Politics Today: Thompson has tough fight to stay in contest

Memphis Commercial Appeal ^ | 1/7/8 | Blake Fontenay

[SmithL]

Fred is not dead. But his campaign is hanging by a thread.

That pretty much sums up where Fred Thompson's bid for the White House stands.

Heading into last week's Iowa caucuses, many political observers were saying the former U.S. senator from Tennessee needed to at least finish third to remain in the hunt for the Republican nomination.

Thompson got that, narrowly beating out Sen. John McCain for the third-place spot by less than one percentage point.

That's the good news, such as it was. But the bad news is that attention has now shifted to Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, where Thompson isn't expected to do particularly well.

According to data released Friday by the Zogby International polling firm, Thompson was running in sixth place there, behind the other four major Republican contenders and long-shot hopeful Ron Paul.

Thompson's not polling well in Michigan, either, which will be the next event on the primary calendar. That leaves him in a situation where he'll almost have to win the Jan. 19 South Carolina primary in order to last until Feb. 5, when more than 20 states, including Tennessee, will hold their primaries.

Winning South Carolina may be an even tougher task for Thompson than it seemed a week ago.

[snarkybob]

“Look, I’m saying that the “trends” are inaccurate. I’m saying that if PEOPLE are reading the “trends” and then voting “with the trend” then the polls aren’t ANYTHING, they are less than useless, and that is that. If the fact were that people weren’t reading the polls first to “see who is electable”.... then they might mean something.
All in all, they are meaningless, and so are all these little primaries taken individually. As a WHOLE they mean something. NH and Iowa are NOTHING.”

The trends so far are not inaccurate, and if it is like you say that the polls influence the outcome, then they can’t be as you go on to say useless. If people are seeing polls and then voting with the poll outcomes then the polls are dictating who gets the most votes, and that hardly makes them useless, also if a poll shows candidate A surging and people read that poll and vote for candidate A then the poll is in fact correct. The smaller primaries can determine momentum and fund raising opportunities. Iowa & NH won’t pick the nominee, but they can add momentum and fund raising opportunity to a candidate.

[ReignOfError]

Wyoming is fly over country to the msm. They don’t count in their minds.

I bet a lot more of the MSM, or elites of any stripe, know their way around Jackson Hole better than they do any part of Iowa.

Wyoming gets little attention because it only allocated 12 delegates and no candidate stepped foot in the state in the month before the caucuses. That's the same delegate count as NH, but every candidate is in NH. To paraphrase playwright Irwin Shaw, "some day they'll have a battleground state and nobody will come."