Why the Republicans had to nominate a flip-flopper

(Cross-posted from the Mischiefs of Faction)

With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to see how Santorum, Gingrich, or anyone else ever had a chance at the Republican nomination this year. But let's not forget -- people were absolutely freaking out about those possibilities just a few months ago. Romney was the troubled front-runner who had a 30% ceiling and was just barely defeating candidates he was outspending 10 to 1. He was also the candidate who allegedly could not be nominated because of his dalliances with moderation or because of his recent flip-flops.

David Karol has an interesting post at the Monkey Cage in which he argues that Romney's "very inconsistency was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for his success in capturing his party’s presidential nomination this year." But I think it goes further than Karol suggests. It's not just that Romney had to switch his positions to be a credible potential nominee. I would argue that any Republican presidential nominee today would have to be a serious flip-flopper.

One reason Romney's nomination was relatively predictable was that he was running against the sort of people who are simply never nominated for the presidency by the major parties. Gingrich had a notably unsuccessful and short term as Speaker and hadn't held public office in over a decade. Santorum's initial election to the Senate was somewhat of a fluke and his 2006 drubbing in a swing state did not bode well for him. Bachmann was a member of the House. Cain was an eccentric businessman. Parties almost invariably nominate current or recent senators or governors, and of the prospective field, only Pawlenty, Daniels, Christie, Palin, Perry, and Romney fit the bill. Three of those (Daniels, Christie, and Palin) seemed hesitant to fully jump into the contest, and among the three that jumped in enthusiastically, two of them (Pawlenty and Perry) had serious campaigning problems. Once the two of them had functionally dropped, it was hard to see anyone but Romney getting it, unless it was going to be a Really Unusual Year. And of course you never know whether or not you're in a Really Unusual Year until it's over, but by definition, they're really unusual, so the safe bet is that things are happening as usual.

But here's the key point about that: No one taking the stances Romney needed to take to win this year could have had the sort of résumé needed to be a typical major party nominee. The Republican Party has been moving to the right very quickly in recent years. Almost no one taking the stances that Romney is taking now could have been elected as a senator or a governor from most states just a few years ago. So, if you were consistently conservative (like, say, Bachmann or Santorum), you were either doomed to service in the House or to being kicked out of the Senate. If you had a presidential résumé, conversely, it was probably because your views were pretty moderate a few years ago. Arguably, the only person who can get nominated in the current Republican Party is someone who has pivoted to the right rapidly in the past decade. Rapid polarization makes flip-flopping a necessity.

Newt

Newt's out. I don't suppose I can say anything about him that hasn't already been said. But I will offer one mea culpa. I used to say that Gingrich had never won an election outside of Georgia and never would. I was wrong. He won Georgia and South Carolina. So there's that.

I would say I'll miss him, except I'm sure I'll be seeing him on TV multiple times a week for at least the next 20 years.

Romney, McCain, and the long slog to 1,144

[Important updates below]

I've written a bit previously (here and here) about how Romney has been doing in this year's presidential nomination contest compared to how McCain did in 2008. One thing that makes it difficult to compare the two years is that the current calendar is so backloaded; more than half the delegates in 2008 had already been awarded by the first week of February. We're still not at that point in the 2012 cycle, and it's almost spring. But here's one way to compare them: Below, I've charted McCain's and Romney's delegate shares compared to the total number of delegates that have been awarded to date. So, for example, by the time 1,247 delegates had been awarded in 2008 (Super Tuesday), McCain had won 740 of them. (I've used RCP's estimates of delegate shares in 2008 and 2012.) I've projected a linear path for both years.

So the big thing to note here is that Romney is accumulating delegates at a slower pace than McCain did four years ago. Also of note: Romney will not get to 1,144 delegates (a majority) by the end of the primaries and caucuses assuming he keeps accumulating delegates at his current pace.

Now, some very important caveats. (Speaker Gingrich, if you're reading this, you have enough to work with already, but the rest of you should keep reading.)

