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.

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.

The last big Senate primary of 2014

By "big" I of course mean a competitive primary in a competitive state. (This is as opposed to something like Hawaii's Democratic Senate primary, which was a competitive primary in a non-competitive state.) That state is, of course, Alaska, where Republicans still haven't settled for sure who their challenger to incumbent Sen. Mark Begich will be.

According to polling, it's true, former Attorney General Daniel S. Sullivan has a comfortable lead--as he has in all polling conducted since the beginning of 2014. In the average he leads Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell by 10 points, 37-27, and 2010 nominee Joe Miller by 19. Sullivan has also raised more twice the amount of money raised by Lt. Gov. Treadwell and Miller combined. While he's been outspent slightly by Lt. Gov. Treadwell, I've written before that the size of the campaign war chest is an indicator of the candidate's strength not so much because of the money he spends, but largely because it indicates broader (or at least deeper) support.

The one thing Lt. Gov. Treadwell (and, to a lesser extent, Miller) may have going for him is Sullivan's potential perception as an "outsider": Treadwell has lived in Alaska since 1978, while Sullivan lived up and down the East Coast most of his life until 2009, when Gov. Sarah Palin tapped him to become Attorney General. In aggregate it may be a minor concern, but for some citizens it may be a dealbreaker. (Personally, I felt that the fact that Tom MacArthur moved down from North Jersey just to run in the NJ-3 primary was a major turn-off.) And in Alaska, with a population less than that of the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area, the aggregate is not very large. (Sorry, Columbia, but you were the smallest metro area that was still bigger than Alaska. Nothing personal.)

Still, that takes a backseat to polling and fundraising, which suggest that Sullivan has all the advantages. One other thing that may work in Treadwell and Miller's favor is that polling in Alaska has historically been highly inconsistent (and I'm talking standard deviations of 10+ percentage points here). In 2008, polling in the last month before the election suggested anywhere from a 1-point victory for incumbent Sen. Ted Stevens to a 22-point blowout for eventual winner Mark Begich. And in 2010, the one poll, taken less than a month before the primary election, put Sen. Lisa Murkowski 32 points ahead of the eventual winner, Joe Miller. So it could be that polls are vastly overstating Sullivan's performance and/or vastly understating Treadwell's performance. But then again, it could just as easily be the other way around.

Finally, there's also the somewhat amusing possibility that Anchorage voters will mistake Sullivan for the mayor of Anchorage, Daniel A. Sullivan, and vote accordingly. (I would laugh if this actually happened.) With 42% of Alaska's population, Anchorage is where the votes are anyway. Humor aside, though, it's Sullivan's race to lose here. LIKELY SULLIVAN

Ratings Update: July 31, 2014

Less than 100 days before the election on November 4, here's another ratings update:

Close-Up: Ghosts of Indiana in Kansas

The political Newspeak term we'd use to describe the prospect of Sen. Pat Roberts losing renomination to Tea Party activist and radiologist Milton Wolf is "primaried", as in "After Eric Cantor got primaried by David Brat in the June 10 primary, Republican fears that Thad Cochran himself would get primaried in the Mississippi runoff scheduled for two weeks later soared dramatically." However, Roberts campaign adviser David Kensinger elected to use a different phrase: "We're not going to get Lugar'd," he told The New York Times, a jab at 2012's surprise loser, six-term senator from Indiana Dick Lugar, who was notoriously crushed in that year's primary by Tea Party-backed state treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Sen. Lugar, apart from being perceived as not conservative enough, was confronted by the problem of not actually owning a home in his own state. The political Newspeak we'd use to describe that problem is "going Washington", and it occurs when a politician begins spending more and more time in the wealthy northern Virginia suburbs than in his home state. In his 36 years in the Senate, Sen. Lugar admitted, he had only spent 1,800 days in Indiana. While registered to vote in Indianapolis, the supposed "residence" at which he was registered to vote was actually an expansive, 600-acre farm about 10 minutes' drive outside downtown Indianapolis. "Getting Lugar'd" is a special case of getting primaried where the incumbent has physically lost touch with his home state by not living there anymore.

