Survivor! The GOP Victory

Barrons.com ^ | 10-21-06 | JIM MCTAGUE

[MNJohnnie]

Opps, looks like the Democrats woke up 2 weeks too early.

[saganite]

Interesting take on elections. Money means everything and ideas and personalities are irrelevant. I will be interested to se how close these guys are come Nov 8.

[sweet_diane]

After listening to some 'cut and run republicans' on Rush yesterday I was pretty disgusted. I've never seen a good excuse to NOT go to the polls. If you have issues than write letters and participate in the 'system'.

IMHO, they are no better than the Dims who want to cuddle with the terrorist. If you haven't noticed, things are kinda critical (scary) right now.

Like I said...IMHO only.

Oh..and if you don't vote you lose your right to complain!

[veronica]

As Rush noted yesterday, he really only had 2 callers of the cut-and-run sort, and they were very unconvincing IMO.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

AMEN!!!

[econjack]

If there's one thing I hope the RINO's get out of this scare (if not defeat) is that the conservative voting public is tired of seeing nothing of their agenda being passed. How difficult is it for them to realize that I know how to spend my money better than they do, yet, even controlling the House and the Senate, they barely maintained the tax cut. This Congress has not been a do-nothing Congress...it's been a do-nothing for conservatives Congress and I'm pretty fed up with 'em all.

[veronica]

I don't think that is what they are implying. The money raised correlates to the passion of the base, and that's hard to poll. But that passion translates to votes on election day, which is the only poll that really matters, as they say.

[veronica]

This Congress has not been a do-nothing Congress...it's been a do-nothing for conservatives...

And so the logic is vote the other side in and they will do even less?? That's just NUTS.

And if nothing else, think of what the current Supreme Court would be like if Kerry had won...

[Bubba_Leroy]

The next Speaker of the House (second in line to the President):

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

[Congressman Billybob]

I agree with the general thrust of this article, that the candidate with the most money generally wins. I wrote an article in the Orlando Sentinel in August, 1992, predicting all 435 House races. My co-author Ed Roeder and I used only two factors in our predictions: relative fund-raising and whether there was an incumbent in the race.

We used FEC data on fund-raising as of reports filed on 31 July. In many states, the primaries had not been conducted, and the general elections were a light-year away. Still, our predictions were 99.5% accurate. We were wrong, as I recall, in only three races.

Since I know my own District, I challenge this article's prediction that Charles Taylor (R) will hang on in the NC 11th District against Heath Shuler (D). But in general, this analysis is accurate on the facts about fund-raising now, and its historical analysis of what that means for electoral success.

Congressman Billybob

Latest article: "An Open Letter to President Bollinger"

Please see my most recent new statement on running for Congress, here.

[Congressman Billybob]

See my comment earlier in this thread. In 1992 I and a co-author predicted the 435 House races in print in August. As here, we used money raised as the primary indicator of success. We were 99.5% accurate as of November.

John / Billybob

[saganite]

Guess your take is correct. I went there and read the entire article. It's a good way of looking at elections given the past predictive ability of their model. I also see they predict my congressman, Charles Taylor, will win based on his fundraising despite the last poll I saw that had him 11 points down.

Thursday was the first day for early voting here in NC. I was at the polls at 9:30 AM to vote and I wasn't even close to being one of the first people there.

[Armando Guerra]

Interesting basis for analysis. I will be curious to see if it holds true. I can, though, see the argument for it. Given the campaign rules, an individual candidate's finances will be larger with broader support. Those supporters will also be more motivated to show up on election day than the random individual being telephoned in a poll. The 'Rats seem to have money coming in larger chunks from fewer individuals and flowing to the 527's. The 2004 elections showed that strategy to not be as effective as expected. If anything, since the money is coming from the kook-fringe it is functioning to drive the Rat's even more in that direction making them less palatable to the majority. I do believe that the Republicans have weaknesses and a there is a general sense of dissatisfaction ('Rats won't like them anyway and the Republican base is unhappy with the number of RINOs). However, I am thinking that the whole 'Rat strategy of gleefully accepting boatloads of money and their marching orders from the likes of Soros will backfire. Howard Dean will once again end up forking over his lunch money to Karl Rove.

[Non-Sequitur]

I think someone needs to bookmark all the articles like this. Come November 8, after the only poll that matters, there will be a lot of people either eating crow or patting themselves on the back.

[econjack]

Never fear...I'd rather have a bunch of RINO's in office who can't fog a mirror than any Dimocrat. I'll vote as always, but I'm really starting to think that Boortz has the right idea:

If you pay between $1-$10,000 in Federal income taxes, you get one vote, $10,001-$20,000, two votes...up to $50,000 and 5 votes. After that, you don't get anymore votes. That way, those who are productive contributors to society get to influence what that society does and the non-controbutors have to shut up and simply accept what the largess of the others deem worthwhile.

Like I've often told my students: I'd be a horrible President, but a great Dictator!

[Welike ike]

Veronica, thanks for the informative post. I have been a subscriber to Barrons for many years and would like to give some insight to their past election predictions.

1. In 2002 when the MSM majority opinion was that the Democrats would increase their majority in the Senate, Barron's predicted a GOP takeover and had Sununu, chambliss, and Allard winning while Charlie Cook and others had them losing big.

2. In 2000 and 2002 Barron's predicted the GOP would hold the House also against Charlie Cook and Sabato DEM takeover predictions. The GOP was at a low of 221 seats back then, and Dick Gephardt predicted a DEM pickup of 30 seats on election eve 2000 and 2002.

[BradyLS]

Perhaps I'm restating the obvious, but, just get out there and vote!!!

[Mr Rogers]

I would be content if only those who paid taxes were allowed to vote!

My sister was a liberal until she got a job...

[dufekin]

The overwhelming majority of cut-and-run Republicans voted for Kerry enthusiastically in 2004, joined the Republican ranks for a few hours or minutes, then decided against voting their new partisan line but vocally attempt to persuade more long-standing Republicans to join them.

Come Election Day, I seriously doubt if the ranks of "cut-and-run" Republicans who actually voted (mostly) along the partisan line in 2002 and 2004 but decline to vote Republican in 2006 number more than 100,000 nationwide (about 200 per Congressional district). I exclude from this figure the deceased, incarcerated, and disenfranchised, including those military voters who reside in states that effectively exclude them from electoral participation. More Kerry voters will elect Republicans to Congress--but the media cannot find them because the can afford to poll only their own newsrooms.