• The two years are still very different. Note that huge jump in McCain's delegate share between acquiring just over 100 delegates to acquiring over 700 of them. Remember, more than a quarter of all the delegates that would be awarded in 2008 were given out on Super Tuesday. We don't really know what McCain's delegate shares would have looked like had delegates been awarded on a more staggered basis as they are this year.
• Relatedly, due to the slower pace of delegate contests, few candidates have seen fit to drop out. McCain's dominance on Super Tuesday made it clear that no other candidate could win, and Romney dropped out at that point in 2008. Huckabee still won delegates in the South, but his campaign was essentially over by that point. If Romney had gone 12 for 20, instead of 6 for 10, on Super Tuesday 2012, it probably would have led to greater pessimism for Santorum and Gingrich. But there was no such day this year.
• In a different year, Gingrich probably would have dropped out by now. Only the recent advent of the Super PAC has made his ongoing campaign a possibility. And if he weren't in it, Romney would be acquiring delegates at a quicker pace. (See Josh Tucker's important post on this topic.)
• There's no real reason to believe Romney will continue to acquire delegates at this same pace this year. Romney looks likely to do well in Illinois tomorrow, as well as in some large winner-take-all states like New Jersey and California* later on. (And I like him for the winner-take-all Utah primary.) [*Note: California's primary is winner-take-all by state and congressional district. Thanks to Josh Putnam, Thomas Lavin, and DemConWatch for catching that.]

So my expectation is still that Romney will have this thing wrapped up before the primaries and caucuses are over. But it may take some time -- NJ and CA aren't until June 5th.

Update: Samuel Minter makes the very important observation that there are different total numbers of Republican delegates in 2008 and 2012, making a direct comparison of raw delegate counts misleading. I don't have a good excuse here. Anyway, I went ahead a changed the raw counts to percentages and produced... almost exactly the same chart:

I'm not really sure why his chart looks so different from mine. Perhaps it's because he's using Green Paper numbers rather than RCP numbers, perhaps because I use a linear projection and he doesn't....

Further update: Here's the chart post-Illinois. Romney's slope has increased ever so slightly.

How does Romney measure up?

To follow up on my post about how Romney is doing so far, the following seems like a good point of comparison. It's the share of the delegates held by the main four candidates in the 2008 Republican presidential contest at the end of Super Tuesday (2/5/08). The information comes from RealClearPolitics:

Again, Super Tuesday 2008 isn't a perfect point of comparison with Super Tuesday 2012, as a lot more states had their contests in the former year, but it's a rough parallel. As we can see, McCain held about 60% of the delegates by this point.

Compare this to 2012. According to RCP's numbers, Romney has 381 of the 881 delegates that have been contested -- that's about 43%. So yes, that's lower than McCain's share by this point. But again, the rules are very different this year. More states are using some form of proportionality, whereas more contests were winner-take-all four years ago. So what if the states were all using winner-take-all this year? Here's what it would look like, assuming the plurality winner in each state got all the state's delegates:

Yes, Romney would have about 60% of the delegates, just like McCain did four years ago. Santorum would actually be doing slightly better than he currently is. Gingrich would have the same number of delegates, and Paul would have nothing.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why this is an imperfect analysis. For one thing, RCP (and other organizations) are making a lot of assumptions when they calculate delegate shares, and these assumptions may turn out to be wrong. Additionally, the caucus states usually end up producing delegates who support the eventual nominee, although there's no reason that has to happen this year. And this doesn't really account for the superdelegates. Furthermore, the system four years ago wasn't entirely winner-take-all. Finally, it's not like John McCain's nomination was all that typical! 

Still, I think this should give us some confidence that, if not for some changes in the calendar and delegate allocation rules, Romney would be broadly considered to be in solid shape and a strong candidate. And even with the new rules, he's still looking pretty good. He is hardly flawless as candidates go, but we shouldn't blame him for institutional rules outside his control.

Perhaps our expectations for Romney are a tad high

There is an emerging narrative that Mitt Romney is simply not a good candidate. As Paul Begala said on CNN last night:

We come here, every week, this is the week he'll close the deal, as we say.... It's not the campaign. He's got good people. He's got the biggest super PAC of them all. He's got good ads. He's just not very good at this. I mean, look what we've got. He's just not that talented a politician.

Is this fair? I mean, I haven't been particularly impressed with some of his Mr. Burns-esque gaffes or his tepid response to Limbaugh, but it's hard to demonstrate that those have really hurt him. But he keeps getting criticized for failing to "close the deal." This strikes me as a case of unrealistic expectations.

As Nate Silver observes, Romney has been averaging between 35 and 40 percent of the vote in the contests so far. That puts him right about on par with Carter in 1976, Mondale in 1984, and Dukakis in 1988 -- in other words, well on track to become the nominee and have the party unify behind him.

