The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

CI needs to be ignored.

2nd term... LOL!

Dream on formerman, dream on

The ground swell of opposition to Obama and his Marxist plan for this country is something even he can't overcome.

The debate tonight is live on NBC at 9 ET. Streaming on nbcpolitics.com.
It should be exciting as Mitt and Newt have been trading nasty barbs all day:
Mitt: Newt is "erratic;" like a "pinball machine;" likely to announce some sort of "October surprise" if nominated; will "decimate the Republican Party" and committed "wrongful activity" with regards to his work for Freddie Mac.
Newt: Mitt has gone from "pious baloney" to "desperate baloney."
Obama will certainly be attacked but not as much in earlier debates.

Barbs aside, both, actually all 4 can agree that in order to save this republic Obama must be defeated.

Sucks to be Paul or Santorum. Nobody is really going to care. The entertainment (what this has devolved to) is centered around the conflict between Newton and Willard.

A
R
T

This is a funny ending for the caucus up to this point; the huckster who paid only 15% on his millions, and the ethics violation Newt who made millions from Freddie while a "consultant."

Does it get any better than this? Real life events are more interesting than fiction!

Willard



Newton




Barack

I think Santorum may still have a shot, depending on what happens with Newt. If Newt can be the not-Romney, he'll be the not-Romney. But if he can't stand up to the increased scrutiny of a front-runner, then Santorum may yet come back as the only remaining possible not-Romney.

But for the guy who won the first primary, yeah, must be annoying.

Santorum will be out after tonight debate.

The primary in FL is a week from tomorrow. It is the largest and the most diverse state to go so far. We can expect some 2M Republican voters (it is a closed primary open only to Repubs).
It would be useful to find out something about the demographics about FL.
Age, race, sex, religion etc. Please, if you have time, try to fill in what you discover. Thank you.

Two points of interest, 1/3 of the votes have already been cast in Florida and Newt is now surging.

Wrong. Check your stats vs a legitimate news source.

That's actually a problem for Newt, that so many of the votes were already cast BEFORE the surge. When Romney was the front-runner, and was thought to have won both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Even if Newt's doing very well now, that's a big advantage for Romney.

Plus, Romney's been spending a lot of money on ads there, and Newt hasn't. Very expensive market.

This is all I can find; it's pretty old, but do not know what changes have happened since then.

http://www.fortreport.com/floridavoting/demographics/.

From the 2010 Census Bureau:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12000.html

The 1/3 thing is wrong, but there are definitely a lot:

http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/?p=4398

Somewhere between 8% and 17% as of 4 days ago.

Damn. I have notes on that. I found an article on Politico which suggested that 200K early votes are in out of an expected turnout of 2M (10%) ahead of the Newt surge. Another 200K of ballots have not yet been returned.
If we assume - I say assume - that Romney got 50% of those then Newt will have to make that up. The writer did a bunch of math based on that and concluded that he will need to win by around 3% to make up for that.

More info about early voting:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/22/florida-voters-head-to-polls-early-impact-outcome-long-before-primary-day/

It says that about 225,000 votes have been cast, or an estimated 12% (depends of course on how many people actually vote, estimates are that it'll be 2 million, according to Nate Silver).

Also gave more details on one part I was curious about, when early voting STARTED.

It started later than I realized, on Saturday, January 21st (same day as the SC primary).

So that is less in Romney's favor than I'd thought.

Early voting ends on Saturday, January 28th. (Primary is Tuesday, January 31st.)

Further, the article (which, yes, is Fox) says that officials estimate that 40% of the votes will be cast before the primary. That means that early voting is a net benefit to Newt IMO since he's riding high right now. It's possible he'll just ride higher, but if Mitt does some damage in the next week, a lot of votes will have already happened.

Oh yeah.

The wife of the millionaire dude who gave Gingrich $5 million to go crazy in SC just gave him $5 million to go crazy in Florida:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/miriam-adelson-donates-5-million-to-a-pro-gingrich-super-pac/

It probably won't go as far as it did in SC but still, good stuff.

Improves the chances of him making gains there too, which is probably why the millionaire dude (I mean, his wife) did it. Just Romney flailing away at Gingrich with no answering ads could do some damage.

One more thing and then I'm done:


(Black is Romney, orangey-brown is Gingrich.)


Wheee!

I'm starting to think Gingrich actually has a chance. Not a large chance mind you, but an actual chance.

Hope to see the debate tonight, it's a biggie.

It will be interesting to see if "immigration" comes up tonight.
Obama has been losing support of Hispanics and the Repubs would like to capitalize on that.
But it gets complicated.
The Repub candidates are strongly against illegal immigration and are lukewarm about legal immigration.
The population of FL is about 20% Latino (I haven't figured out Hispanic vs Latino). Most of them are Cuban-American or Puerto Rican and have some strong anti-immigration views.