Gardner Selby talks to Fred Thompson consultant Rich Galen while Fred was in town visiting Dell:
We can't tell yet. We're doing fine in the polls. Given early polls, you'd rather be first or second rather than seventh or eighth.Galen doesn't mention -- and the Statesman doesn't provide the context -- that he is a Newt Gingrich confidante.Given that, Newt Gingrich has a great theory about how people vote and why people respond to polls different than they do when they actually go and vote. People vote the way men buy cars. If you think or I think I need a new car, I might drive a Jaguar or a Hummer or a Maserati if I can find one, whatever.
And if you ask me after I drove it, did you like that car? "Oh yeah, that was a great car." (A pollster's conclusion:) "Galen likes Hummers." ...
And that's what happens when people are asked by a pollster if the election were held today, (who would you support)? If I was going to buy a car today — yeah. But I'm not buying a car today, so I can say whatever I want.
But when the day comes that I do buy the car and I have to actually write the check, I drive out with a Windstar because that's the right car for the family.
So Howard Dean was leading, was the (Democratic) nominee presumptive in December 2003, and four weeks later he came in third.
Anyway, while there's something to Newt's theory, I'd say that the reasons Dean didn't win the Donk nomination have more to do with the law of diminishing returns and Iowa. That is, the way Dean campaigned, it was easy to get to a certain level of support, but very difficult to get to 50+1. Combine that with Iowa being a Dean-unfriendly state and Dean's post-Iowa meltdown, and those have more explanatory power than Newt's hypothesis.
Posted by Evan @ 09/23/07 05:13 PM
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