Why hasn't he "closed the deal"? Because this year's calendar and delegate allocation system are a major departure from what we've seen in previous years. As Matthew Dickinson points out, by Super Tuesday in 2008, more than half of the Republican delegates had been allocated. And that was in early February! As of today, only 36% of the delegates for 2012 have been awarded. The contests are simply more spread out than they used to be. And while the Republicans haven't gone full-proportional for the most part, they're not exactly winner-take-all in most of these states, either, while they largely were four years ago more states were so four years ago.

So when you consider that it's harder for any candidate to amass delegates quickly and that the Republican calendar was designed for a prolonged battle, just what are people expecting Romney to have done? Also, given that his nomination is virtually a mathematical certainty at this point, perhaps we could cut the guy a bit of slack on this narrative.

Combining the natural political talents of Martha Coakley with the warmth of Don Rickles

Romney, in Daytona:

But the crowd initially booed Mr. Romney, who occasionally struck a discordant note, as when he approached a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos. “I like those fancy raincoats you bought,” he said. “Really sprung for the big bucks.” And when asked if he was a fan of the sport, he mentioned that “I have some great friends who are Nascar team owners.”

(h/t David Karol)

Updated forecast

Nate Silver has updated his election forecast models based on current assessments of the Republican candidates' ideological positions and the status of the economy. The numbers look substantially better for Obama since the last time Silver drew up these calculations. There are still legitimate reasons to quarrel with Silver's estimates of candidate ideology (especially the conclusion that Gingrich and Santorum are equally conservative) and of the impact of ideology on an election, but he's notably being a lot more transparent about the methods this time around.

Anyway, I've updated my chart of the forecasts based on Silver's numbers, assuming Obama has a 50% approval rating:

It's been too late for some time now

Colorado political consultant Eric Sondermann, in Sunday's Denver Post:

At the end of 2011, I said that I still thought there was one shot in three — no more than that — that the nominee would be somebody not currently in the race. Every time the Romney freight train gets slowed down or temporarily derailed, that brings up that option again of whether Romney is ultimately going to be able to close this deal. I still say that it is only one shot in three. But one shot in three is a lot higher than in any normal political year.

No, there will not be another candidate. The field is set and has been for some time now. Jonathan Bernstein and Josh Putnam dismissed the idea of a late-entering candidate three months ago, and they were repeating themselves then. There are three main reasons:

1. Filing deadlines: It is now too late to enter roughly half the state primaries and caucuses. Yeah, that makes winning a majority of delegates kind of challenging.
2. Romney's not that unpopular: Sure, the contest has been a bit longer and bloodier than Romney wanted, but polling consistently shows that a broad majority of party voters would be okay with him (if not unabashedly enthusiastic about him) as the nominee.
3. The Republican Party does not have a death wish: The last time a party nominated a presidential candidate who had not participated in primaries and caucuses was 1968, and it led to a massive rift within the Democratic Party and a number of profound reforms to the nominating system. If the Republican Party is at all concerned about maintaining the loyalty of its most active voters, it is not going to diss them by nominating someone for whom nobody campaigned.

Scatterplot dump: Colorado caucus edition

Just to follow up on my previous post about Tuesday's Colorado Republican caucus, I've played with a bit more county-level data and found a few interesting correlations. None of these are perfect, and a lot of things are moving simultaneously, so to find the one thing that caused Santorum's upset is a fool's errand. Nonetheless, these are suggestive.

I also encourage you to read Sean Trende's county-level analysis of New Hampshire's and Florida's primaries (he finds some similar things to what I found about Evangelical voters) and Nate Silver's interesting essay today.

Anyway, some graphs after the jump. All bivariate relationships are statistically significant at the p ≤ .05 level.

The Secret of Santorum's Success?

I've been mostly focusing on the Colorado results from last night's Santoruming, which, I'll admit, caught me by surprise. Those seeking to understand what happened here should begin with the knowledge that the Colorado GOP is far from monolithic. Yesterday, Micah Cohen at fivethirtyeight ran a nice geographical profile of the state's Republicans (featuring the occasional blatherings of Kyle Saunders and myself). Cohen notes that the business Republicans in the Denver metro area don't necessarily vote like the libertarian Republicans on the Western slope, who don't necessarily vote like the Evangelicals in Colorado Springs. And last night's map showed some geographic diversity, with Romney doing well in the Denver suburbs -- but not by enough -- and Santorum taking just about every other part of the state (with the exception of the sparsely-populated northwest).

