The Politics of the Day

It seems like every week that I go through the news there’s a new poll out showing this candidate or that pulling ahead in some state or the other. Everyone gets excited, or at least those geeky enough to pay attention to it do, and wonder if candidate X is becoming a “serious” contender for a party’s nomination.

Now let’s put aside the fact that of course it’s just fodder for the all consuming media machine and consider what might be going on under the surface. It seems to me that from a voter’s perspective, I mean a regular voters not freaks like you and me, that the primary race goes something like this:

• Phase 1 (6-12 months before): small buzzing sounds, you realize some big names are in but don’t really care yet.
• Phase 2 (3-6 months before): the buzzing gets louder, you start to recognize some of the names in the race that meant nothing before but don’t really know yet what they stand for.
• Phase 3 (1-2 months before): you start kicking the tires in earnest. You know you’ll have to make a decision soon and you start to look more closely at candidates that you only knew by name before. You start to think: “I like this person, I could vote for them”.
• Phase 4 (the month before): you take a good hard look at all the candidates, you start taking things like electability into account and make your final decision.

As you can see we’re currently in phase 3, the tire kicking phase. What this means is that people are starting to really get to know some candidate, liking what they see in a lot of them, but haven’t yet asked themselves hard questions about electability and such. As a result you get a lot of answer to polls like: “well, if I could vote for anyone I’d vote for Mike Huckabee”. Candidates like this who might be really attractive to voters on “principals” will start to fade away when decision time comes and the cold hard reality of what a national candidate has to face comes into play. The truth is that when it comes right down to it there are only four serious candidates in this race, no matter what the polls tell us right now: Clinton, Obama, Giuliani and Romney.

Of course as someone who has never been involved in a political race I’m probably talking out my ass here. We’ll see if I’m right or wrong in a couple of months and just to be fair I will come back and eat some crow if I turn out to be as wrong as some may think I am… I think…