Wednesday, January 9, 2008

NH v. Iowa

So the question becomes: How often is there a split between results in Iowa and results in NH? And the answer is: Often. In 1972, Edmund Muskie won NH but lost to "Uncommitted" in Iowa. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won NH but lost to "Uncommitted" in Iowa. In 1984, Walter Mondale won Iowa, but Gary Hart won NH. In 1988, Dick Gephart won Iowa, but Mike Dukakis won NH. In 1992, Tom Harkin won Iowa, but Paul Tsongas won NH.

It's worth pointing out that 1972 and 1992 were the only years on record in which the winner of either Iowa or NH did NOT go on to be the party's nominee. In 1972, Muskie was undermined by Nixon's "Dirty Tricks" campaign and lost the nomination to George McGovern. 1992 was the year that a southern upstart named Bill Clinton defied expectations, helped by the fact that Paul Tsongas failed to raise the money he needed to go national and was upset by Jerry Brown in several late primaries. Tom Harkin, an Iowa favorite son, went nowhere after Iowa. It seems likely that if Mario Cuomo or Dick Gephart had run that year, he would have won, but neither thought Bush the First was beatable.

So the odds are that either Obama or Clinton will be the nominee, but it is by no means a done deal, at least as far as we can learn from the ghosts of primaries past.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was very suprised by the Democratic results.....but not at all surprised by the Rupublican. Even is you do not like McCain.......Romney is, as you said in an earlier post "ick". Like we needa nother "businessman" in the Whitehouse.

January 9, 2008 at 6:44 PM
Anonymous said...

Dearest Dog,

First of all, no one should be doing anything at 6:30 in the morning except sleeping or urinating. But to come to my point:your sister, the Squirrel, and I are having a rare political disagreement regarding the effect of Hillary's "getting all choked up" in response to a perfectly ordinary question. In my view, it is appalling that this bit of emotion (born of exhaustion as much as anything) should boost her support among women voters by 10 percent. As one who has long believed that women were more thoughtful and informed than men regarding elections, I must say that I find this quite disillusioning. It discredits the only demographic portion of the electorate that I had previously respected--Democratic female voters. The testimonies of such voters that I heard today on NPR nearly forced me to vomit by the side of the road. By contrast, your sister, while emphatically no more a Hillary supporter than I am, was not displeased by this development (not my vomiting). She likes the idea that women voters identify with a woman's emotional response and regards the "boost" as a sign of bracing female solidarity. Tycho agrees with me, of course, but he is highly emotional and deeply intuitive despite his XY chromosones. Frankly, I think my perspective is more supportive of current feminist thinking than the Squirrel's, which patronizes women in the the most sterotypical way as the embodiments of feeling. So where do you stand?
On another, more amusing topic, I find it curious that Holy Roller Huckabee and his handlers used the music from Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" as a lead-in to his post-election speech last night. The work is, of course,based on Nietzsche's philosophical tract in which the ubermensch hermit declares "God is dead." Perhaps they thought it originated with Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey." Someone subversive should set the poor fellow straight about his unintended apostasy. I think I've made enough enemies for today, don't you?
Your Stoat

January 9, 2008 at 7:48 PM
KAZ said...

Dear Stoat--I think HRC's NH win had nothing to do with her choking up and everything to do with the fact that her support comes from Democratic party members, not from unaffiliated voters as Obama's does, and the unaffiliated voters in NH largely supported McCain. And she was boosted by the fact that she had a better ground operation, which meant that she got the vote out in a way no one else did. I remain amazed that people were still deciding in the voting booth, after drowning under what must have been months of inundating media messages. The notion that a teary eye forced a change in position is something the media manufactured, perhaps by bribing a few women to bare their souls on NPR. Do not be fooled.

As for Huckabee, perhaps a clever wag on his staff thought that would be funny. Or maybe they are truly idiots.

January 9, 2008 at 9:43 PM

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