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The Herdson question: At what point will Newt quit – if at all?

March 3rd, 2012

Is he denying Santorum frontrunner status?

For all the time, money and energy spent in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, not all that much has been decided in the first two months. The states that have voted so far account for only about three hundred delegates, and the final allocation of some of them isn’t settled. March is an entirely different prospect.

After Washington today (43 delegates), Super Tuesday sees states worth well over 400 delegates go to the polls. Following swiftly on, next Saturday accounts for around another hundred, the Tuesday after that over a hundred more, and then there are close to two hundred more delegates up for grabs in the second half of the month. All in all, around three times as many as January and February combined.

The way things have panned out, there’s only really space for three candidates: Ron Paul, who will continue to pick up his loyal 10-15% and no more, Mitt Romney, the establishment choice and front runner, and a conservative alternative to them. That final slot remains contested between Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, with Santorum increasingly taking the edge. In fact, Gingrich now looks set for a string of further thirds and fourths on Super Tuesday, his home state of Georgia apart.

That begs the questions of why he’s bothering to continue to run and why people will bother to fund him. The most obvious answers are that he’s either waiting for one of the leading candidates to slip up very badly, or for the convention in the hope that he and Ron Paul can gain enough delegates to stop anyone winning outright. That might make sense for him personally but is a less attractive argument for his backers: what do they get out of it that they couldn’t get elsewhere?

With Romney heading back towards a comfortable lead in the latest national polls, is Gingrich’s stubborn unwillingness to quit costing Santorum votes, delegates and perhaps the nomination?

The first thing to say to that is that the polling is more nuanced. While the national picture has Rasmussen and Gallup reporting double-digit Romney leads, the polling from the Super Tuesday states is much more favourable for the former Pennsylvania Senator, where he leads in Tennessee and Ohio, for example.

One thing that’s very noticeable from the polling history is how both Santorum surges coincided with collapses in the Gingrich vote. That does not necessarily imply that the rest would transfer so readily. Newt’s base of 15% has been solid since November. By contrast, the bursting of both of his polling bubbles may well have been further migrations of the perpetually disillusioned or refugees from candidates who’d withdrawn: different types of voter. Even so, all things being equal, Newt’s base ought to be more sympathetic to Santorum than Romney.

If so, that may well make the difference between one or other candidate being the front-runner. After all, while Romney currently has about as many delegates as everyone else combined, that’s heavily down to his two winner-take-all wins in Florida and Arizona. The rest have split very evenly overall.

Romney is likely to gain another effective winner-take-all victory in Virginia – where Ron Paul is the only other candidate on the ballot – but most of the rest of March’s states allocate proportionately. The crunch begins to come not long after this current flood of primaries, as winner-take-all states become more frequent. This of course assumes that Santorum is still in the game at that point which considering the week he’s just had isn’t a given. And that, together with his likely win in Georgia, is why Newt’s likely to keep battling on for a good few weeks yet.

David Herdson
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  • Anonymous

    There is a competition problem with the media at the moment. There are a lot of them competing for attention, that is sales, but too little real talent to do it.

    So the result is trivia triumphs as they are either too lazy or too frenetic or too talentless to follow up the real news.

    Yesterday was a great example. Hacks tweeting congratulations to one another for pestering Cameron about horses, while the EU in the background signed a deal which is so onerous that it might cause major European strife in due course, and where they at least started to address, after Cameron’s pressure, the need for growth as well as financial stability.

    Yet what did we get. Some silly story about a horse on which journalists are trying to hang enormous theses about the government.

    Have you read any ‘analysis’ – often no more than self puff pieces – on Leveson? But I bet you have seen them hung on old police horses.

    Does every news reporter feel the need to mention horses whatever the policitcal story of the moment: yes. Do they feel the same need to mention the story that a Labour government cover-up of hacking seems to be emerging? No.

    We have seen this before with all governments. The media trivialise and serve us badly when they do it. And it is become more frequent as competition intensifies as money becomes shorter and when it appears talent is ever more evidenced by its absence.

  • Sunil McPrasannan

     Is she named after Mrs. Gorbachev?

  • Plato
  • Charles

      No – the Catholic Church recommends it, some Anglicans follow it, but
    no one is obliged to.  Last Friday I had a burger with the Archdeacon of
    London and he was completely relaxed about the idea (although he did
    have fish because it was Lent)

  • Anonymous

    It was also an EU deal which saw UK (and 11 other nations) concerns being met.

    I cannot think of a single honest newspaper. Its a sad indictment that the Sun on Sunday is probably the most honest and currently News International is probably the most scrupulous news organisation.
    The papers are of course all guilty of paying people for stories they are not supposed to tell.  The Guardian was regularly breaking stories about the police hacking investigations that must have come from the police themselves and which were not authorised.  We also have the police making numerous dawn raids to the accompaniment of press cameras.
    The press and police have a lot to hide and welcome any digression.

