And the Nomination Race Begins!

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Santorum's daughter is seriously ill - she has trisomy 18. Most of the time, if you have that chromosomal defect, you aren't even born. Most pregnancies result in a miscarriage, and those that go full term are typically stillborn. Even after that, the survival rate in the first year of life is under 50%. In a sense, it's a miracle the Santorum's daughter has made it to three years old. This race was already over for all practical purposes, and Santorum is simply placing his priorities where they belong at this point.

 

Every candidate who claimed that "God told me to run" has now dropped out.

God's kind of a dick.

 

Has Gingrich dropped out yet? Has Paul? Can either if them do basic fricking arithmetic?

 

Maybe people just didn't understand right ? Apparently not everyone understands old Aramaic .

 

No, but it doesn't matter at all. Technically, Romney has not yet secured 50% of all the delegates, but that's only a formality because many states (including nearly all of the big population states that award a lot of delegates) have yet to hold their primaries. Romney won over 50% of the delegates that have been allocated thus far, and now with Santorum ending his campaign, Romney's delegate percentages in states yet to vote will only improve. So it is certain that by the time all the states votes, Romney will have over 50% of all the delegates, and therefore the nomination is his regardless of whether Gingirch and Paul drop out now, next week, next month, or never.

The result that all the other candidates were hoping for was that no candidate received a majority of delegates, and thus the convention would be brokered, and they could win the nomination at a brokered convention. I never thought a brokered convention was particularly likely, as it would essentially kill the eventual candidate's chance of winning in the general election - he wouldn't be able to run against Obama until winning the nomination, so the eventual candidate would stay in the "primary phase" of his campaign, and would have no real shot.

But that is all now moot. Since Romney will have more than 50% of the delegates once all the states vote, there will be no brokered convention, and thus it doesn't matter how long the other candidates continue their campaign.

 

Any delegates you earn (and this goes for Gingirch and Paul as well - they've both won delegates during the primaries too), are compelled to vote for whichever candidate they were selected to endorse, unless the candidate that they were compelled to pick releases them of that obligation. In such cases, the candidate usually states which candidate he would prefer them to back - although once they are released I do not think they have any obligation to vote for the person they are asked to vote for.

Will that actually happen? Probably, but as far as the outcome is concerned, it doesn't matter. You don't need to secure the nomination unanimously. In all likelihood, all the superdelegates, which make up about 25% of the total delegates and are not bound by state votes will likely line up behind Romney. So even if none of the other candidates release their delegates, Romney will still go to the convention with something like 80% of all the delegates. It won't be a squeaker either way.

 

Yes, but the longer they stay in, the more they divert Republican attention from the Dems. They just weaken his campaign. It seems petty and spiteful.

 

And how is that out of character for Newt? (Or a great many other politicians for that matter?)

 

The democrats have super delegates too. Most of them are elected officials. For example, all members of the House of Representatives and Senate are super delegates. As are most governors, and members of state legislatures. For both parties, super delegates comprise about 1/4 of the total delegates available. And you're right about the underlying purpose of this - and there really can be only two reasons. 1) to break a tie - or something approximating a tie like in 2008 with Clinton and Obama or 2) when the party elites feel like the candidate likely to win the nomination as decided upon by their constituents is unelectable.

Since the modern primary rules used today were put into effect in 1972, there hasn't been a brokered convention, although well into the 1900s brokered conventions were routine.

If you're interested, a convention is considered brokered if, on the first ballot taken at the convention, no candidate receives support of a majority of delegates. At that point, ALL delegates are released, and another vote is taken immediately after that. If still no majority is reached, you then have negotiations and do some political trading (for example, promising a vice-presidential nomination to someone if they swing their delegates over to the front-runner).

 

Looks like Newt is out, too. Now it's just Romney and Ron Paul, and I think Paul doesn't have any appreciable chances.

 

Considering that Paul hasn't won a single state, I'd say that's an understatement. So now Romney has 6 months to focus on Obama and the Democrats (sounds like a band!) and convince people that Mitt Romney can do a significantly better job at running the country. Hmmm. Can it be done?

 

Which one, convincing the people, or actually doing it ?

Convincing the people may be easier, I think there is a fair amount of disappointment in Obama from all sides (although Romney is hardly beloved himself); actually doing better may be a fair bit harder, even though he may find the Congress a lot less antagonistic than Obama. However, being able to do something is one thing; actually doing it is quite another. I imagine the biggest issue is how the economy will fare the next half year.

 

Yeah, the nomination race was, for all practical purposes, over the moment that Rick Santorum dropped out. Santorum was the only other candidate to win a decent number of states (Paul had zero wins, and Gingrich had just two). Also in the two weeks since Santorum dropped out, there have been 6 more primaries/caucuses and Romney won them all (including in Santorum's home state of Pennsylvania). While Romney has not "clinched" the nomination yet because he has not yet received enough delegates for an outright majority, it's a matter of semantics. The only reason he's not there yet is because there are 13 states yet to hold their primaries, including the two largest states in terms of population, California and Texas, that also award the most delegates. With the only candidate who could have possibly challenged Romney now out of the race, there's no reason to expect that Romney wouldn't win a majority in all the remaining states (the other candidates will still be on the ballot). So Romney earning a majority of delegates is an inevitable eventuality.

