In the past, most candidates didn't even begin their campaigns until very late in the year before the Presidential elections. Ronald Reagan didn't enter the race until Nov. of 1979, before the 1980 election.
Yeah, but look how well that worked out.
27 posted on Tuesday, August 16, 2011 5:29:28 PM by hans56: “If you want to run as a Republican it can be done at the convention. That's how Eisenhower got it instead of MacArthur.”
The problem with citing past precedents like Reagan and Eisenhower (actually, the Eisenhower situation was a lot more complicated, and happened back in the days when state and city party bosses still ran major parts of both political parties) is that huge changes have happened in our political system since Reagan, and even more since the post-World War II era of the Truman presidency. Things move much faster now, and it is difficult if not impossible to enter late in the race and assemble the organization needed to win. As much as some conservatives like to bash the media, we rely on FOX News, Rush Limbaugh (and yes, Free Republic) just as much as the leftists rely on the New York Times and Huffington Post.
Not only do we have a 24-hour news cycle, we live in an increasingly nationalized political scene in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary have assumed outsized levels of importance precisely because elections in those states, with door-to-door campaigning and town hall direct interaction with candidates, is so radically different from politics in most of the United States.
Our candidates for president are forced to compete in Iowa and New Hampshire much like a candidate for county or city office in those heavily rural states. That's a good thing in my view because it forces candidates to deal with real people who have real problems and who can expose major holes in a candidate’s well-prepared policy statements.
The problem is that once those two contests are over, the candidates move into a series of races where “boots on the ground” campaign organizations and money to buy TV ad time are the two most important factors. While there are other states later in the campaign cycle which have dynamics comparable to those of the first two states, most are politically irrelevant or minimally relevant, at least in comparison to Iowa and New Hampshire.
Essentially, if you have a campaign based on political ideals and grassroots support that isn't strongly tied to existing ideological groups or entrenched power players, if you haven't made a decent showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, you're out of the race. On the other hand, a poorly funded candidate who “connects” with voters and makes a very good showing in one or the other of those two states can “upset the apple cart” by winning an unexpected victory, then building on its momentum to make a credible challenge to much better funded opponents.
That's what we saw with Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. Obama successfully beat off far better funded and better organized campaigns by John Edwards and Hillary Clinton; Huckabee successfully proved that evangelicals would not rally behind a socially conservative Mormon candidate if a better alternative to McCain was available, and by remaining in the race as long as he did, he made it very clear that the Republican Party has a strong religious right core group with which none of the major candidates were closely enough identified to earn their support.
Granted, if you've got lots of money, lots of Party organizational support, or deep ties to ideologically focused organizations (which in the Republican Party basically means the overlapping but not identical pro-life and evangelical constituencies), you may be able to win if you enter the race late, make a credible showing in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, and then move on to later races and do very well.
Sarah Palin does have a built-in reservoir of support in the evangelical world, and has virtually universal name recognition among likely Republican voters. She might be able to pull out a late entry into the race, win in Iowa, then make a strong showing in key Southern states, and become a major top-tier contender, especially if other socially conservative candidates back out to avoid splitting the vote and thereby ensuring a RINO wins the nomination.
I can't think of any other Republican candidate who could do so, and the longer she waits the more problems she will have with people who would like to support her but will commit their support to other candidates in her absence.
I'm not really happy with any of the candidates in the race so far, but the key goal for conservative Republicans has to be making sure a RINO does not win this nomination.