econo-Republicans supporting Huckabee. They have no hold on him and he is frankly too populist for their taste. Almost any other Republican candidate would be preferable to them outside of Ron Paul. I also see Huckabee as being fatally subject to TV ads that point up his flaws. I previously posted on some of Huckabee's flaws in " Huckabee - from an Arkansas reporter "and "Huckabee - more to confirm Brantley's report", both posted Nov 13, 2007.
Feel free to disagree with me. I'm just trying to read the tea leaves and use the results to predict which way the voters in the Republican primary are currently trending, and which changes are likely to expect. The tea leaves themselves (various news reports) may or may not be good indicators of voter sentiment, so I have to use my judgment to try to "weight" each report for consistency with the others, then see what is suggests.
I have tried to link to the reports I am basing my guestimates on, so go look. Weight them yourself and draw your own conclusions. Then, if you disagree with my conclusions, I have more to learn from disagreement than I do from agreement. Maybe I'll learn to do a better job. (And maybe trying to predict the future is just a fool's game.) In any case, feel free to disagree, but I want to know why. What do you see that I don't. Specifiy if you have evidence, or just a different judgment in weighting the evidence.
And do go look at the charts Josh Marshall refers to. As far as I can tell, that's the best relatively unbiased trend data currently available, all nicely wrapped up in a presentation that permits each comparison between candidates. Note that it does not include data from the last couple of weeks.
Personally, I think that watching politics beats watching a good poker game - and as the war in Iraq has proven, the stakes are a lot higher.
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