Posted on 10/27/2011 4:38:21 PM PDT by mandaladon
Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman who has never held elected office, is tied for the lead in national polls of Republican voters — or perhaps even slightly ahead of Mitt Romney, as he was in Tuesday night’s New York Times/CBS News poll. Mr. Cain has also led in most recent polls of the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary, has taken the lead in Ohio, and is close to Mr. Romney in Florida. If all you had to go on was the polls, you might think that Mr. Cain was the favorite to win the Republican nomination.
But then there are the nonpolling factors, some of which can be objectively measured and some of which cannot, but which would generally point toward Mr. Cain as being a second- or third-tier candidate. Mr. Cain has no endorsements from Republican members of Congress or Republican governors, and very few from officials in key early voting states. He has raised very little money. He has not hired well-known names for his campaign staff. He does not have traditional credentials. He has run for elected office just once before. He has begun to get a fair amount of media coverage, but the tenor of it has been fairly skeptical. His campaign commercials have been … interesting.
Has there ever been a candidate with such strong polling but such weak fundamentals? Almost certainly not, at least not at this relatively advanced stage of the race.
I’m working on a project that tries to assign grades to each of the Republican candidates in a wide variety of categories. Most of these, like polling numbers and establishment support (as measured through endorsements) can be quantified in some way, but a few like debating skill are more subjective.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Silver is a liberal, but his polling analysis is often pretty good. This is a pretty fair article I think, especially considering that Silver probably hates everything Cain represents.
Saying that, I think the odds are very slim that Cain wins the nomination. And if he did, I think Hussein would easily defeat him in Nov 2012. I still think the only person who can realistically stop Romney the chameleon from getting the nomination is probably Perry. If Perry can’t recover then the next best shot against Mitt would be Newt, but I have little confidence in him as a national candidate. All in all, the more I see of our candidates the weaker this field appears. It amazes me that in an election cycle with a president struggling so badly that a better crop of candidates didn’t want to run against him.
Bill, Hillary or both?
I've never listened to Belling, Sykes, etc, but I agree with their analysis. Sorry, Cain is a good guy who I think has absolutely zero chance to win a national election. Too much of a political novice, too much of a gaffe machine, too likely to blow up his own campaign by saying stupid stuff because he is not polished enough to know how to deflect and otherwise avoid answering questions or making statements that will play horribly in the media (which would result in endless distracting controversy and knock him off message constantly). He'd get the solid conservative vote and that is about it - which is just not enough to win a national election. If we could just appoint a President, Cain might be just the guy for the job - but I don't think he can win a presidential election. The reality is Perry is in fact probably the only person that really stands between Romney the chameleon and the GOP nomination.
This is the first Tea Party Presidential election. That explains everything the pundits can’t figure out about Cain.
I once created a program to predict the NFL draft. It assigned grades to various players according to their skills and sutibilty for each team's needs.
It produced wonderful mock drafts that were actually featured on several high-profile draft websites. It only had one shortcomming: It was never right.
Some things just can't be quantified down to a formula. Politics is one of them.
I have to thank Herman Cain, because he’s “outed” a lot of the so-called conservative pundits for who they really are. Watching O’Reilly and Laura Ingram tonight was almost nauseating ...and the rest of them must be totally wetting their pants.
That got an out and out chuckle from me.
ROFL!
As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos
Remember, Cain is not only a rocket scientist, but a computer scientist, as well. :)
He's gotten a fair amount of worship at FR
If your opinion is that people here are negative, 'prickly', and guilty of idolatry, perhaps you SHOULD spend your time elsewhere instead of showing up here periodically to insult people.
“Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman who has never held elected office”
Both of these qualifications are more impressive than anything Obama ever did before he was elected by a landslide by the American boobacracy in 2008.
And just to be fair to Cain, the NY Times should have mentioned that he also has been a Federal Reserve bank chairman.
By the way I can think of a couple of pretty good presidents who had never held public office prior to the presidency: George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower.
New York Times = Jayson Blair Nuff Said
Oooh, you don’t like my posts! How awful. I’m gonna eat a worm. :)
I read all of Silver's analysis and it's thoughtful as far as it goes. However, he is suffering from being blinded by "the way it's always been done."
IOW, try as he might, he continues to hold fast to his old definition of "fundamentals." For example, none of things he mentions above as indicators presently mean a hill of beans in the wake of the political earthquake that was caused by the Tea Party and, more broadly, the grassroots discovery that it can support candidates of its choice directly (i.e., bypassing the old party apparatus and endorsement system completely).
Few in professional political analysis, including what are commonly called the party "elites," seem to have actually appreciated the shifts that have occurred under their feet.
The grassroots no longer needs ANYONE to do whatever it wants. Candidates can raise money directly -- I could see a candidate making it without ever having done a traditional rubber chicken dinner! Candidates can use new media and web ads to go directly and inexpensively to voters. And voters can make ads and pass them around, potentially to millions, on the internet.
IOW, to talk about "ground games" and endorsements is pretty much an historical anachronism, and will be more so as the first fully Tea Party/new media election gets going.
Cain is being dismissed because he's not using the Pony Express to get his message out. Meanwhile, he's figured out that the telegraph has been invented.
I posted earlier that Silver seemed quite boxed in by his set understanding of what constituted campaign "fundamentals."
He actually was pretty open to the fact that he wasn't sure these old indicators still applied. What I meant, however, was he seemed stumped as to what new indicators were taking their place.
Some of the things I think will become the new non-polling fundamentals: direct fundraising (grassroots donations directly to the candidate's website); earned media appearances and views, including clips viewed and linked on the internet; talk radio mentions. For starters.
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