I watch a lot of elections. And I haven’t seen many where the polls have bounced around this much as we go down to the wire, with no clear trend other than that from a crowded field to a two man race. I’m talking about tomorrow’s Republican primary in Florida. If you click here you can see all the polls of this race going back into October (aka the Rudy era).
As recently as mid-January, this remained a four man race, with McCain, Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani bunched around 20%. Then over the last week, Huckabee and Giuliani have faded into the background — both now in the low mid-teens — as McCain and Romney have risen to around 30% each. Fred Thompson’s departure has of course also augmented this trend.
Over the last few days it’s bounced back and forth between the two. McCain didn’t get any clear bounce out of South Carolina. Then Romney seemed to be rallying. And then this weekend, Gov. Crist (R) endorsed McCain, which may have punched him back into the lead.
There are still a decent number of undecideds in most of the surveys. But there’s another factor that adds an extra margin of uncertainty to tomorrow’s outcome. As the battle has become more and more clearly a McCain-Romney race and one quite likely to settle the GOP nomination, I think there’s a good chance that Huckabee and Giuliani significantly underperform their margins. Because people want to actually have a say in who becomes the nominee rather than throwing their vote away on Rudy or Huck. That potentiallly throws a lot of other votes into the mix that could push either McCain or Romney past the finish line.
Whatever the outcome, for those who maybe haven’t been watching the GOP race that closely, who wins tomorrow will be a very big deal. I think people are likely right when they say that the guy who wins tomorrow will probably be the one at the presidential debates in October.
