Category: Rick Santorum

Please: Hurt Karen Finney Some More

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Before we get around to explaining how you can hurt MSNBC analyst Karen Finney, we must ask: Why does Michelle Malkin hate women?

That’s right: Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy is advertising on the Hateful Misognystic Rush Limbaugh Show, so obviously, she hates women.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence, therefore, that it was via an item at Twitchy that I learned how you can hurt Karen Finney:

Karen Finney: “This woman vote really hurts me! …”
Lawrence O’Donnell: “Working women went for Rick Santorum in a big way: 49%. …”
Karen Finney: “It’s a little painful because I’m wondering if those women really heard the full message …”
— MSNBC, Tuesday, March 13

Oh, they “heard the full message,” all right: If you want to hurt Karen Finney, vote for Rick Santorum!

Also: Speak English, Puerto Ricans. Because it hurts Karen Finney even worse when you speak English while voting for Rick Santorum.

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Mathematical Impossibilities Happen

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“Rick Santorum charged of out Tuesday’s wins in the South with a fresh claim to being the chosen son of the Republicans’ conservative flank. Mitt Romney limped out with something that could endure longer: an enhanced lead in delegates.
“Under the cruel math of the prolonged GOP primary race, Mr. Santorum’s victories in Alabama and Mississippi were more than negated by late-night Romney wins far to the west in the Pacific Ocean, in caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa.”
— Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal

“If Newt Gingrich drops out of the GOP primary after losing in Alabama and Mississippi yesterday, it could enable Rick Santorum to unite conservatives against Mitt Romney.”
— Greg Sargent, Washington Post

“As it turned out, the Lindsay campaign was fatally flawed from the start. It was all tip and no iceberg — the exact opposite of the slow-building McGovern juggernaut — but back in February it was still considered very shrewd and avant-garde to assume that the most important factor in a presidential campaign was a good ‘media candidate.’ If he had Star Quality, the rest would take care of itself.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Went to bed last night — actually, about 3 o’clock this morning — happy to know that Rick Santorum had won Alabama and Mississippi and was on his way to a second-place finish in Hawaii.

And I woke up with a feeling of dread: Today is the day that I have to go through my travel records and gather up my expense receipts from 2011, because my wife has made an appointment Thursday for us to get our taxes done. The Beatles wrote a song about this.

Piled atop the tax-time misery, however, was the Fear and Loathing of what I was certain I’d encounter when I logged on this morning: Romneyites gloating about the delegate count.

Damn those Samoans! Damn them all to hell, I say!

Let Charles Johnson denounce me as an anti-Samoan bigot, I don’t care. Those island bastards put a smile on Jennifer Rubin’s smug face:

According to the Associated Press delegate count, Mitt Romney won 42 delegates last night to 38 for Rick Santorum. By winning nine delegates in American Samoa and 45 percent of the vote in Hawaii, Romney wiped out Rick Santorum’s narrow wins in the Deep South. And, just like Saturday, when Santorum won Kansas and lost ground to Romney, today Santorum’s task to get to 1,114 delegates (as he promised last night he would) is that much harder. …
Math, like gravity, can’t be ignored. . . .
There are 1,358 delegates yet to be awarded. Romney has 495. He needs 694 delegates, less than 48 percent of the remaining delegates, to wrap it up.

Evil Blogger Lady pointed out this Rubin-Romney gloatfest, and all the other Romneyites — including Hugh “Guess Who This Helps?” Hewitt — have joined in. Permit me, then, to piss in their cornflakes.

If you subtract nine Samoan delegates from Tuesday’s results, this seemingly inexorable March Toward Mittdom starts sliding back the other way, and we have passed the point in the schedule where Romney can keep padding his lead by scooping up uncontested delegates in farflung territories. Mitt’s got those 36 delegates from Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas Islands and I’m sure they’ll all have a good time in Tampa, but the territorial RINO good times are over, baby.

Rick Santorum left Louisiana last night and flew to Puerto Rico for two days of campaigning. Puerto Rico votes Sunday, they’ve got 23 delegates and, while I’m not a Michael Barrone-type expert on stuff like this, do you think there might some Catholic voters in Puerto Rico?