So how did Santorum end up taking the state, when Romney dominated it four years ago and when Romney had the backing of an impressive array of Republican leaders, including the state's most recent Republican governors and U.S. senators and the current speaker of the statehouse?

I was curious about the role of Evangelical Protestants in the state. Here's a telling scatterplot, looking at the percent of religious adherents in each Colorado county who are Evangelicals and Santorum's caucus vote share:

And yes, that regression line is statistically significant at the p ≤ .05 level. I know the data are a bit noisy -- chalk that up to caucus results in small counties, where sometimes only a few dozen people actually turn out to vote.

Below is a multivariate regression equation in which I use the percentage of Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons to predict Santorum's county-level share of the caucus vote in Colorado. I also include a variable measuring whether there was a Tea Party organization in the county in 2010. The only predictor that is statistically significant is the Evangelical percentage:

    santorum |      Coef.   Std. Err.      t    P>|t| 
-------------+---------------------------------------
    evangper |   .2715796   .1125573     2.41   0.019
 catholicper |   .1328817   .1060132     1.25   0.215
   mormonper |  -.2968235   .1923018    -1.54   0.128
  teaparty10 |  -2.368753   3.282964    -0.72   0.473
       _cons |   32.19836   5.826821     5.53   0.000

Meanwhile, here's the same regression predicting Romney's share of the caucus vote. The Evangelical variable is just on the edge of significance, suggesting that the more Evangelicals, the lower the Romney vote. Conversely, the more Mormons, the higher the Romney vote. No, I cannot explain why the Tea Party variable is positive and significant here. This may be spurious, or it may indicate that Tea Partiers who were not Evangelicals backed Romney:

      romney |      Coef.   Std. Err.      t    P>|t|

-------------+---------------------------------------

    evangper |   -.193941   .0985893    -1.97   0.054

 catholicper |  -.0887819   .0928572    -0.96   0.343

   mormonper |   .5840437   .1684377     3.47   0.001

  teaparty10 |   5.884603   2.875557     2.05   0.045

       _cons |   32.35636   5.103729     6.34   0.000

Again, these are county-level data, which may not be the best level to examine such questions. Nonetheless, what does this mean going forward? Is this evidence that Evangelicals will not accept Romney due to his religion? Or that Romney supporters lack the enthusiasm to seal the deal? I noticed this interesting tweet from David Leonhardt this morning:

Streak continues: Romney has won every state Hillary did in '08 (NH, FL, NV) and lost all those she lost (IA, SC, MN, MO, CO).

Here's the important difference: she lost all those other states to Obama. Romney lost those other states to two different people. If there were one non-Romney sucking up all the votes and delegates, that would be a serious threat, but at least so far, that's not happening.

Romney still has what his rivals lack: the money and institutional backing to be competitive everywhere at the same time. We'll see evidence of that on Super Tuesday. Gingrich and Santorum may continue to make him bleed, but I still don't see how either of them deprives him of the nomination.

Update: More telling scatterplots here.

Christina Aguilera is the Newt Gingrich of "The Voice"

Just think about the parallels:

• She's a tremendous diva who can't let a conversation go on without inserting herself in the middle of it.
• She makes uncomfortable and unnecessary references to race.
• She's convinced a number of people that she's extremely talented, but most of what she does is just babbling incoherently into a microphone.
• She's still trying to relive her glory days from the 1990s, although even then she was playing second fiddle to Britney Spears (Bill Clinton).
• She tends to make out with blondes who are not of her generation.

A pair of pliers and a blow torch

Last week, after Gingrich's upset victory in South Carolina, I wrote the following:

My assumption is that the system has not changed significantly, and that party insiders will rise up again to crush Gingrich as they did back in December. And Lord knows they have the material to do it.

Did they ever. It was ugly. It seemed like every Republican member of Congress who served with Gingrich took to the airwaves or the op/ed pages to pillory him. They even dug up Bob Dole to slap Newt around a bit. And it seems to have worked quite effectively.

Now, what do I mean by "they"? I'm speaking of the party insiders, what some might call the "establishment." To understand this, it's important to read Jonathan Bernstein's post on the subject. As he notes, the concept of the party "establishment" is not terribly useful, and it can be very difficult to distinguish between party "insiders" and "outsiders." I stick with the idea that the bulk of "insiders" (officeholders, major donors, activists, media figures, and others) are backing Romney and set out to crush Gingrich over the past week. But, of course, Gingrich did get the recent backing of Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin, and I hesitate to call them (well, at least the latter two of them) "outsiders." Perry, despite being a rather pathetic campaigner on the national stage, is still the Republican governor of Texas, and Palin is, of course, the party's most recent vice presidential nominee.