  • Charles

     They are laying the ground work for a long-term reform of welfare, which will really come to fruition if they win a second term.

    If they can address those 3 issues properly, then they will have been a very very important government in modern British history.

  • Plato

     This caught my eye

    We then asked people to take all the different taxes and forms of
    spending into account, and posed this question: in terms of you and your
    immediate family, do you think the overall value of the benefits and
    public services you receive are worth more or less than the taxes you
    pay? A mere 8 per cent said they were net gainers, while 55 per cent
    said they were net losers. (The rest thought the two were roughly in
    balance or didn’t know.)

    Again, the views of different groups were similar. It will cause no
    surprise that middle class voters regarded themselves as losers rather
    than gainers by nine-to-one; but among working class voters, the margin
    is still a hefty six-to-one. Less well-off voters are almost as
    resentful as more well-off voters.

    Historic trends in public spending help to explain this. The
    Institute for Fiscal Studies has compiled figures going back to the
    early 1950s, when the National Health Service was young and the
    Beveridge reforms had bedded down. Back then, social security spending
    amounted to around 5 per cent of gross domestic product.

    This year it is
    likely to be 14 per cent. Similar trends apply to health and education
    spending.

  • Anonymous

     He is an ideas man and not an implementation man. The Newsnight talking heads did not rate it, indeed one said the government need to be more boring now its got its reform agenda on the statute books.

  • Icarus

    Very probably. Gorbachev was in power from 1985 so the dates fit!

  • Anonymous

    ‘to promote their hard left/authoritarian views’ – this is the whole point of the AGW agenda, fro’m the Stockholm ’72 conference and the ’92  ‘Rio Earth Summit’ onwards.

    You should look up the life and times of Marxist and UN apparatchik, the Canadian, Maurice Strong.
    ‘Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class
    – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical
    appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing -
    are not sustainable’
    ‘ Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.’
    ‘ So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope
    for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it
    our responsibility to bring that about?
    ‘
    ‘It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, ‘
    and
    ‘Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions’

    This is the green movement in a nutshell.

  • moses
  • Anonymous

    Which suggests that the coalition should continue for another term.

  • Anonymous

    Yes, but in terms of a suggestion to the public we already have a meatless day. Friday.  No doubt Monday was tagged along by some Godless bureaucratic organisation for its own propaganda ends (see my post on Maurice Strong).
    If it were serious it would have encouraged Friday as a good example.

  • Sunil McPrasannan

     Do people ever give up PB for Lent?
    :)

  • Anonymous

     OGH hopes not.

  • Sunil McPrasannan

     Bowel movement?

    (sorry!)

  • http://tinyurl.com/Agreement-of-the-People John Lilburne

    In which case she should be pronounced Ra-eeza, not “Razor” which is what most journos seem to believe

  • Plato

    I hope a newsreader tries to pronounce his name – its wonderfully musical!

    Thai snooker player Thanawat Thirapongpaiboon

  • Charles

    I wouldn’t have a problem with that. Or Cameron with enough of a majority that he can ignore his lunatic fringe.

  • Chris A

    Just had my Unite ballot paper on the government’s latest pension proposal.

    The question is “The NHS pension changes will mean paying more, working longer and getting less in retirement. Do you Accept or Reject.”

    The Electoral Reform Society ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself for being involved with such a shoddy leading question.

  • Plato

    And this from Kellner’s article. The gap between what Labour politicians and activists seem to be pushing vs what the electorate thinks is an eye-opener.

    As for the other three groups of benefit claimants we tested [not elderly or disabled], far more people back less rather than more tax-and-spend.

    The margin is two-to-one for parents on standard rate tax receiving child benefit, six-to-one for unemployed people and seven-to-one for single parents who have never married. And although the detailed numbers vary by party support, age, income and gender, every group of respondents sides more with the lower-cash than higher-cash option for these three kinds of benefit.

    The political lesson is clear. For most people and most aspects of welfare reform, charity ends at home. The government’s current plans tap into a widespread public desire for less generous provision for others.

    Any future government that seeks to reverse these reforms will have its
    work cut out to persuade voters that it plans to give the right money
    to the right people for the right reasons.

  • Sunil McPrasannan

     Pah! I’ve gone without meat for over twenty years (since my mid-teens) and it hasn’t done me any harm!

    (Sunil says, twitching nervously…)

  • Plato

    That is a shocker.

    I imagine that only those who object to leading questions would vote No.

  • Anonymous

    BTW
    Its about 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit and close to 30 since Hanson of NASA started this scam rolling.  Have any of their predictions turned out to be true?  Even close?

