New poll data.
National tracking poll, Gallup (2/19):
Santorum: 36%
Romney: 26%
Gingrich: 13%
Paul: 11%
Looks like Romney has staunched the bleeding, with his deficit to Santorum nationally flattening out at about 10-12%. Still, the implosion of Gingrich at the same time as Santorum's surge (I think it's a requirement that any talk of Rick Santorum uses the term "surge") meant that Romney had about one week at the beginning of February where he was able to breathe easy. And then it was back to hanging on for dear life.
Looking back and comparing this to 2008, 2012 is all over the damn place. 2008 was pretty much stable up until the voting started. 2012, we've had 5 different front-runners in the national polls, and four different front-runners (Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Romney) before the actual primaries even started. Candidates have had these huge 30-40 point spikes, then within less than a month, they're plummeting equally as fast. Hell, Gingrich has managed to do that twice.
Arizona, PPP (2/19):
Romney: 36%
Santorum: 33%
Gingrich: 16%
Paul: 9%
Less than three weeks ago, Romney was winning Arizona by 24 points. Epic collapse.
Michigan, two different polls, 2/19:
We got one set of polls that show Romney and Santorum tied at 29%, but with 12% "undecided". Another poll shows Santorum leading Romney 37-33. Either way, it's still a tight race, and if anything it's getting tighter. Just a few days ago, Santorum was polling as high as +10 to Romney. Michigan appears to be where the Romney SuperPAC has decided to drop the heavy artillery for now.
Quick history lesson:
There's also increasing rumbling about the possibility of a brokered convention in Tampa. And possibly even a "compromise candidate" wherein the party would basically trot out a brand new candidate in order to break the impasse. This occurred somewhat more frequently in the US in the 19th century and early 20th century, but has been extremely rare in the postwar era. The last brokered GOP convention was the 1948 convention when Thomas Dewey lacked enough delegates to win, but his three nearest rivals refused to support a compromise candidate to oppose him. Eventually one of the three withdrew from the race and freed his delegates up to vote however they chose, which pushed Dewey over the top.
The last convention where an entirely different candidate was elected was the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy had won the primaries, with 38.73% of the total popular vote in the primaries, with Robert Kennedy in 2nd place. President Johnson had dropped out of the race and announced that he would not run for re-election. The esatblishment within the Democratic Party feared losing control to an outsider like McCarthy, and so orchestrated the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the convention, despite the fact that Humphrey had not run in a single primary, and Johnson (whose stead he would be running in) fared terribly before dropping out, only taking New Hampshire (and barely taking it at that). Humphrey got most of his support from states which did not run primary elections (which was actually a majority of them) by orchestrating with the party bosses in those states to get their support.
The McCarthy supporters (mostly young anti-war activists and intellectuals) staged a huge mass protest outside the hotel where the convention was occuring, and Chicago mayor Richard Daley (a party boss and part of the establishment) used the police to crack down hard. The protests turned into riots, but Humphrey was nominated regardless. He went down to defeat in the fall to Richard Nixon.
And that, boys and girls, is why primary elections matter. Because without them, you wind up with a candidate picked by the party elites rather the populace. And you can expect to see a metric shitton of references and comparisons to Chicago, 1968 if Romney is trailing in candidates going into this thing but somehow comes out the nominee.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 772095 times)