Do you see what I’m talking about here? Rubin and Hewitt and all Mitt’s “inevitability”-mongers keep making the same mistake: They’re extrapolating the trend forward, as if this trend were a fixed factor in a polynomial equation and the actual campaign — you know, candidates giving speeches, shaking hands with voters and stuff like that — didn’t make any difference at all. Continue reading Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Mathematical Impossibilities Happen →

Fox Not ‘Fair and Balanced’? Santorum Finally Mentions Pro-Romney Bias UPDATE: Exit Polls Show Mitt Wins Mississippi? Newt 3rd in Alabama?

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I’ve been saying this for weeks, and it’s probably not a good idea for the candidate to say so himself, but it’s unquestionably true:

On Tuesday’s “Kilmeade & Friends” radio show on Fox News Radio, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum . . . accused Fox News of being in the tank for his competitor, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. . . .
“The man has had a 10-to-1 money advantage,” Santorum said. “He’s had all the organizational advantage. He’s had Fox News shilling for him every day, no offense Brian but I see it. And yet, he can’t close — he can’t seal the deal because he just doesn’t have the goods to be able to motivate the Republican base and win this election.” . . .
“I can tell you, we watch the coverage there and you know, look you guys are allowed to cover what you want to cover,” Santorum said.

The daytime programs, in particular, seem to have a pro-Romney bias, and there’s no doubt that Bill O’Reilly loves him some Romney. Rick gets his share on Hannity and Greta, but the rest of the lineup has been leaning ever more steadily Mitt-ward since Florida.

Someone could, and should, do an analytical study of how Fox has covered the GOP primary campaign, because as someone who spent the past 16 months cheering for underdogs — first Herman Cain, then Santorum — I’ve noticed how the bias works.

Forget about the commentary programs and candidate interview segments. The bias has actually been on the straight news side of the Fox operation. In horse-race campaign reporting mode, Fox always showed a bias toward the perceived “first tier” candidates.

Herman Cain was mostly a non-story until after Perry melted down and Cain won the Orlando straw poll. Then everything was Cain, Cain, Cain until it became obvious that the sexual allegations were non-survivable, at which point it was, “Hey, Newt!” And then it was Newt, Newt, Newt all the way through Christmas.

Only in the final week of December did it seem that somebody at Fox said, “Hey, maybe this Santorum thing is for real.” But on caucus night in Iowa, the Fox analysts — Karl Rove in particular — were clearly dismissive of Santorum’s success, treating it as a fluke. So, once Mitt won New Hampshire, as everyone knew he would all along, Santorum was once again relegated to “second-tier” coverage. Then came Santorum’s Feb. 7 “hat-trick,” but the talking heads on Fox kept repeating the misleading “non-binding” spin from the Romney camp, once again treating any Santorum success as an irrelevant fluke. (Iowa was also non-binding, but the Fox talking heads didn’t mention that when it looked like Romney had narrowly won there.)

Simply put, anyone who watched Fox News campaign coverage could detect two clear biases:

  1. Until the field was winnowed (i.e., after South Carolina), a bias in favor of covering the contest between perceived front-runners; and
  2. A generally dismissive attitude toward Santorum, so that even his victories were treated as insignificant, whereas any win by Romney — no matter how slender the margin, nor how much Romney out-spent his opponents — was treated as a solid victory.

Just as liberals don’t notice liberal bias in the media, people who hate Santorum don’t notice their anti-Santorum bias — and there are clearly some people at Fox News who hate Rick Santorum.

Finally, I’ll say this: Newt has gotten bend-over-backward fairness from Fox, which has ignored his campaign’s severe financial problems and blatant organizational ineptitude. People who saw Gingrich’s campaign at close range in Nevada pronounced it a “clusterf–k,” and I’m reasonably sure the campaign has been running deeper and deeper into the red for several weeks now.

Question 1: How much did Newt raise in February? Question 2: What was his campaign’s cash-on-hand and total debt as of March 1?

Until we see Fox News people asking those hard questions, I will continue to suspect them of bias.

UPDATE: Just as I was about to take my customary Tuesday nap — I expect a late night — a commenter notices that the Drudge Report has posted these exit-poll numbers:

AL
ROMNEY 32.07%
SANTORUM 25.24%
GINGRICH 23.6%

MS
ROMNEY 33.55%
GINGRICH 24.62%
SANTORUM 22.15%

OK, I’m adding several grains of salt: Exit polls can be screwy.