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/29/day-of-reckoning-draws-nearer-for-ipcc/

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/uah-global-temperature-anomaly-still-below-the-zero-line/

    The lies and scams of the AGWers have not changed since the day Hansen gave his evidence to Congress (‘What we did is that we went
    in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so
    that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when
    the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is
    television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot’)
    http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=b6a8baa3-802a-23ad-4650-cb6a01303a65

  • Plato

    More commonsense from Peter Watt.

    “Labour folk are an understanding lot. Imagine, for instance, if I
    told a meeting of fellow party members a dark secret about myself. Let’s
    say that I admitted that I had robbed a post office but had since
    served my time. No doubt people would initially be shocked. But pretty
    quickly members would reconcile themselves that my time had been served
    and I was now rehabilitated. Or what if I admitted that I was an
    occasional user of recreational drugs? I suspect that people would on
    the whole turn a blind eye. After all, what’s the odd spliff among
    friends?

    But imagine if I admitted that I had sent my kids to a private
    school? Or used private health services? Even the most mild-mannered
    card carrier would struggle to hide their contempt as understanding was
    replaced by a sense of betrayal. After all, an instinctive love of all
    things paid for by the taxpayer is in the DNA of the party.

    To be honest, I have always found something disturbing about Labour’s
    attitude towards the public sector. Oh, the language is cuddly enough.
    We want the ‘best education system for all’ and ‘first-class health
    services’ and so on. But if we are honest the reality is sadly often
    very different. While many of our schools are great, many are not.

    Much
    of the NHS is incredible, but there are still too many stories of abuse
    on NHS hospital wards for us to be comfortable. Yet all too often
    Labour’s rhetoric seems to indicate a willingness to accept second best
    for taxpayers…” http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/03/02/parents-and-patients-first/

  • stjohn

    in the air at the moment. So not much opportunity to post here, 

  • Anonymous

     Which probably explains your jokes…..
    ;-)

  • stjohn

    I’ve got a lot of balls

  • tim

    Everyone missing the betting story today are they?

    Theres a reason Ed Miliband singled out Michael Gove at PMQs.

  • Anonymous

    Those e-mails to journalists?

    What’s the betting then? That he will be next to leave the Cabinet?

  • moses

    I presume this is the email story now doing the rounds
    Should have shredded them like Blair’s expenses then nothing would have occurred and would have been said.Jeez 130 fecking emails is as bad as the fecking horse story and still no one asks the main question from the hacking enquiry and stated by the Guardian…What did the SoS Reed know or what was he briefed?Who was then informed and how far up the chain did it go?Who suppressed the information and why?

  • moses

    Mike / Moderator

    The previous comment was edited as just about every comment has to be edited to put the paragraphs back in and make the post at least resemble some form of English. The fact that the post is then indicated as “edited by the poster X hours ago”  tends to infer we have changed the contents.

    This may be a disqus thing but it is very irritating to have to constantly re style the post after posting.  

    I have mentioned this before but for a while the poster edited statement was not there it now has returned. Please can we sort the paragraphing issue or remove the edited by poster date stamp feature

    EDIT.. FFS!!! I even had to re edit this fecking post!

  • Plato

    I haven’t heard a single reference to the Guardian article/Peter Clarke testimony on R5/BBC24 so far.

    I probably hear about 10hrs of their broadcasts a day. If only I’d tuned in when they did…

  • Chris A

    Well some of us (me included) will (and have) also voted No because we think the revised NHS pension deal is still a good one.

  • moses

    To me this is the pivot of the whole enquiry not Coulson as some numpty stated yesterday.   Who in Labour when all this occurred,while NI supported them fully and while they had jim jam parties knew what was happening? 

    If it was simply the Tories or the LD’s then they get a kicking for it but how they were not in government even when the initial enquiry was under way.  

    If Labour are responsible as the sworn statement now portrays then Labour Blair and Brown. Reed was briefed. Fact!!

    What was he told?
    Who did he then tell?
    How far up the chain did this go?
    Why was this not followed up?
    Who suppressed the information?

    Until these questions are answered then the enquiry and Levenson are equally farcical and have no further credibility whatsoever. Why is this being done under FOI??

    I am one that has in the past been very critical of those engaged in hacking as regulars know whoever it was but I was absolutely furious when I found out the Guardian lied about Millie Dowler. 

    So enough Now!!! I cannot any longer watch this hypocritical expensive ego driven witch hunt egged on by the left continue. Cameron rode a horse amongst many belonging to an old friend. So Feking what!!!

    What did Reed know is the question…. Yet no one will ask coz he’s a leftie. 

    EDIT AGAIN FOR LAYOUT

  • Chilon

    Well I think it’s the fact Cleggs main protector has flounced.

    What have you got?

  • Plato

    New Thread – Eurovision!

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