Similarly, how do we classify Gingrich? Sure, he's running as an "outsider," but as Ezra Klein notes, Gingrich is a rather odd person to claim outsider status, given his two decades in Congress, his four years as Speaker, his doctoral degree, his penchant for using Isaac Asimov books to generate policy ideas, and more than a decade of work as a DC consultant, party elder, and Sunday morning talk show mainstay. This is hardly the stuff of raw populism. But being an insider or an outsider isn't simply a function of one's résumé. He's running this way precisely because the bulk of insiders are already in Romney's camp. He has no choice.

In The Party Decides, Cohen et al. talk about the importance of endorsements by out-of-group elites. The example they use is a vegetarian recommending a fish restaurant; if the vegetarian likes it, that sends a signal to people with lots of other preferences that the restaurant probably has a lot of good selections, even if their speciality is fish, and a whole group of people with diverse preferences may end up converging on that restaurant. Similarly, if, say, a prominent evangelical Christian backed Romney, that would be an important signal to other prominent party activists, and would probably be more impressive than if he got endorsements from other northeastern Mormon businessmen.

The example we have today is that the bulk of Republican members of Congress who served with Gingrich are now backing Romney. It wouldn't be terribly impressive if they had backed Gingrich -- we'd have expected that kind of loyalty to the former Speaker. But the fact that they know him well and are refusing to back him is very meaningful. David Frum had one of my favorite quotes on the subject: "Suppose it were Gingrich v. Obama. And suppose we restricted franchise to Republicans who served in Congress 1978-1998. It'd be a close vote."

Now, when party elites have converged on a candidate (as they have largely done in this case), it tends to be easy for the media to portray other rival candidates as flaky or eccentric, and the insider-backed candidate can exploit that. (Think Gary Hart '88, Howard Dean '04, Ron Paul in several cycles.) But with Gingrich, that's like shooting fish in a barrel.

I had suggested a while back that this election was turning into a great test of The Party Decides, and so far it's looking like a resounding win for the theory. But Gingrich may have made it a bit easy for them.

Winning the future

Exit polls from Florida Republican primary:

Romney in Two Primaries

Here's a graphical comparison of Romney's performance in the Florida primaries of 2008 and 2012 among different demographic groups:

The red line is where Romney's support would be if he'd done the same in 2012 as he did in 2008. Obviously, he did much better overall, garnering an estimated 46% (as of 11:30 EST) as compared to 31% four years ago. And he improved in all the subgroups I've charted above. But he improved in some quite a bit more than in others.

He seemed to make the greatest inroads among the wealthiest voters, Catholics, women, the elderly, and those who believe the economy to be the most important issue. He made his weakest gains among Evangelicals, pro-lifers, men, and Protestants.

The gender gap strikes me as an interesting story this year. There was an enormous gender disparity in turnout in 2008, with men outpolling women 56-44. This year, the electorate was just about even between men and women. In 2008, meanwhile, Romney got 32% of men's votes and 30% of women's -- not much of a difference. This year, Romney got 41% of men and 52% of women. (Gingrich seems to have attracted men to his campaign much more than women.)

Quote of the day

A reported exchange between Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich: "Why do so many people take an instant dislike to me?"
Dole: "It saves time."

Can conservatives count on Newt?

I've got to strongly disagree with the Economist's RLG here (via Sullivan):

It's not that Mr Gingrich would be the best president. But watching Mitt Romney pivot to the centre with the smoothness of a consultant flipping to his next slide, a manoeuvre we can all expect him to execute the minute he wraps up the nomination, will be depressingly predictable. The perception that he will say whatever he feels he must to become president is not founded on sand. Mr Gingrich, by contrast, can almost certainly be counted on to be the same Mr Gingrich we've seen in the primaries. Say what you like about the man, but he has ideas, says arresting things, and most of all, would make the clearest possible contrast with Barack Obama in the general election. [emphasis added]

On the contrary: Newt is an enormous flip-flopper! Does anyone out there recall his big debate with then-President Bill Clinton in New Hampshire in 1995? This was the first opportunity for Americans (well, C-SPAN viewers, anyway) to see these two titans of the mid-90s -- the great intellectual leaders of conservatism and liberalism, the warriors anointed by rival tribes -- duke it out mano a mano. And this was right after the 1994 elections, during which Gingrich had led his team to victory claiming that Democrats were the party of incest-perpetrators and child-killers. How did he do against Clinton?

