2012 Presidential Election TL

[Mr. Morden]

So the GOP picks up 40 seats and control of the House, and Boehner ends up getting not 1, but 3 challengers as leader of the caucus?  That seems highly implausible.  When was the last time a party took control of the House or Senate and proceeded to immediately dump their leader....setting aside cases where there's some kind of scandal, like Lott's Strom Thurmond comments?

[Mr. Morden]

Good so far.  A few things to keep in mind though, as you go forward.

First, in the year before the election, one key metric of how the candidates are doing is fundraising.  How much $ does each candidate raise each quarter?  That's almost as important as polling.

In a presidential primary race, the national polls tend to change very very slowly until about a month or two before the primaries start.  Then you might start to see a lot of fast movement just before the voting starts (see, e.g., Giuliani's consistent lead in the national polls through much of 2007, and then very sudden collapse at the end of the year).  They definitely don't change as a result of things like debates, since virtually no one watches primary debates.  OTOH, it's possible for minor candidates to gain enough attention for a small niche following as a result of debates, as happened with Ron Paul in the last election.

Polling in Iowa and New Hampshire is more fluid, because people there are actually paying attention to the race much earlier than the rest of the country is.  But IA and NH also tend to see faster movement in the polls in the final month or so leading up to the vote.

It's unusual for no candidate to have more than 30% nationally plus in both Iowa and New Hampshire.....and you've got no one with more than 27% of the vote in any of them at the moment.  Realistically, in most cases, the media is not going to have time to cover more than about four or five candidates.  The remaining candidates will be widely considered to be joke candidates with no chance of winning, and will languish at 2-3% in the polls at best.

There definitely isn't polling of every state every single month, though if you really want to make national maps each month, knock yourself out.

[Mr. Morden]

Approval Ratings Approve/Disapprove
Barack Obama 36/57
Hillary Clinton 46/48
Newt Gingrich 49/47
Mitt Romney 46/46
Mitch Daniels 50/45
Gary Johnson 39/51

You can't have job approval ratings if you don't have a job.  "Approval rating" means the %age of people who approve of the job you're doing as president, secretary of state, or whatever.  There's no such thing as an approval rating for a former speaker of the House or a former governor who doesn't currently hold office.

There is a separate thing called a "favorability rating", which you can have regardless of whether you hold office or not, and this is different from approval ratings.  Obama's job approval #s are here:

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php

whereas his favorability #s are here:

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/fav-obama.php

His favorability #s have typically higher than his job approval #s, though that won't necessarily always be the case.  During the later Clinton years, Clinton's job approval #s are much higher than his favorability #s.  That's because people thought he did a good job as president, even though they thought he was scum in his personal life.

Mitt Romney's favorability #s are here:

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/fav-romney.php

but he doesn't have a job approval number because he doesn't have a job.

[Mr. Morden]

If this really happened, there would be enormous pressure from GOP bigwigs on the three candidates to cut some kind of deal before the convention, with one of them as presidential nominee and another as VP nominee.  They would be in a panic, trying to avoid this dragging on until the convention, and leaving the party without a nominee until then, culminating with a messy fight at the convention.  Especially if all three candidates are that competitive in the general election.  They would not want to blow this election over a messy fight within the party.  This is not 1960, when the nomination being left undecided until the convention was considered par for the course.

Also, if Gingrich won the most votes and the most delegates, he would be wielding that fact like a club over the other candidates.  He and his supporters would be hammering the other candidates over the fact that they're unnecessarily keeping this race going, and not cutting a deal with him that would make him presidential nominee.  He'd try to argue that the fact that he got the most votes means that he's the only person who would be seen as the "legitimate" nominee for the party.  Again, times have changed since pre-1972 reform era.  Most voters don't really understand the nomination process.  They just think that whoever gets the most votes should be the nominee.