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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.