But if this works out — if Mitt wins both Alabama and Mississippi with Newt third in Alabama — then it’s all over for Gingrich.

And I’m sure you’ll remember my earlier prediction: When Newt quits, he will endorse Romney. Why? Just like Pawlenty, Gingrich will have campaign debts he can’t pay without Mitt’s money.


The Expert Agrees: Polls Are Crap! BONUS: @ESantorum2012 in Hawaii

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Nate Silver of the New York Times shows a surprising humility in explaining the limitations of polling, particularly with the situation we’re facing in Alabama and Mississippi: We don’t have what you might call “data depth.” Unlike the early states (e.g., Iowa or South Carolina), we don’t have a long string of polls, several every week by different agencies, to develop a clear trendline. We also had enough polls in Michigan and Ohio and various other Super Tuesday states so that the trendline was pretty clear there, too. In Mississippi and Alabama, however — as I’ve previously pointed out — there’s not  enough data to say anything beyond “too close to call.”

Also, something else I’ve pointed out before, polls are a lagging indicator. It usually takes several days after a shift of opinion for it to start showing up in polls, which is why the Santorum surge in Iowa caught everybody — well, nearly everybody — by surprise. If Santorum’s win in Kansas gave him a late boost, we won’t know it until they count the votes tonight. Meanwhile, remember that Elizabeth Santorum is in Hawaii campaigning for her father. A news report from Honolulu:

When it comes to Presidential politics, Santorum’s daughter, Elizabeth, thinks Father knows best. “I hear from a lot of people, you know, this is Obama’s home state. What are you doing here?” says the 20 year old daughter. “Hawaii’s important to us, and every state along the way brings something to our country.”

Here’s the video:

It will be the wee hours in the morning before we know how the 17 delegates at stake in the Hawaii caucuses will be apportioned. The important thing is, when the TV talking heads try to spin any unexpected results as a “surprise” or an “upset,” ask yourself this question: Why was the result so unexpected? Why are these supposed experts on TV always trying to tell us that the actual vote numbers are some kind of shocking surprise, just because they don’t match the numbers in a poll taken last week? Welcome to the Information Age, where you can read the same polls that they’re reading and make up your own mind, without experts telling you what to think.

Why Did the Santorum Campaign Leak Its Strategy Memo to Liberal Media First?

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Before I wrote this post, I checked to make sure that I hadn’t somehow missed an e-mail from the Santorum campaign, which I hadn’t. And I haven’t missed any phone calls from them, either. So how to explain why they would have released an important strategy memo to Politico, rather than sending it to me, or to some other conservative journalist?

By 9 a.m., the Santorum campaign had also already provided the memo to Zeke Miller at BuzzFeed, who headlined his story:

Santorum Concedes: He Can’t
Win The Nomination Outright

. . . which I’m reasonably sure isn’t the spin the Santorum campaign had in mind when they gave Miller the memo, but then again I’m not sure what the Santorum campaign had in mind, because while they keep sending me press releases, they never reply to my e-mails or return my phone calls.

But they’re getting paid to run the campaign, and if they don’t think they need to return my calls, who am I to question their judgment? It’s not like I know anything about “media strategy” or stuff like that . . .

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Zeke Miller gets a Santorum campaign strategy memo that outlines their argument that Mitt Romney isn’t as far ahead as some believe, and that Santorum will pull together the disaffected conservatives that show up in Tampa . . .

Hey, Ed, you endorsed Rick Santorum in February, right? How come you’re not as angry as I am about the fact that you’re having to read about this memo at BuzzFeed? And while we’re at it, Michelle Malkin endorsed Santorum in January — why didn’t the campaign send the memo to her?

The point I’m trying to get at is, this isn’t just about me getting scooped. Yes, the Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu does have feelings, and they can be hurt. But why would the Santorum campaign pimp-slap the entirety of conservative New Media like this, including major bloggers who have endorsed Santorum?

For that matter, why didn’t the Santorum campaign release this memo to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Mark Levin? I’m mystified.

UPDATE II: Lisa Graas didn’t get the strategy memo, either — and she was the one who first got me to cover Rick Santorum back in August in Iowa, when Politico wouldn’t give Santorum the time of day and Zeke Miller would have said, “Rick Who?”

