How would you ding Thune?

[pbrower2a]

Show him irrelevant to most of America. John Thune is from a very rural state that can solve most of its problems on the cheap and get away with it, and I doubt that he understands urban problems as city-dwellers and suburbanites do.

John Thune will do well in very rural parts of America -- those parts of America in which public services are inexpensive and effective because teachers and cops have few viable alternatives to their careers, and where infrastructure is cheap to build and not easily pushed to its limits. Contrast California, where teachers can usually make more money by becoming bartenders or commissioned salespeople, greater Chicago, where cops must be paid salaries high enough that they don't have to take bribes to live well, or New Jersey, where adding more lanes to a highway implies huge costs of real estate acquisition and realignment of utilities.  How often does  Sioux Falls or Rapid City have a traffic jam? It would be far lest costly to build an Interstate spur from I-90 to Pierre than to re-engineer an expressway interchange in Minneapolis.

If he were able to swing Minnesota, he would win the election of 2012. But can he? I think that he would do nothing to win "back" suburban voters with promises of tax cuts at the cost of the deterioration of public services upon which suburbanites depend.

He is from a small state in a region of wide-open spaces and few electoral votes. The last President from a small state in electoral votes to win the Presidency was Bill Clinton -- but Arkansas has but six electoral votes, it is part of a swath of states that seem to vote alike (Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and to a lesser extent Georgia and Missouri... 39 to 65 electoral votes). The Dakotas to Oklahoma have only 24 electoral votes, only one of which (NE-02) is shaky for Republicans.  Minnesota and Iowa, states that border South Dakota, are politically more like Massachusetts than like South Dakota. 

So far, South Dakota is doing better than most of the rest of the country in economics -- but think of how well the "Massachusetts miracle" did for President electoral failure Mike Dukakis.

[pbrower2a]

Show him irrelevant to most of America. John Thune is from a very rural state that can solve most of its problems on the cheap and get away with it, and I doubt that he understands urban problems as city-dwellers and suburbanites do.

I'm sure understanding urban problems is a top line of attack in the GOP presidential primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.  

C'mon.  I've read through focus group reports and internal polling for GOP primaries in states far more urban than these states, with far more rural candidates, and nowhere does anyone think about making the GOP candidate seem too rural.  Perhaps it could be an avante-card attack, but you say these things so casually.  As if like this could be a serious line of attack when it's not.  Like zero percent chance.  Like, Sarah Palin would have a better chance at winning 40 states against Obama than "he doesn't understand city issues" being an effective attack against Thune in early GOP primaries.  

Thune has been running ads now in Western Iowa, where most of the GOP primary voters live, for like twelve years now, that's a pretty good base to start off the election with.

Your posts are like crazy theoretical to support predetermined conclusions dude.  It'd be like in 2008, making some argument about how people from the upper south don't win GOP primaries in Iowa, and how someone like Huckabee could never relate to the Iowan primary electorate...it's just throwing pasta against the wall, where just as much could be thrown supporting the completely opposite conclusion, and whatever can be justified with a coherent sentence structure is considered almost prophetic. 

You are right about the primaries. I was thinking of the general election. Thune could conceivably win the GOP nomination because Republican voters in the primaries are far different from the electorate as a whole.