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[RedKing]

Scott Walker has dropped out of the race.

 

It's easy to imagine another second-tier candidate like Pataki or Graham quitting...but I'd have pegged Walker as having a pretty good shot.

This will get interesting...

You're about 3 pages late. :p

But yeah, I was surprised too. I thought his sentiment was interesting -- "I'm getting out of the race so we real Republicans can rally around an anti-Trump, and you should too."

My prediction: ALL the other candidates drop out at the same time, except for Jim Gilmore, who forgot he was running. Gilmore suddenly becomes the front-runner and dies from shock, leaving Trump to win the nomination uncontested.

[Powder Miner]

Does it make me a terrible person if I experienced a bit of schadenfreude at Walker's campaign tanking?

[RedKing]

So we seem to have entered the "revolving-door" phase of the campaign, where every few weeks another candidate bubbles near the top of the frothy mass of santorum that is the Republican field (though it's highly unlikely Santorum himself will). Weirdly, this is sort of a mirror universe version of the 2012 race, where Mitt chugged along as The Big Establishment Train That Could, while a host of "insurgent" candidates rotated being the anti-Romney. Now you have Trump as The Big Mouth That Totally Could, Way Better Than You Losers and a host of mostly establishment candidates vying to be the anti-Trump.

Newest CNN poll has Trump still in first place by 9 points, though his overall number was down to 24 from the low 30's he had been enjoying. The winners? Ben Carson (14%) and Carly Fiorina (15%). Carson has since had his "a Muslim should not be President" flap, and Fiorina is starting to look a bit unhinged to many because of this focus on the Planned Parenthood thing that has already been mostly debunked.

So who's next on the carousel? Well, Marco Rubio came in 4th in that poll with 11%, and his numbers have seen a steady increase since the beginning of this month. Mike Huckabee is back up to 6%, double where he was at at the beginning of the month, so maybe he's got some second wind. Even Jeb Bush is back up to 9% (fifth place) and his favorability ratings have gone back up by 10 points in the last month (though still negative). It's probably going to take some kind of external event to push him back up into the top-3 at this point.



Interestingly, this poll came out over the weekend, before Walker dropped out. The poll itself may have provided impetus to pull the plug. Walker was netting less than 1%, with a net favorability rating of -12, the same as Jeb Bush. The only ones with worse favorability ratings are Rand Paul (-13) and The Trump (-28). Impressively, only 1% of respondents had never heard of Donald Trump. The media is now trying to track down that 1% so they can do a story on "People who never pay attention to anything the media says". 

Among Republicans, obviously all candidates have better favorability ratings than among the general poll population, but even then Walker was only +14, as compared to Carson's +55, Rubio's +41, and Huckabee's +25. Even Trump is at +12 and Bush at +11.


The most interesting bit would be if this does start to coalesce into a 3-way race, I could see Trump "buying out" the biggest rival by offering him the VP slot (and possibly money under the table -- I assume that's illegal, right?).

[FearfulJesuit]

The most interesting bit would be if this does start to coalesce into a 3-way race, I could see Trump "buying out" the biggest rival by offering him the VP slot (and possibly money under the table -- I assume that's illegal, right?).

Great. We'll get Watergate 2.0, except a Watergate where the villain is a total moron rather than a magnificent bastard.

[Cthulhu]

Scott Walker has dropped out of the race.

Who?

[smjjames]

I think 'Flavor of the Month' is a better term than 'revolving door' for this phase. And yeah I have questions on Fiorinas mental state because if she 'has a habit of making things up', you've gotta wonder about her mental state. I don't mean twisting the facts or not telling the entire truth like politicians do, I mean completely making things up which sound completely ridiculous.

As for Trump 'buying out' one of his rivals, theres plenty of precedent for presidents (and candidates) picking one of their rivals for the VP position. I really don't think he would need to bribe someone, he just needs to convince the rival that they should work together.

For a while, it's been seeiming like he might pick Carson as a VP (or in the pool at least), but after this controversey (which even Trump seems to be backing away from), maybe not.

[smjjames]

Also, theres a new poll this morning (not sure if that's the one RedKing meant) with Walker still in it at 5%. They still list Perry for some reason, with no number though. Edit: Nvm, the poll itself doesn't list Perry, it's the RealClearPolitics page that still puts his name in there for some reason. Automated proccess maybe.

Wouldn't it be a better idea and a better picture for those people doing the polls to refresh the polls if someone drops out?

[RedKing]

A bigger issue might be this thing that's starting to bubble up about HP illegally selling to Iran during her tenure, in violation of sanctions imposed by President Clinton.

And we're not just talking a few sales here and there.

by 2007, HP printers made up 41% of the total market share in Iran.

@smjjames: That's because RCP displays a poll aggregate of the last 5-6 polls. Walker and Perry registered in those, so they still show up in the aggregate. As time moves forward and new polls don't register them, they'll disappear.

[nenjin]

Lucky for her I guess, they only passed Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002. Otherwise someone at HP would be doing jail time.

[Baffler]

Lucky for her I guess, they only passed Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002. Otherwise someone at HP would be doing jail time.

It'd still probably either be the plant worker who signed off on product shipments before they went out (responsible for HP's part of the sales in the most uselessly literal way possible and therefore the perfect person to blame), or nobody.

[smjjames]

A bigger issue might be this thing that's starting to bubble up about HP illegally selling to Iran during her tenure, in violation of sanctions imposed by President Clinton.

And we're not just talking a few sales here and there.

by 2007, HP printers made up 41% of the total market share in Iran.

It started in 1997, before her tenure, so, she can't be blamed for starting it Whether she actually has any liability or responsibility for continuing it is another thing.

The fact that she outsourced jobs would hurt her more I think.

[RedKing]

Her and virtually every other Fortune 500 CEO in the last 15 years.

[Reelya]

I don't know a lot of in depth US politics but my gut reaction is that I'd vote Carly Fiorina well before Bush or Trump. I think she has less chance of being completely incompetent or beholden to specific interests like oil or military contractors.

[mainiac]

My reaction when reading about her was "wow, so there is someone who makes Trump look good at his job."

[RedKing]

No, I think she's pretty incompetent. And beholden to all manner of corporate interests. See, the problem with CEOs as Presidents is that the US is *not* a for-profit corporation. If it was, the logical step would to outsource our citizenry to save money. After all, the purpose of a company is not to make more money for its employees, it's to make the profits flow up to the shareholders.

In this case, Americans are not "shareholders" of their own country anymore. We're just the worker drones whose job it is to spend, spend, spend so that the wealth can flow up to Wall Street.