Rick Santorum’s Daughter Elizabeth Will Campaign for Her Father in Hawaii

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This news was announced Saturday night:

The former Pennsylvania senator broke the news about his daughter while standing on stage at a campaign rally in Missouri with his wife, Karen, and second-oldest child, John.
“John just said to me there is an advantage of being the oldest,” Santorum joked.

I’ve contacted my editors at The American Spectator about sending me to Hawaii to cover this important developing news in the Republican presidential campaign, but it was hard to understand their answer due to the loud laughter. Elizabeth’s Hawaii schedule was announced in a press release from the Santorum campaign:

ELIZABETH SANTORUM TO CAMPAIGN
FOR HER FATHER RICK SANTORUM IN HAWAII
Verona, PA – Elizabeth Santorum, daughter of Senator Rick Santorum candidate for President, will be arriving in Hawaii today for the GOP Caucus set for Tuesday, March 13.

Sunday, March 11:
3pm HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will meet and greet with College Republicans in Honolulu.
Location: Starbucks
2330 Kuhio Avenue
Honolulu, HI

Monday, March 12:
9:15am HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will participate in a Rick Santorum for President sign wave in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Corner of King and Punch Bowl
Honolulu, HI

12:30pm HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will be the special guest at a brown bag lunch at the Republican Party headquarters in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Republican Party Headquarters
725 Kapiolani Boulevard #C-105
Honolulu, HI

2:00pm HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will visit the Hawaii State Capitol Building in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Hawaii State Capitol
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI

4:00pm HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will participate in a Rick Santorum for President sign wave in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Corner of King and Punch Bowl Street
Honolulu, HI

6:30pm HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will be the featured guest at the Republican Party Open House/Potluck Dinner in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Republican Party Headquarters
725 Kapiolani Boulevard #C-105
Honolulu, HI

Tuesday, March 13:
9:00am HAST: Elizabeth Santorum will participate in a Rick Santorum for President sign wave in Honolulu, HI.
Location: Corner of Nimitz and Alakawa, HI
Honolulu, HI

SANTORUM SCORES ‘DECISIVE’ WIN IN KANSAS REPUBLICAN CAUCUSES

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Headline from the New York Times:

Santorum Takes a Decisive
Victory in Kansas Caucuses

Now the story from the Wall Street Journal:

OLATHE, Kan.—Rick Santorum easily won the Republican presidential caucuses in Kansas on Saturday as the front-runner, Mitt Romney, didn’t campaign the state. . . .
With 95% of precincts reporting, Mr. Santorum had 51% of the votes—more than the combined totals of Mr. Romney (21%), Mr. Gingrich (14%) and Ron Paul (13%), figures from the Associated Press showed.

From a Santorum campaign press release:

On the heels of three stunning victories on Super Tuesday in Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum wins the Kansas caucuses.
Santorum National Communications Director Hogan Gidley issued the following statement: “We are very pleased to see the Santorum surge sweeping through the Jayhawk State. This is a great win for the campaign and further evidence that conservatives and tea party loyalists are uniting behind Rick as the true, consistent conservative in this race.”
The Santorum for President campaign invites everyone to come out to our Victory Rally tonight at 8:00 pm CT at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

UPDATE: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power — thanks! — who includes video of this interview Santorum did Friday with Al Hunt of Bloomberg News:

“Congressman Gingrich [on Super Tuesday] finished first in one state, his home, and finished third or fourth everywhere else, which has been a consistent pattern. He’s finished third or fourth in almost every state since . . . Florida, so we feel pretty good that it’s now narrowing to a two-person race. We’ve been competitive.”

This pattern of Gingrich’s fade since the Jan. 31 Florida primary — which was exacerbated by his Feb. 4 meltdown in Nevada — hasn’t gotten much serious analysis from most conservative pundits, who seem rather embarrassed to admit that Gingrich is no longer in serious contention.

Or maybe the pundits are just embarrassed to acknowledge that Santorum, the candidate they never thought had a snowball’s chance in 2012, has run a surprisingly effective campaign and emerged as the only viable conservative alternative to Romney.

