Bush’s brain has a point. The time line don’t lie.
And the number crunchers come up with this:
“”Now the gap between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is 6,239 votes. There are 1,500 precincts. Do the math… If that message cost Carson four votes per precinct to switch to Cruz, then Cruz beats Trump. If he doesn’t switch four, then he loses””.
I’ll take another tack. Looking at the votes, Carson got about 17,000. People are trying to say that over 6,000 potential Carson voters switched. So everyone is saying that 1 out of every 4 Carson voters switched to Cruz because of this? That’s BS. I would be surprised if more than 100 people switched votes as a result.
That’s assuming no voters who would have voted for Carson decided to vote for Trump instead. It also presumes that there were that many voters who were originally going to vote for Carson which would be way above what the polls were predicting.
I know number crunchers who are way out of Rove's league.
You had a 6200 vote gap between Cruz and Trump, who almost finished third. Cruz had 51666 votes. Carson had about 17,400 votes. In order for this gamesmanship (I'm not going to call it cheating as I've seen much dirtier politics than this on student council for Pete's sake) to have cost Trump, it would have had to cost Carson about 1/3 of his total vote (which would have all had to go to Cruz) - and Carson already well over-performed his polling.
This "four votes per precinct" line would be 9000 votes. That more votes than all except the top four vote getters total.
Rove's point here is one of those arguments that sounds sensible at first blush--only 4 votes per precinct doesn't sound like a whole lot, after all. But Carson's total was 17,000 votes (that's around 11.5 votes per precinct), which means than an increase of 6,239 total (or 4 per precinct) would represent a 30+% increase in Carson's vote total. Not plausible!
Rove's point also ignores that Carson out-performed both his polling average leading up to the caucus, and his entrance poll numbers. There is simply no support for the idea that Carson lost any support, much less any significant support, due to Cruz's misinformation.