How Dean could win - and lose

By Aziz P. -
DailyKos has been running a series of analyses on the major candidates and how they could win the Democratic nomination. Today he has posted his analysis of how Dean could win, and it's notable because he also throws in an alternate scenario of how Dean could lose. This is an essential post and comparing the two scenarios only underlies how important the fund-raising effort will be.

Kos goes into a chronological detailed list of each state's primary dates. For brevoty, I'll just excerpt the summaries. Here is Scenario 1, a Dean win:


Dean wins the nomination if he takes California, Connecticut, Maryland, Mass, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii and Washington. He could lose Georgia, North Dakota, and Texas, and still sew up the nomination. The "moderate's" task will be to steal at least two of those states.

Bottom line: My scenario is fairly CW, not too controversial. It assumes that the NH loser in the Dean/Kerry battle will be forced to drop out because of waning media attention. Remember, the media has every interest in culling the field as quickly as possible in order to save money. It's expensive to cover so many candidates.


Scenario 2 is where Dean loses New Hampshire, and cannot raise funds. In that case the campaign remains competitive but operating a a sever disadvantage. It would all boil down to Super Tuesday:

Super Tuesday is a money day, and it's hard to see how Dean could pull it off. His candidacy would probably die in a flood of Kerry money.

But here's the kicker -- as Kerry and Dean split the lefty vote, the "moderate" candidate has an undivided share of the centrist vote. He wins the election right here and now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali
Read more