Mr. Morden
Atlas Legend
Posts: 44,066
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« on: November 28, 2007, 01:16:42 AM » |
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Well, a couple of points on that. First, in most of the recent nomination fights, there's been a similar pattern. You have a strong frontrunner who suddenly looks vulnerable once one of his challengers catches fire by making a strong showing in one or more of the early states. The frontrunner still usually ends up winning in the end because of money, institutional advantages, or other factors. So part of it is just evaluating how strong the frontrunners are. Are they like GW Bush in 2000, who held on to win despite McCain's mo' from winning NH (and later MI), or are they more like Dean in 2004, who crumbled as soon as he came in 3rd in IA? I think it's pretty clear that there is no strong frontrunner on the GOP side. Giuliani leads the national polls, but people don't even agree on whether he *is* the frontrunner, for obvious reasons. On the Dem. side, it's more of an open question as to whether HRC is a strong enough frontrunner to withstand a strong showing by Obama in the early states.
With regard to Gustaf's other point, that the nomination fight can sometimes go on for many months, after the early states have been long forgotten.....well, that's the way it *used* to work. But the recent trend towards frontloading, and so many primaries coming up at once seems to have resulted in the same pattern replaying itself in each of the last three or four nomination fights: There may be some back and forth in momentum in the first couple of weeks of primaries, but once you have the first big mult-state primary day, one of the candidates sweeps the bulk of those primaries, and their momentum becomes unstoppable. That's why I think it's very unlikely that the nominations will still be undecided on Feb. 6th. Not that it's impossible, since we have a small number of elections to use as guides, but the recent trend seems to be:
more frontloaded calendar -> early momentum becoming more important
Of course it doesn't have to turn out that way, but that's the way I'd bet.
Having said all that, I do actually agree with Gustaf that people are overdoing it when they say that Giuliani is "done". These things are *way* too unpredictable for us to say that at this point. However, I have a hard time seeing how Giuliani can start out 0-5, and still win the nomination. He's going to have to win *somewhere* in those first couple of weeks.
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