2016 Republican Nomination Poll - August 2014

[Bull Moose Base]

Why did Bush collapse in this poll this month? Do I get the credit? What happened besides my post in the July thread arguing he had problems?

If so, let me train my sights on Rand Paul's chances this time.

Cruz is better positioned than Paul to end up the strongest insurgent candidate. The Ron Paul libertarians who will likely support Rand, despite Rand's departures from libertarianism, are an enthusiastic but small group of Republicans, smaller than the overlapping subset of the GOP: very conservative Republicans, who will likely find much more they dislike about Paul than Cruz.

It's true that the establishment would open a dam of money to stop Cruz but that's just as true of Paul. Whether it will work against either is an open question.

Regardless, both Cruz and Paul are among the likeliest Republicans to run and should both still rank ahead of people like Walker and Bush who are still solid maybes to run.

Also, why not remove these people from the poll?
Jon Huntsman   
Peter King   
Scott Brown       
Donald Trump       
Condi Rice       
Steve King       
Sarah Palin       
Brian Sandoval
Kelly Ayotte       
Mary Fallin       
Nikki Haley       
Sam Brownback   
Tim Pawlenty
Joe Scarborough       
Jeff Sessions       
Carly Fiorina

[Bull Moose Base]

Why did Bush collapse in this poll this month? Do I get the credit? What happened besides my post in the July thread arguing he had problems?

If so, let me train my sights on Rand Paul's chances this time.

Cruz is better positioned than Paul to end up the strongest insurgent candidate. The Ron Paul libertarians who will likely support Rand, despite Rand's departures from libertarianism, are an enthusiastic but small group of Republicans, smaller than the overlapping subset of the GOP: very conservative Republicans, who will likely find much more they dislike about Paul than Cruz.

It's true that the establishment would open a dam of money to stop Cruz but that's just as true of Paul. Whether it will work against either is an open question.

Regardless, both Cruz and Paul are among the likeliest Republicans to run and should both still rank ahead of people like Walker and Bush who are still solid maybes to run.

Also, why not remove these people from the poll?
Jon Huntsman   
Peter King   
Scott Brown       
Donald Trump       
Condi Rice       
Steve King       
Sarah Palin       
Brian Sandoval
Kelly Ayotte       
Mary Fallin       
Nikki Haley       
Sam Brownback   
Tim Pawlenty
Joe Scarborough       
Jeff Sessions       
Carly Fiorina

Any one of these potential candidates could run and win the nomination. It's a wide open GOP field.

No, it's wide open because there are 10-15 people who might run and could win. But everyone on that list has done nothing to suggest they'd run and/or has no chance in a primary.

As for Rand Paul, you can win with a lot of the base or a lot of the establishment suspicious of you, but both seems very tough to pull off.

[Bull Moose Base]

Because I am trying hard to procrastinate and found it a tad suspicious that Paul's support should have jumped so much this month when nothing really changed, I went through the comments here and counted 30 people who made a specific prediction within. Only 5 of the 30 predict Paul, that's about 16%, a little less than the slice Paul got in last month's poll, even though his vote total is 28% or whatever.  In other words, not only are Paul's numbers inflated by people predicting him just because they like him, but it also looks to me undeniable that Paul folk are creating fake users to stuff the ballot. Perhaps this was all orchestrated by that Rand Paul/Mitch McConnell campaign manager who's about to go to jail for corruption? Anyway, this poll is even more meaningless than I thought before.