He was civil, pleasant, and conciliatory. He spoke about saving Medicare, he praised Americorps, he shook hands with the president over lobbying reform. They shared some laughs. The bomb thrower vanished in the presence of the Democratic president.

In general, Newt's policy positions are famously unstable, to the point where he makes Romney look like a rock in contrast. But the idea that he's going to stick it to Obama in the debates? Well, there's just no evidence for that. Picking a nominee solely because he'd be a good debater is generally a silly idea, but particularly so in Gingrich's case.

What the second coming of Newt means for party scholars

According to the latest tallies, Newt Gingrich has defeated Mitt Romney in South Carolina by 14 points, after trailing him by double-digits just a few days ago. Yes, that's pretty astounding. So what does this mean for those of us who study parties for a living?

Readers will recall that I have strongly endorsed the Cohen et al. book The Party Decides on several occasions. I consider this probably the most important book on presidential nominations in print. I am currently teaching it to my undergraduates, and I subscribe to its thesis that party insiders determine nominations. It would be hard to read this book and come away thinking that anyone other than Romney will be the Republican nominee this year. After all, he's had a strong advantage in insider endorsements for the past year, and polling suggests that while he's certainly not everyone's first choice, he's a lot of people's second choice. That is, he's broadly acceptable within the party, even if most people aren't enthusiastic about him. That's classic nominee material. (The one important caveat is that a lot of insiders have declined to endorse so far.)

Newt Gingrich, conversely, is precisely the sort of candidate who should not win according to this theory. He has astonishingly little support among Republican insiders. (Indeed, the opposite: Republican elites have gone out of their way to trash him.) He has little money. He is sustained only by his savvy use of the media. Previous candidates who have attempted this path to the nomination include Jerry Brown '92, Howard Dean '04, Gary Hart '88, Mike Huckabee '08... basically, the really interesting losers. No one has pulled this off, really, since Jimmy Carter in '76, and that was before party insiders had learned to master the post-McGovern-Fraser-reforms system.

So, as I've said before, this contest is turning into a fantastic test of the Cohen et al. thesis. If Gingrich were to somehow win the nomination, that would be pretty astounding, and we'd have to say that the system has changed. Perhaps the overwhelming number of debates changed the dynamic, and party insiders didn't control those as well as they can control primaries. Perhaps the rise of Super PACs made a difference, allowing a very, very small number of eccentric wealthy people to have inordinate influence over the contests.

Again, my assumption is that the system has not changed significantly, and that party insiders will rise up again to crush Gingrich as they did back in December. And Lord knows they have the material to do it. But at the very least, this is already becoming a more interesting contest than most of us predicted.


Update: For more on this topic, be sure to check out Nate Silver's post, although you probably already have.

What endorsement?

Interesting. Perry drops out and backs Gingrich this morning. By this evening, two of his three superdelegates remain unaligned, and one has switched to Romney.

The GOP Field

Important point from Jonathan Bernstein:

It's just worth remembering that the real GOP field this time was at least Romney, Pawlenty, Perry, and Barbour, and perhaps also several others, including Palin, Thune, Christie, and Daniels. That's the real field that we should consider when assessing what Romney beat. Most of the others who showed up for debates and even took votes in some primaries, such as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, were just sideshows.

It gets a bit fuzzy when we try to determine exactly who the field of candidates is in a given year, since many of them are selected out during the invisible primary stage, long before anyone begins voting or conducting debates. Kerry wanted to run in 2008. Gore wanted to run in 2004. So did Daschle. But after enough discussions with potential donors, activists, and endorsers, they became convinced it wouldn't happen, so they decided not to run.

What's more, it's often the highest quality candidates -- the ones who understand the difference between a winnable and an unwinnable campaign -- who select out of the pool the quickest. The Pawlentys and Christies of the world likely looked at the way the field was shaping up (specifically, how much inside support Romney had) and figured they just couldn't make it happen this year. The people who are left in by the time the voting starts either don't realize they can't win (Bachmann, Santorum), are just trying to raise some issues of importance (Paul), or have nowhere else to go (Gingrich).

A man with a plan

This explains basically everything you need to know about the man:

A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled "Some Projections on West Georgia College's Next Thirty Years."