It's by Sen. Lugar's ghost that Sen. Roberts is now being haunted. Sen. Roberts' "home" is actually a house on a country club owned by two donors with whom he stays every once in a while when he visits Kansas. But there are three key differences between Kansas 2014 and Indiana 2012 that make Sen. Roberts a lot safer than Sen. Lugar:

Hooray! I was only partly wrong on Georgia

"Looking forward to" isn't the same as "winning", as Senate candidate Rep. Jack Kingston found out after his loss in the Georgia runoff yesterday. When the primary on May 20 proceeded to a runoff, many Georgia Republicans' favored candidates were forced out of the race. Excitement among those voters was lower as a result (it's a case of "KAREN FUCK YEAH" vs. "meh, Kingston I guess"), and turnout subsequently lowered--a common pattern in runoff elections that we saw in the last election to this Senate seat in 2008, when a whopping 1.6 million voters who voted in the hotly contested November election didn't vote in the December runoff.

Nevertheless, the departure of some strong runner-up candidates from the race meant that both David Perdue and Rep. Kingston were able to increase their vote totals. Rep. Kingston did much better than Perdue in this respect, closing the 30,000-vote deficit on May 20 to a less than 9,000 vote gap yesterday. In large part this was due to his dramatic improvement in the counties carried by Perdue in the May 20 primary. In Hall and Henry Counties, both suburbs on the edge of the Atlanta metro area, Rep. Kingston picked up more than 2,600 votes in the runoff compared to the primary. Perdue couldn't boast any equivalent improvement in the counties carried by Rep. Kingston on May 20. Just as a refresher (and so you can look at both maps next to each other), here's the May 20 primary again (red is Perdue, blue is Rep. Kingston, and green is Karen Handel):

2014 GOP Senate primary in Georgia by county and winner's share of vote.

The Georgia Runoff, Part Two

Where would coverage of the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia be without a nice colored map?

May 20, 2014 GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in Georgia by county and winner's share of vote.

Three Reasons Why Jack Kingston Should Look Forward to Tomorrow

With one day left before July 22, the Republican primary runoff seems only to have tightened up since Rep. Jack Kingston and David Perdue advanced from the May 20 primary. However, that's a tightening in a marginal sense: Rep. Kingston is still favored for tomorrow. Here's why:

Stragglers: Georgia Runoff and the Rest

One thing that's bugging me right about now is the fact that I don't have access to Stata, the statistical package in which I do a lot of the stuff that goes in here. Fortunately, I do still have my Excel spreadsheets to enter polls and election results and create graphs, and I still have Microsoft Paint to make those maps I love so much. And a lot of the primaries are over already. As far as competitive races go, only the following primaries have yet to be held:

Super Tuesday Mk. II and Quick Ratings Update: June 1, 2014

Normally I make the necessary rating changes at the end of the month; however, we have another Super Tuesday coming up, so we'll hold off on that until afterward in case we have any primary surprises. Not that we had any on the last Super Tuesday (May 20), but still. Primaries are going to be held in the following states:

Brief notes on the North Carolina GOP Senate primary

SurveyUSA just released the first poll of the Republican primary field North Carolina's Senate election since they held their debate yesterday. And it looks pretty rosy for House Speaker Thom Tillis. Prior to the debate, Speaker Tillis had consistently led in the polls, but only by only by 6 or 7 percentage points, and not nearly enough to break 40%, which is the required plurality a candidate must win in order avoid a runoff election. Now he's at 39%, well within the margin of error of the necessary 40% and leading his closest opponent, Tea Party activist Greg Brannon, by 19 points. 

We can't say just yet that Speaker Tillis can comfortably assume an easy road to the nomination without a potentially grueling runoff campaign against Brannon or the other major contender, Baptist pastor Mark Harris of Charlotte. After all, this is just one poll, albeit one that comes after the second debate in which the candidates failed to distinguish themselves from each other. Specifically, the three other candidates who aren't Thom Tillis failed to distinguish themselves from the Speaker, who was the only candidate at the debate who held elected office. If none of the other candidates can present himself (or herself, in the case of nurse practitioner Heather Grant) as a viable yet distinct alternative to Speaker Tillis, current polling suggests that Republican voters will defer to the Speaker's superior political experience and name recognition.

But if we had to guess? We'd say an outright Tillis victory in the primary on May 6. If you happen to be a North Carolina Republican, go vote. Civic duty and all that.