A candidate to sink your teeth into?

I think I can say rather definitively that the GOP picture is as clear as mud, but it also looks like a previous "minor player" is making serious waves. I must confess, I didn't see Mike Huckabee emerging as a viable candidate, but there you have it. He's got the conservative credentials, he talks the talk, he's got some name recognition and he hasn't been taken seriously for the past 6 months. This means that he's managed to evade the Giuliani-McCain-Romney-Thompson snipe-fest, so his skeletons are still largely buried.

Whereas with the Democrats I think an aggregate national look is appropriate, the GOP race will be determined by momentum from the early primaries and caucuses, and that's where Huckabee is doing well. What's more, it looks to me like he's getting some of the "soft" backers of McCain and Romney in his camp, which is what I had previously said it would take to beat Giuliani (who, incidentally, is suffering from some rather serious ethics difficulties himself.)

So, let's take a look at some of the early states, shall we?

In Iowa, Huckabee and Romney are in a statistical dead heat. Giuliani and Thompson are a distant third and fourth, and McCain is desperately trying to avoid finishing behind Ron Paul(!)

New Hampshire shows Romney with a comfortable lead with McCain and Giuliani fighting for second and third, Huckabee 4th and Paul in 5th, ahead of Thompson.

South Carolina looks like a very competitive 4-horse race, with Romney, Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee all in the thick of it. That said, it looks like Huckabee is starting to siphon off a lot of Thompson's support.

This is going to be a very interesting next couple of months. The Iowa caucus is January 3, less than a month away. A win by Huckabee and poor showings by Thompson and McCain could give Huckabee the momentum to get the moral conservatives firmly in his corner. Thompson waited too long to make his move, and his candidacy is starting to fall apart at the seams.

It's been awhile...

My apologies for not keeping up on this for awhile. The "big picture" stuff has really only started moving in the past couple of weeks, and while there's been a lot of posturing and some surprising developments (mostly pertaining to endorsements), the view from the top down has only recently started changing.

Right now, news headlines are blaring about how nasty this race is getting, and about Barak Obama's surge and the surprise emergence of Mike Huckabee. Then there's that little issue of Michigan not getting any delegates to the Democrat National Convention. I definitely want to take a closer look at these, starting with the Democrats.

On 9/21/07, the realclearpolitics.com poll aggregates had Clinton leading Obama nationally 41.8% to 23.0%. As of December 5, the national numbers are 41.5% to 23.3%. The biggest "hiccup" in there was a Rasmussen poll from 11/30-12/03/07, which gave Clinton a mere 35-23 lead. So the national picture really hasn't changed all that much, except that Clinton's popularity is slipping in some polls. What I'm also seeing is that Obama's overall popularity really isn't gaining much.

The bigger story here, though, is about the early primaries and caucuses, which tend to dictate how national trends will go. In Iowa, Obama holds a very, very slim lead: statistically, it's a dead heat, with different polls showing both Clinton and Obama holding slight leads. I'm giving Obama the edge right now because that's what the most recent polls tend to show. But it's much too close to call. That said, Clinton leads comfortably in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. The lesson here is, it looks like media outlets are trying to make this race look closer than it actually is. Still, Clinton can't afford any more weak performances.

Next up: the GOP.