I doubt that Romney can do much of anything in the next six months that will appreciably alter the outcome of the election. He's quickly back-peddling some of his comments about it being an easy decision to go after Osama bin Laden (after saying during the 2008 campaign that he would never go into Pakistan to get him as Pakistan is an ally).

And his comparison of Obama to Carter was poorly thought out as well. It's true that Carter made a similar decision during the Iranian hostage crisis, but that was a miserable failure, resulting in the deaths of eight US servicemen, and no freed hostages. It was also likely the biggest reason that Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan later that year. I don't know what Romney was thinking there.

Also this past week, Romney called Obama a "celebrity president", and went on to say that Republicans prefer people like Reagan to be the conservative standard bearers of the GOP. (Yeah, Reagan - the guy who was a movie star before becoming president - no celebrity status there.) Again, I don't know what Romney was thinking, and I question if he has speech writers, or at least editors.

I also find Obama's first set of campaign commercials surprising. He is going to great pains to point out how wealthy Romney is (referencing several Swiss bank accounts) and his record as a CEO for Bain Capital, in which the company bought out many smaller competing businesses, usually resulting in the laying off of the majority of the workforces. The message is clear - Obama is running a campaign that Romney is not like you. Whoever would have thought that the first black president could run a campaign portraying the white guy as "the other".

And all of this might not matter one iota. Obama's approval and disapproval numbers are both at 47% - and they have been within a percentage point or two of that number for months. And given that most people have made up their mind on Obama, those numbers are not likely to move a great deal between now and the election. While having an approval rating over 50% guarantees victory (no incumbent has ever lost since doing this poll with a number at 50% or more), being below 50% does not necessarily ensure defeat. Both Clinton and Bush (W) had approval ratings below 50% when they won re-election, and it's because while people may not like you, they might like the other guy less.

And I think that this election correlates very well with the elections of 1996 and 2004, when Clinton and Bush, respectively, won re-election. While neither incumbent was very popular at the time of the election, they both ran against uninspiring alternatives, Bob Dole and John Kerry. I think Romney fits that description perfectly. He's just not the kind of guy people are going to get excited about, not even in a primary where he was running against a field of incredibly flawed opponents. (Santorum's views on social issues lie to the right of the Pope - Gingirch hasn't been relevant in the last 15 years - Paul is nuts.)

So the only way Romney is winning the middle, and thus the election, is if Obama's favorability numbers decline in the next six months, and Romney does not have very much control over that at all. If the economy nose-dives again (most economists predict continued slow growth in the economy for the remainder of the year), or if there is some scandal linked directly to Obama surfaces (he has apparently emerged from the Secret Service scandal unscathed), that might happen. I suppose it's also possible if Romney runs a near perfect campaign (he hasn't shown any signs of being capable of that), or if Obama runs a poor one (which is practically unimaginable).

So where do we stand? Enough people dislike Obama for a variety of reasons that they will vote for the other guy, irrespective of who that other guy is, even a fairly uninspiring candidate like Romney. So there's no reason to think this isn't going to be a close election. That said, Obama has a number of built in advantages, including being the incumbent, having a huge war chest built up for the election (more the double what Romney has), and people liking Obama, the Person a lot more than Romney, the Person (even if they aren't as thrilled about the performance of Obama, the President). So Obama is at this point the favorite heading into the general election, but by no means a prohibitive favorite.

 

It can if he sticks with third person references! I loved that trait in Bob Dole.

 

I'm not normally a huge fan of Ann Coulter, but I thought this was very true and I'm curious as to what Romney's position will be and if elected what he will actually do.

 

So the idea is if you go to a US university and earn a degree, you get to stay here? I don't mind the thought, and while there are thousands of such people in the US every year, it doesn't address to biggest problem area of immigration from Mexico. We're talking hundreds of thousands annually (450,000 are allowed to enter legally each year, and it is estimated that at least that many more make it in illegally). I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm guessing most of those from Mexico aren't coming for a college education.

 

and if they are it probably isn't in math or the hard sciences (If there is a Mexican space program I apoligize for my ignorance)

 

I read it differently -- I thought it meant that people who ALREADY have a degree would be given preferential treatment. I don't see why not, either. I am of the opinion that if established Westerners didn't have to pay such high taxes supporting immigrants who have huge families, we'd have more disposable income, and we'd start having bigger families ourselves, and the labour shortage would be solved. If we bring in only people who can benefit the country rather than coming in and immediately sucking on our generous social programs (I speak of Canada here, don't know how generous the US is) then we'll have a lot less hostility toward the immigrants who are here.

I know for a fact that a lot of the students I taught are only here for the free handouts. They will never contribute economically to the country anything close to what they siphon off. IMHO, we should never have let them have citizenship until they proved over a period of, oh, say 10 years, that they were willing to work and respect our society.