Thompson's Closing Argument in SC

He nails it.

I've been meaning to (and still intend to) give a more in-depth review of where I currently stand on the candidates. The short of it is, if I could appoint one of these nominees to be our next president, Fred most surely would be the guy. His apparently lack of ability to run a compelling campaign is a huge concern, given what's about to come following the primaries, though.

But, for now, "always conservative", "against amnesty", "low taxes", "100% pro-life", "strong military" ... 3 cheers for the only consistent Fiscal- (and Federalist-), Foreign Policy-, and Social- Conservative in the race.

GOP Primary Predictions - Results

You can find my "methodology"/approach to coming up with these results in my previous post.

Predicted GOP Primary Results

Iowa (1/14/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	37	33
Thompson	17	13
Giuliani	10
McCain	3
Huckabee	12

South Carolina (1/19/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	8
Thompson	36	45
Giuliani	26	22
McCain	10
Huckabee	10

New Hampshire (1/22/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	39	10
Thompson	20	3
Giuliani	22	4
McCain	4
Huckabee	7

Delegate total after these three: Romney: 43, Thompson: 61; Giuliani: 22.

After failing to gain delegates in IA, SC, or NH, McCain and Huckabee will drop out.

Note: SC most likely will change it's date. If it doesn't, Romney is in a lot of trouble though. He's focused a lot on IA and NH, both of which he will likely win, but a SC "hiccup" in between will destroy any momentum he would get from IA and NH wins.

Florida (1/29/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	18	13
Thompson	41	57
Giuliani	39	52

Heading into Super Tuesday, Romney is now officially in a lot of trouble. The big and non-southern states coming up are also likely going to give Rudy a big bump at Thompson's expense.

Delegate total after four: Romney: 56, Thompson: 118; Giuliani: 74.

Georgia (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	22	16
Thompson	52	85
Giuliani	20	13

Illinois (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	12
Thompson	38	28
Giuliani	46	42

Half way through the selected Super Tuesday states...

Delegate total after six: Romney: 72, Thompson: 231; Giuliani: 129.

Now Rudy-territory's turn...

New York (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	14
Thompson	26	19
Giuliani	53	82

California (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	18	16
Thompson	29	36
Giuliani	49	121

Delegate total after six: Romney: 88, Thompson: 286; Giuliani: 332.

From the states I picked, Rudy comes away with roughly a 15% lead. Unfortunately, I think if I had brought in the full array of Super-Tuesday-and-before states, things get more bleak for Thompson. Utah will most certainly go to Romney, but of the remainder, I think they'll break down as follows (# of delegates follows the state name):

Thomspon
Wyoming: 12
Alabama: 39
Alaska: 29
Arkansas: 34
North Dakota: 26
Tennessee: 55
Oklahoma: 42

Giuliani
Nevada: 34
Maine: 21
Arizona: 53
Colorado: 46
Connecticut: 30
Delaware: 18
Minnesota: 41
Missouri: 58
New Jersey: 52
West Virginia: 18

For the sake of simplicity, if you give the full number of delegates to the candidate, we have a grand total between Rudy and Fred of Thompson: 523; Giuliani: 703.

That doesn't look too good, but it may be close enough to keep Fred in the race through March 4th when I think Thompson could probably close the gap by picking up Ohio and Texas. If that happens, we'd be looking at a race through April or May though which could complicate things for Republicans in the general election.

The good news is Thompson is much more likely to get a bump in the weeks ahead than Giuliani, if Thompson pulls off the whole going-official thing well. My predictions also don't really factor in what should be an extra Thompson-bump heading into Super Tuesday with Thompson then in the lead (and Giuliani really almost without any delegates to speak of).

Right now it looks to me like Rudy certainly has the upper hand, but it's certainly not out of reach for Fred. Mitt, I think, is in a fair bit of trouble unless NH and IA can propel him ahead. I think Fred's likely taking of the immediately following (or in-between) Southern states are going to screw that up for Mitt though.

Finally, even in recent end-of-August polls, Huckabee can't break 5% in the early states. I think he's basically failed to capitalize on his brief success in the straw poll. And McCain is in a tailspin in all the graphs and I full expect him to wind up in the 3-10% level Huckabee is in by the time January is here.