UPDATE II: Now a Memeorandum thread and let me be the first to predict — in fact, I predicted it yesterday — that this “decisive” victory in Kansas renders instantly obsolete any previous polls showing Gingrich or Romney ahead in Mississippi and Alabama. And let the ladies sing: GAME ON!

UPDATE III: Linked by Lisa Graas — thanks! — and I’m not sure I entirely agree with Tina Korbe about this:

Santorum’s win in Kansas might help him to pick up a point or two in the polls in the next crucial Southern states. It’s nearly as vital for Santorum to outright win Mississippi and Alabama as it is for Gingrich. While his campaign will continue either way, Tuesday is his best chance to knock Gingrich out of the race. While Mitt Romney wins in both states would probably also knock Gingrich out, they obviously would do nothing to move Santorum closer to the actual nomination.

Let’s stipulate that conservative bloggers don’t have the power to set the stakes in the expectations game. That will be done by the major media without regard to our complaints.

However, anybody who thinks Gingrich can survive two losses Tuesday in Alabama and Mississippi is nuts, even if the nuts include Newt himself. Can Santorum lose both and survive? Sure he can, and I would count surviving as “moving closer to the actual nomination.”

This is something I think a lot of analysts have missed about Santorum’s campaign: According to the experts, Santorum never was supposed to get this far. He’s been counted out over and over, and has come back to win over and over, and so he exceeds expectations merely by staying in the game.

The South is supposed to be a lock for Newt, and when he lost Tennessee on Super Tuesday, it exposed his weakness. If he loses in either Alabama or Mississippi on Tuesday, Gingrich will be seriously hurt, but if he loses both, he’s dead meat.

Santorum? Yeah, it would be great if he could pick up another win or two on Tuesday, but there isn’t any real pressure for him to do so, despite all the “act of God” talk from Romney and the pundits about delegate counts. If Newt goes down in flames Tuesday, that will be the story for a day or two, and then Republican primary voters will start taking a second (or third or maybe even fourth) look at Santorum. All Santorum has to do Tuesday is survive and, no matter what else happens, he’s got a chance to be the Last Man Standing against Mitt.

Also, I think Santorum’s win today will be worth more than “a point or two,” in part because, again, Newt finished third in Kansas and fourth in Wyoming. Since Nevada, how many times has Gingrich finished third or fourth? A lot, and it’s hard for a candidate to keep doing that and still be considered a “contender.”

Finally, don’t rule out the possibility that Newt could finish third in Alabama and/or Mississippi on Tuesday. Once a campaign starts going downhill, you never know where the bottom will be.

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If Rick Santorum Wins Kansas …

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. . . it will add to the valuable perception of renewed momentum he got from his strong showing on Super Tuesday, when he won primaries in Tennessee and Oklahoma, as well as the North Dakota caucuses, came within 1% of Romney in Ohio, and ran a strong second nearly everywhere else. And it looks like Santorum is the overwhelming favorite to win Saturday’s Kansas caucuses:

Long-shot Newt Gingrich, weak outside the Deep South, dropped plans for a six-stop swing Friday and Saturday through Kansas. The former U.S. House speaker from Georgia is gambling a couple more southern states — Alabama and Mississippi — can sustain his quest for the nomination.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who remains front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, is uninterested in the Kansas caucus. He won’t personally chase Kansas’ 40 delegates to the GOP national convention.

The key thing here is that Gingrich is not campaigning in Kansas because he’s been forced to fight in Alabama and Mississippi merely to maintain whatever semblance of “viability” Newt’s got left, which frankly isn’t too damned much.

So if Santorum wins Saturday, both Mitt and Newt will try to pretend it’s irrelevant, but a Kansas win would add weight to the perception of Santorum as the conservative alternative — “a two-man race” with Romney, as he says — and thus should boost his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi by a few points. I say all that as a precursor to talking about the polls, which must be taken with a grain of salt.

Unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, where you had lots and lots of polls to compare and try to spot the trend, there have been very few polls in Alabama or Mississippi. It is therefore necessary to say that we can’t tell if the Rasmussen poll of Alabama, showing a virtual three-way tie between Newt, Mitt and Rick, will bear much resemblance to the vote totals on Tuesday. And I’m highly skeptical of the Rasmussen poll of Mississippi, showing Mitt with an eight-point lead.

