Friday, January 04, 2008 :::
How about my predictions last night? That meta-prediction that my other predictions would be like my Gephardt call in '04 - was that dead on, or what? I am on fire.
According to some polls on TV last night, the Caucusing Democrats (which wbagnfarb) wanted to find someone electable, just like four years ago. And, corporately, they went for Obama. Which I think demonstrates that they're smarter than they look, or sound, or their 2004 decision-making indicates.
As for the Republicans, I've seen some people express confidence that Huckabee won't be the nominee, but he's near the top of the polls in Michigan and New Hampshire, which aren't necessarily states where I would have picked him. People in winner-take-all states (like Michigan) who don't care for him had better coalesce around someone else. I'm hoping one of the other Republicans starts providing better answers to the questions he's raising and that he falls by the wayside, but I'm not as confident as some people.
One thing I would like to point out, though, is that today's headlines are unrepresentative. I don't mean that Iowa is unrepresentative of the nation or that the caucus-goers aren't most of Iowa, I mean that when I said above that the Democrats went for Obama, I mean that just over a third went for him, while just under a third went for Edwards and just under a third went for Clinton. If you held a voice vote, the winner wouldn't be clear. Likewise, nearly two-thirds of Iowa Republican caucus-goers voted for someone other than Huckabee. That doesn't mean it's not a tremendous victory, but it goes back to the point that the main victory is not so much having four delegates more than Romney as having news anchors announcing, "Huckabee won". If one in ten of the Republicans had switched from Huckabee to Romney and one in ten Democrats had switched from Obama to Edwards, my meta-prediction wouldn't be looking so good right now.
::: posted by Steven at 7:57 PM
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