On Pins and Needles in Florida
The race remains excruciatingly close in Florida, and the InTrade numbers provide no insight. Romney and McCain keep trading the lead, although McCain is up more often than not. Still, when it's this close, I doubt a 53/47 InTrade split has much predictive value. The investors, it seems, are looking for a winner, and they can't decided on anything except that Giuliani ain't it. (He's at 3.o.)
Nobody knows anything. And I do mean nobody.
Polls provide little or no insight. McCain is up in the RCP average by half a point, yet the outlier polls that show Romney significantly ahead aren't included. I take some comfort in the fact that there are no outlier polls that I know of showing McCain with a surprisingly big lead. The usual polling suspects - Rasmussen, Zogby, et al - significantly underestimated Romney's strength in Michigan and New Hampshire, although they may have overestimated it in Iowa. That could be the case here, too. Then again, maybe not.
Nobody knows anything.
Talked to a political insider who was actually in Washington for the State of the Union. He's pessimistic, thinking that the Iraq kerfuffle hurt Romney more than McCain. When I cited article after article pointing out exactly the opposite was true, he perked up. "That's the reaction, huh?" He was far more confident after talking to me. And I don't know anything.
He doesn't have any idea what's going to happen today.
I wonder if the people of Florida realize that what they do today will determine the course of the Republican Party for decades to come. If McCain pulls it out, then the Republicans will no longer be the intellectual home of the conservative movement. McCain will go down to ignominious defeat against a candidate, who, unlike McCain, will be more interested in battling Republicans than Democrats.
The thing that sticks in my craw is the reprehensible justification for a McCain vote that maintains that McCain is "the only Republican who can win in November." This is asinine for two reasons:
1. It's not true, and
2. Winning with McCain is worse than losing.
After the roller coaster ride that is this nominating process, who in their right mind thinks that a poll taken in January has any predictive value for November? Two months ago, Rudy Giuliani was unbeatable. Now it looks like he will have fewer delegates at the Republican Convention than Ron Paul, if he has any delegates at all. You really think polls showing McCain beating Hillary by a point or two matter at all?
And say he does win. You then have a president who is far more interested in what the New York Times thinks of him than the Republican base, which he hates with a vitriolic passion more intense than anything the Clintons could muster. Imagine how the NYT editorial page will praise him when he nominates a David Souter lookalike to replace Justice Stevens to "reach consensus" and "maintain the ideological balance of the Supreme Court." Consider how CNN will wax rhapsodic as McCain jacks up taxes on "the rich" in the name of "equality." Tremble in fear as Al Gore soils himself in delight over McCain's trillion-dollar global warming debacle that will bankrupt this country and solve nothing.
In what sense, then, is a McCain victory a victory for the GOP, who will be stuck running him for reelection in 2012 whether they like it or not? The GOP that can support a John McCain is not a GOP in which I can rightfully belong. The GOP might be able to win if it nominates George Clooney, too. It's a bad scene when your candidates win and your ideas lose.
It's all up to you, Florida. What are you going to do about it?
Nobody. Knows. Anything.
posted by Elder Samuel Bennett | 8:16 AM
4 Comments:
I know things. Not about Florida, though.
Just had a nasty thought. Imagine McCain and Huckster gather up enough delegates on Super Tuesday that they can double-team Mitt at a brokered convention. And there is definitely a mutual support pact at work between those two. Imagine Senator McCain and the Huckster as your GOP dream team in November?!? Mitt needs to do really well on Super Tuesday to avoid scenarios like this.
I grabbed this user comment off of Ross Douhat's blog.
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Romney's odds of winning the nomination outright at this point probably depend on a McCain meltdown. The possibility of which is, of course, very real; we're talking about Senator McCain, remember.
If McCain somehow gets crushed in Florida, that could be the beginning of a meltdown. But all the polls now show a close race. If he loses Florida narrowly to Romney, he should still win Arizona, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey on Feb 5th, all of which are winner-take all, and total 236 delegates. Romney polls terribly across the South; Arkansas will go to Huckabee, and Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia will presumably split their delegates between Huckabee and McCain. That's another 280 delegates that Romney can't get on Feb 5th, for a total of 516 delegates out of 1081, or nearly 50% that are essentially out of reach.
Romney can count on winning basically all the delegates from Massachusetts and Utah (the latter being winner-take-all), together totalling 79. Then there's Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota. Romney should be able to do well in Colorado and Montana because these are relatively conservative states with a significant Mormon population. But even if he wins Florida, he's not going to win all the delegates from California, Illinois and Minnesota. Missouri is winner-take-all, but all three candidates are competitive there and the last polling put Romney in third.
Romney not only has to win every state he has a chance of winning - he needs to win by decisive margins. In a realistic Romney dream scenario, where he wins Florida, Massachusetts and Utah, McCain wins New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Arizona, Huckabee wins Arkansas, McCain and Huckabee split the remaining southern states 65% Huckabee 35% McCain, and the delegate split in the remaining states where Romney's competitive is 60% Romney, 30% McCain, 10% Huckabee, then the delegate count after Feb 5th looks like this:
McCain: 510
Romney: 499
Huckabee: 234
In these circumstances, Romney would certainly be the strongest of the three - to win 60% of the delegates from the Western and Midwestern states in contention, he'd need to win a lot of states. But he wouldn't be winning the delegate count; he would have been shut out in the South; and he would still have a slog ahead of him to get the nomination, because there are only 1032 delegates still to be won after February 5th, and he would need 692 of them, or nearly 70%. And remember: this is where Romney is after decisive victories in the competitive states on February 5th. If it's more of a muddle - if Romney wins California narrowly and Colorado decisively, but McCain wins Maine, Illinois and Minnesota, and Huckabee wins Missouri - then even after losing Florida and California McCain would be the clear leader in terms of number of states won, number of regions where he has won, and delegates amassed, and Romney could be under 400 delegates with essentially no chance to win the nomination in the remaining contests (he'd need nearly 80% of the remaining delegates up for grabs after February 5th in this scenario).
Of course, in this scenario - where February 5th is a muddled result where everyone wins a few states and everyone gets delegates - it's also tough for McCain to win the nomination outright, though not as tough as it is for Romney. Going into a brokered convention - which I do not expect - you'd think McCain would be in a weak position, even if he won the plurality of the delegates, since he would have failed to unite the party, failed to close the sale. But remember: Huckabee and McCain are very friendly, and Huckabee has no chance of winning the nomination. I think the odds that McCain and Huckabee walk into the convention arm-in-arm are pretty high in a scenario where no individual has a majority of delegates, but the two of them together clear the threshold. Romney, by contrast, really has to win this thing outright to have a chance. And with the Northeast and the South basically out of contention on February 5th, that's a very hard thing to accomplish.
Unless McCain implodes in spectacular fashion. Which he has been known to do.
Posted by Noah Millman | January 28, 2008 3:03 PM
McCain/Huckabee simply is the scariest ticket I can imagine. If it is a choice between that ticket and anything the Democrats can put together, I will vote Democrat - simply because I would rather the wheels come off during a Democratic presidency than a Republican one. Beside which, McCain/Huckabee can't win - at least, I hope and pray they can't.
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