Remember this: Polls are a lagging indicator in politics. This is why it helps to have a lot of polls bunched up together in a sequence, so you can attempt to plot a trend and extrapolate forward. We don’t have that in this case, so we are in some sense “blind” to what’s happening in Alabama and Mississippi. (I haven’t seen any polls from Kansas at all, but the fact that Newt and Mitt aren’t campaigning there is an obvious sign that Santorum should do well.)

We are merely speculating, therefore, to consider this scenario: Santorum wins Kansas, bumping up his numbers in Alabama and Mississippi, where it is entrely possible that Newt could finish third — and that, my friends, would be the end of Gingrich. It would be bad enough for Newt, who has staked his entire campaign on doing well in the South, to finish second in either of Tuesday’s primaries. But a third-place finish on “home turf” would be the kind of humiliation the Gingrich campaign could not survive.

My buddy Quin Hillyer lives in Mobile and has been covering Santorum’s campaign down there and quotes Alabama Policy Institute president Gary Palmer about Santorum’s speech there: “He looked presidential — he really connected with the audience.” Quin also relates how Santorum stopped a speech to help a lady who fainted.

Santorum’s creating a good impression in Alabama, it seems, and so if we can take the speculation a step further — not a prediction, mind you — think about this not-too-extreme possibility: Santorum wins Kansas on Saturday, then wins Alabama and/or Mississippi on Tuesday, and Gingrich finishes third in all three states. The narrative then would be?

Santorum the Newt-Killer Emerges
as Last Remaining Conservative
Opponent to Moderate Mitt Romney

Just speculation, as I say, but you can see why it may have been too early for Mitt’s boys to say only an “act of God” could stop Romney from winning the Republican nomination. And it looks like Mitt may be having some money troubles.

UPDATE: Press release from the Santorum campaign:

KANSAS CITY ROYALS ALL-STAR MIKE SWEENEY
ENDORSES SANTORUM FOR PRESIDENT
Verona, PA – The Rick Santorum for President campaign is proud to announce that it has received the endorsement of All-Star Major Leaguer Mike Sweeney.
Mike Sweeney said: “I take great pride in the success I’ve had on the baseball field, but even greater satisfaction in knowing that I have spent my entire life embracing Godly principles and instilling these values into the everyday lives of my children, family and friends. After personally getting to know Rick Santorum, I am absolutely convinced that he is the only candidate in the 2012 Presidential race that shares these same core values! The moral decline of our great country must stop now and this can only be achieved through real leadership and real solutions. I believe Senator Santorum has the wisdom, passion and vision to bring our country back to global excellence with those core Christian beliefs that our Founding Fathers envisioned, including protecting the rights of the unborn child, in mind. This election is the most important in my lifetime and as a father, husband, and American I am proud to play on Rick Santorum’s team!”
Mike Sweeney was a five-time Major League All-Star, with a career batting average of .297 and over 200 homeruns. Sweeney played for four Major League teams, including over a decade with the Kansas City Royals. Sweeney is very active in the Kansas City community, supporting various organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of Kansas City and Children’s Mercy Hospital. Sweeney is also the advisory chairman of the Catholic Athletes for Christ and a spokesman for Life Teen, the largest Catholic youth ministry program in the United States.

Over at the New York Times, Nate Silver is counting delegates and projects Mitt Romney getting to barely 50 percent — 1,162, or 18 more delegates than the nominating majority. While I can’t quibble with Silver’s math, the problem is that what he has done is an extrapolation of current trends, which is OK so far as it goes, except that no mere extrapolation can predict future evenst.

Go back to early December, when Santorum was in sixth place in the Iowa polls. No expert at that time would have given two cents for Santorum’s chances of winning Iowa, much less would the experts have predicted that Santorum would be Romney’s strongest remaining rival after Super Tuesday.

What happened? Events happened, events that no one expected in early December. And while no one can deny that, as the situation stands now, Romney is the near-prohibitive favorite to be the nominee in Tampa in August, we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after that, much less what’s going to happen between now and the Texas primary on May 29.

Oh: Texas was originally scheduled to vote on April 3, but a lawsuit about re-districting pushed it back to late May — another one of those “events” no one predicted three months ago. It always pays to be careful about predictions in politics, because events happen.

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