Something to Smile About

So, McCain and Hillary won the New Hampshire primary and the news media is running around in circles not knowing what to make of it. All of the reporters and commentators had written off Hillary just hours before. So, what happened with the democrats? Well a few things, actually. One, polling is a tricky thing to do and we are finding out election after election that sometimes it isn't always very accurate, mainly because we don't know if those polled will actually vote and because some haven't made up their minds. While polls can give you an indication, you can never totally count on them for the election result.

Another thing that must be accounted for is the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary are very different beasts. Comparing those results and how a candidate won is apples to oranges. With the caucus, there is vote trading, if one candidate isn't going to reach a viable number, voters switch to another. In some ways this could predict more of who the party wants as a whole, between a lesser amount of candidates. If Bill Richardson had not run in New Hampshire, Obama may have won by 3% points. It is hard to tell.

That leads me into the final thing that happened...there are still too many candidates running in both parties. This splits up the votes and takes votes from the stronger candidates. Until it is trimmed down to two or three people, we are going to have these weird results that may differ from state to state. That will leave us with the media creating these crazy elaborate stories trying to explain why this happened..."The voters felt touched by Hillary crying and shooting that man in the back" "Barack wore green today, and voters don't like green in January" "Mitt has nice eyes and that got him into college, which lead him to go fishing, which is why he lost". So, until Bill Richardson, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, insert names of people that barely get 1 % get a clue...and possibly some bigger names like Rudy Guiliani and John Edwards get out of the race, prepare yourself for an annoying media coverage and uncertain candidates for a little while longer.

As for last night, we must keep things in perspective. It was still a win for McCain and Hillary, strengthening their campaigns. Additionally, it had to weaken Romney and Edwards some. But, it was a close battle between Obama and Hillary, so I see very little weakening there...and we need to wait and see if Guiliani can make a comeback of his own in the Super Tuesday states, and whether Huckabee can spread his message to a national audience.