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Know when to fold 'em...

...and know when to run.

Chances are, if you're running for president, you won't win. Obvious though it may seem, it was still kind of surprising to me to actually read it in James Oliphant's article in The National Journal: "Running for the presidency is, at heart, a loser's game. In the past 35 years, scores of men and women have tried, and only five have made it."

Of the eight luminaries on this stage--including three governors, a senator, two congressmen, a Speaker of the House, and a pizza guy--a whopping 0% would go on to become President of the United States.

Because of this, not every candidate tries to see primary season through to the end--and why would they? Running a presidential campaign costs cash and credibility (just ask Rick Perry about the latter), and not every candidate has much to spare. Unfortunately, just looking at campaign data shows very little rhyme or reason as to when or why it is exactly candidates finally decide to pull out of the race. Maybe unforeseen circumstances, like the hospitalization of Rick Santorum's daughter in 2012, force the candidate to figure out his priorities. Maybe the campaign can't sustain the cash flow needed to keep a campaign going. Or maybe the candidate has simply decided it's a losing battle, with an impossibly narrow path to victory.

This question--how do we know when to fold 'em?--came up as I was developing a state-by-state model for eyeballing--and this is really, really, really rough eyeballing--who would win the Republican nomination for president next year. State-by-state polling, especially for early states like Iowa and New Hampshire, or delegate-rich prizes like Florida, is readily available, as is a tentative calendar for primary elections. Both of these should allow us to estimate, day-to-day, how many delegates each candidate has accumulated.

We're nine months out from the Canadian election and I don't feel like saying anything definitive about it just yet

As far as elections go, the Canadian federal election this year seems very distant—we’ve still got a good nine months to go before the current scheduled election day on October 19. (Which is odd, considering that every two years when we have national elections, the hot question always seems to be about what that election means for the elections two and four and twenty years into the future.) And no one’s paying attention in the US, and definitely not as much as they were paying attention to the 2014 midterms. While understandable, it’s one that Americans should be paying attention to, more so than the British ones. We’ve kind of got this special relationship with Canada. Yeah, Britain, we know we’ve got one with you too, but let’s be real here—long-distance relationships can sometimes seem a little, I dunno, let’s say distant, and besides, Canada makes much better food.

The current situation

While current PM Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have been in power since the 2006 elections, it was only in the most recent elections in 2011 that they have actually constituted a majority of the House of Commons—unlike in Britain, where Conservatives weren’t able to form a majority on their own to elect their leader as Prime Minister, Canada has no such rule. Therefore, despite his caucus comprising only 40% of the House after the 2006 elections, Harper has remained Prime Minister in the 9 years since.

It could very well change, however. The 2011 elections were unprecedented in the history of the Liberal Party, not because of the size of the Conservative victory (the Tories won less than 40% of the vote and only an 11-seat majority) but because of the size of the Liberal defeat.* In years past the Liberal Party of Canada had been referred to as Canada’s “natural governing party” because of its near domination of Canadian politics throughout the 20^th century, during which it held power for almost 69 years. It’s the same party responsible for the single-payer healthcare system we in America love so much (*cough*) and (thanks to the party’s historic reliance on the majority-French Quebec as a bedrock of its electoral support) Canada’s official English-French bilingualism.

Its 2011 defeat, however, was a shellacking worse than either major U.S. political party has suffered since 1936. The former “natural governing party” was reduced to a mere 34 seats out of the 308 in the House. This was not all to the gain of the Conservatives, who didn’t win anything resembling a landslide. Instead, it was largely at the gain of the New Democratic Party, which, like Britain’s Lib Dems, had historically been the third-place finisher in every election. That changed in 2011, when the New Democrats won over a hundred seats and became the Official Opposition (that is, second place) for the first time in its history. 

Jeb Bush's greatest advantage is being from Florida

Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has long since anointed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as the "nominal frontrunner" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It's partly due to the lacklusterness of the opposition (third time's the charm, Mitt) and partly due to the fact that he's the only Republican so far to have officially announced an exploratory committee into a candidacy. But Jeb Bush has a fairly obvious advantage that comes into play not just in the general election but in the nomination fight, too: He's from Florida.

This may be less important for the general election than you think. While Mitt Romney's decisive loss in Massachusetts in 2012 and Al Gore's loss of Tennessee in 2000 probably burn sharply in the minds of the two men (probably more so Gore than Romney, since winning any other one state would have won Gore the presidency), those two are exceptions to the general historical trend: presidential candidates almost always win their home states. Before Gore, the last candidate to lose his home state at all (while winning at least one other state) was George McGovern, who lost his home state of South Dakota by over 8 points in 1972, and the last candidate to lose his home state while winning the presidency was Richard Nixon, who didn't need New York to win the presidency in 1968. (Nixon therefore belongs to an exclusive club along with Woodrow Wilson and James Polk, the other two presidents who were elected without the support of their home states.)

Even so, that may not be so much due to a "native son" effect as much as it's a result of the nomination process working. Democratic primary voters will probably nominate a moderate-to-liberal candidate; these candidates are easiest to find in places like New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and so on. Those moderate-to-liberal candidates will likely win New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California not necessarily because they're from one of those states, but because those states tend to vote for moderate-to-liberal candidates anyway, especially when given the choice between that and a moderate-to-conservative candidate. Of course, in a state as close as Florida is at the national level, being from there might make a difference. But for someone like Hillary Clinton (New York) or Rick Perry (Texas), there is no real home state advantage to make use of.

Primaries, though, are different. In a primary, it's no longer a broad spectrum of voters comparing the moderate-liberal candidate to the moderate-conservative candidate; it's now the right side of the political spectrum trying to pick its favorite moderate-conservative candidate out of a bunch of conservative candidates (for the Republican primary, that is). This means distinguishing between candidates ideologically is much more difficult, and other factors may come into play. One might be electability--does even the most partisan of Republicans really believe that, barring a massive, 1929-sized economic implosion, that Ted Cruz can beat Hillary Clinton? But another easy factor could be home state. I, as a New Jerseyan, might vote for Chris Christie in the Republican primary since he's from the state, and I know I can trust a New Jerseyan to serve the functions of the office well.

Britain has a 56% chance of not returning a government after Election Day

"Oh look, a squirrel. How quaint." - Tory PM David Cameron (right), to Labour leader Ed Miliband (left) and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (center). No pun intended.*

Ever since this blog was started in March last year I had been fairly certain that there would be quite a bit of a hiatus at least for the beginning of 2015. After all, there's not much election that happens in odd-numbered years, save for some scattered state elections in the South (two of which, Mississippi and Louisiana, already seem to favor Republicans) and some mayoral elections. There's also the pre-presidential primary scramble, which promises to be interesting, and of course 2016 sees a totally unclear presidential election as well as a Senate map that's almost as favorable for Democrats as the map the Republicans had in 2014. But of course, 2016 is just under a year from now, and for the primaries only two major candidates, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former U.S. Senator from Virginia Jim Webb, have even formed exploratory committees. (That's if you exclude joke candidates like Jeff Boss, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey in 2013, and then successfully petitioned to get on the ballot as the "NSA did 911" candidate.)

As it happens I get bored easily, and an off term from college almost certainly doesn't help. (For me, it's either watching elections or playing TF2 all day anyway.) So what's there to watch in 2015? A lot, as it turns out. This year, America's two closest allies have scheduled national elections: the United Kingdom election is on May 7, and Canada's tentatively scheduled its elections for October 19.

How much does it matter to the U.S. domestically? Probably not that much. But hey, it's something to do, so here's how it works.