GOP Primary Predictions - Intro

My goal for this post was/is to make some predictions about the GOP '08 primaries and figure out just how much work Thompson has to do to get in front of Giuliani (or, put another way, figure out how inevitable is it that Giuliani will be the '08 GOP candidate?).

I started by spending some time looking over the Republican presidential primary poll results over at Pollster.com. I then proceeded to make some predictions for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, and California (six of the eight states for which they have polling graphs).

For each state, I tried to follow the trends I saw in it's graph to arrive at a January '08 number. Obviously the trends these graphs show will likely change over the next four months, but the trends were generally quite clear and had been fairly consistent over the last four or more months, so I think using the trend-result numbers will be closer to reality than the current snapshot numbers.

I also made the assumption that Gingrich supporters would ultimately turn into Thompson supporters. Newt is tacitly supporting Fred, and it seems to me that Gingrich supporters probably support Gingrich because they aren't thrilled with Rudy McRomney. Perhaps I'm being myopic to the possibility Gingrich supporters would wind up with the Huckabee camp, but I think overall this is a pretty safe assumption.

Here's what my predictions, per the above, end up looking like on the polling graph overlaying the six states:


The big colored dots are where I think the candidates will wind up. There should be six dots for each (one for each state mentioned above).

The graph is nice and all, but prediction-wise, it's more valuable to see how things actually break down for each of the states, and sort of go state-by-state like it will actually happen.

Prompted my desire for that approach, I compiled the '08 Republican primary schedule and having done that I actually decided I didn't like my original mix of states. I don't think it would really be worthwhile to look at all fifty states, or even all of the "early" (up through "Super Mega Extrodinary Tuesday!!!") states. So, I'm going to leverage the "Influence" index I added to my '08 GOP primary schedule and I'm looking at the states with an influence number greater than 10 who vote before March. Ohio and Texas have >10 influence numbers, but things really are generally decided before they will actually vote in March. Thus, the states that meet my criteria are Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, New York, California, and Georgia.

For Iowa, SC, NH, FL, and CA I'm using the numbers I arrived at in my mega-graph above. For New York, I'm also going to take the same approach using New York's graph from Pollster.com. For IL and GA, which don't have graphs at Pollster.com, I'm using opinion polling recorded on Wikipedia.

A final note on my "methodology" is regarding turning voting percentages into numbers of delegates from that state. There are actual rules documenting how that's supposed to work, but each state has some delegates that are sort of flexible (not necessarily tied to the state's popular vote) so it gets extra complicated, fast. I tried to look at historical delegate allocations for percentages and use that. Generally, it appears that the top candidate winds up with say 60-80% of the state's delegates and the remainder get spread among the other top vote getters who got more than 10-15% of the vote.

And now with all this background out of the way ... onto the results.

Fred Thompson for President

Arthur Branch for President? Yes please!

Fred Dalton Thompson was on Fox News Sunday over the weekend (transcript) where he announced he is considering running for President. Due to the goodness that is TiVo-eque devices, I didn't watch FNS until tonight but I come away from my evening's viewing thinking "wow."

Thompson isn't particularly charismatic but I'm not sure I have ever come away agreeing with the positions of an interviewed politician more than I did with Thompson. My inner-Libertarian is deeply disgusted by his support of McCain-Feingold but my inner-social-conservative is all sorts of excited.

In truth, if I were in a position to hand pick the next President of the United States, I'd pick Newt Gingrich. Over the last two years, literally every time I've heard Gingrich talk - whether in speeches (highly recommended for any thinking American: 1, 2, 3, 4) or on TV, even if I haven't come away agreeing with him, I have come away thinking "Gingrich knows the problems America faces and has clear solutions for them."

Unfortunately (and frankly, I honestly do think this is unfortunate for the United States), there are probably more people who strongly dislike Gingrich than dislike Hillary Clinton. (And, strangely, most people react the same way — "Newt Gingrich?! You seriously like him? Didn't he... err, what did he ... didn't he do something awful?" — and, no, frankly, he didn't.)

But Thompson doesn't have that negative stigma. He's politically experienced (having served about as many years in the Senate as Obama and Hillary combined) yet his credentials to be considered an "outsider" are at least as strong as Obama's: He's been out of the Senate for five years, people know him primarily for his acting, etc., etc.

And hey, what American in the post-9/11 world doesn't want a "Law and Order" President? Put me down for the Arthur Branch / Jack McCoy ticket, please. (Or even better: Branch / Carmichael, '08!)