Posted on 10/27/2011 4:38:21 PM PDT by mandaladon
Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman who has never held elected office, is tied for the lead in national polls of Republican voters — or perhaps even slightly ahead of Mitt Romney, as he was in Tuesday night’s New York Times/CBS News poll. Mr. Cain has also led in most recent polls of the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary, has taken the lead in Ohio, and is close to Mr. Romney in Florida. If all you had to go on was the polls, you might think that Mr. Cain was the favorite to win the Republican nomination.
But then there are the nonpolling factors, some of which can be objectively measured and some of which cannot, but which would generally point toward Mr. Cain as being a second- or third-tier candidate. Mr. Cain has no endorsements from Republican members of Congress or Republican governors, and very few from officials in key early voting states. He has raised very little money. He has not hired well-known names for his campaign staff. He does not have traditional credentials. He has run for elected office just once before. He has begun to get a fair amount of media coverage, but the tenor of it has been fairly skeptical. His campaign commercials have been … interesting.
Has there ever been a candidate with such strong polling but such weak fundamentals? Almost certainly not, at least not at this relatively advanced stage of the race.
I’m working on a project that tries to assign grades to each of the Republican candidates in a wide variety of categories. Most of these, like polling numbers and establishment support (as measured through endorsements) can be quantified in some way, but a few like debating skill are more subjective.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Wow, even a NYT political analyst outdoes freepers occasionally!
I’m surprised to hear that out of your talk radio lineup.
What they are stuck on is the old playbook.
They are saying Cain is “doing it wrong” because he’s “not doing it the way it’s always been done.”
If they don’t think Cain should president, I have no problem with that. They should state that directly and give their reasons.
But it’s just dumb and poor reasoning to say Cain “won’t” be president or shouldn’t be president because he’s not using the traditional party apparatus to go about his business of campaigning.
I don't get how these pundits, pollsters and professional analysts miss this!
They are no longer the gatekeepers. Cain, for example, has a huge archive of columns, talk radio transcripts, speeches etc. available for any voter to read, post and start a widespread discussion over.
We haven't a candidate with this kind of record of his actual thoughts, analysis and philosophy of governing available to one and all to see, DIRECTLY, with no media filter, no less, in history.
They haven't fully appreciated what it means that each person in their audience now has some ability to fact-check what they say -- or to find the links to back up an opposing viewpoint. This also means that voters are essentially doing their own vetting of candidates.
When Cain gives a speech in TN, for example, because there is so much interest in him, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the US see the clip on the internet and end up watching the entire speech. Then talking about it, not only with friends and neighbors, but with thousands of people, again spread throughout the U.S., in forums such as FR.
That trumps having the little ladies lined up to go door-to-door handing our brochures and asking you to vote for so-and-so any day! And these days people aren't home, nor do they want to open the door anyway! So it's pretty funny to hear many of these people still talking about an old-style "ground game."
Man, even Nate Silver of the NYT wouldn’t go there.
That, my friend, is it in a nutshell. Entirely.
I’ve often recommended Tony Blair’s political memoire, “My Journey.” Fascinating on several levels.
One of the observations he makes there that really made an impression on me:
“Mood always trumps politics.”
Basically, there is this mostly unquantifiable force called the “mood of the country.” It has a mind and will of its own, so to speak, and it defies (or at least operates separately from) political convention.
In the draft, it’s probably comparable to that last piece of the puzzle, the gut instinct about a player.
The reason draft prediction models are so often wrong is the same reason political convention can be wrong: gut instinct/mood of the country trumps all.
I see this in 2008: the mood of the country led to the election of Obama, despite the fact that on the political fundamentals he was already a disaster.
It’s beginning to seem to me that everyone’s ex-aides are always complaining of a “campaign in chaos.”
Maybe campaigns just are pretty chaotic and the candidate never does/can micromanage them enough to meet the liking of some?
Anyone who still reads that rag and believes it is forever lost in the murky sea of lies and deceptions.
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