In which I spitball the final NH results.

Just off of the top of my head:

Trump 25
Cruz 20
Rubio 20
Kasich 16
Carson 12
Everybody else 7

This is probably wrong. The numbers, I mean. But I think that the basic idea – Trump falling behind but ending ahead, Cruz and Rubio battling it out for second place, Kasich at a high-water mark, Carson fading, and everybody else getting their coats on – is sound enough.  Bear in mind: if Trump comes in second his campaign will definitely start to death spiral. If Rubio comes in ahead of Cruz Ted Cruz is not actually in trouble, because Iowa and New Hampshire rarely agree with each other.  Kasich would need to win New Hampshire before we’d all stop writing off his campaign. And so on.

Also bear in mind: nobody knows jack about what’s going to actually happen next week. We’re mostly just good at sounding confident. Largely because there’s never a penalty for failure. I mean, look at me: I told everybody that Trump would either win or be in fourth place, and guess what happened?

20 thoughts on “In which I spitball the final NH results.”

  1. I’ll offer this: Trump is either going to win or come third…
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    Rubio seems to have peeled off most of Bush/Christie/Kasich’s backers, making Kasich the spare and Rubio the heir .. which would be great news if I *trusted* Marco ..
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    For Cruz .. New Hampshire is where we’ll find out how well (or poorly) “stone cold” politics works.
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    For Carson .. it’s pretty much over unless someone starts throwing money his way to keep him around.
    .
    Mew

      1. I suggest consulting Moe’s zen flow chart.
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        Rubio remains dead to me, and I see no need to speak ill of the dead.
        .
        Mew

        1. Eh, I’m not yelling at Rubio. I’m just laying down a marker.
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          The “he’s electable” argument deliberately overlooks that much of the Tea Party loathes him. And so the perception must be countered, lest it be blindly accepted.

  2. Don’t feel too bad. I think Trump earning a solid nearly-third-place is close enough.

    I remain mystified that Kasich of all people registers here…

    1. Kasich is, I think, getting some benefit from “feels”.
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      I’ve mentioned, elsewhere, the very liberal anti-2A lawyer who is voting for Hillary “because electing any female is better progress even if she’s a crook!”.
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      She likes Kasich .. says he’s the only GOPer who “seems to care” / “seems like a real person”.
      .
      Mew

      2. In a state that’s 43% socialist, personally I see doing well here as evidence that you shouldn’t be doing well anywhere else. Which definitely seems to be true of Kasich.

        1. And keep in mind, Kasich’s current fighting-for-the-podium standing in NH is the result of him investing everything he has there. Had he split his resources more evenly, I just don’t see any way he’d even be sniffing fourth. Or fifth. Possibly even sixth.

  3. The Cruz number seems a bit high for New Hampshire. I do expect Trump to win, with less of a cushion than he has now, and I expect Rubio to come in a reasonable second, with a bigger margin between him and Trump than there was in Iowa (mostly because Trump has started with such a commanding lead). Cruz battling Kasich for third seems more likely…and if Cruz wins that battle, Kasich should be done even in his own eyes.
    .
    Everything else seems about right, except that I think Carson’s numbers are a bit high, and the Jeb/Christie numbers are just a touch too low, almost in exact proportion. But I do think Carson finishes ahead of both of them, Christie (along with at least one other candidate) drops out the next day, and Jeb sticks around until Super Tuesday…mostly because at this point, he’ll feel like he has to.
    .
    The real battle now is South Carolina. At this point, both Cruz and Rubio have established themselves as viable Trump alternatives. But while Cruz will stay that way at least until Super Tuesday on the strength of Iowa alone, I think Rubio either needs to win South Carolina or lose it close. (Nobody will hold a close loss against him, especially if at least one of the higher-polling splitter candidates is still in.) If Rubio wins South Carolina, or barely loses it, it’s a three-way race where the fundamentals favor him more and more as other candidates leave. If he finishes third or worse, Cruz will probably end up as the nominee, as the Anyone-But-Trump vote will consolidate behind him in the long run.
    .
    And that leaves me satisfied. While I would prefer Rubio over Cruz, the latter strikes me as a perfectly acceptable general-election candidate. They are both conservatives, at least…Rubio with more mainstream rhetoric, Cruz with more populist rhetoric. But Cruz is not really a populist. Trump IS a populist, and an opportunist, and a big-government type playing dress-up for his own gain. I’ll never cast a vote for him.

    1. So the main difference between Romney/McCain and Trump is that Trump is a populist?
      (He asked, innocently.)

      1. Between Romney and Trump, certainly. They’ve each held their current conservative views for about the same amount of time at the beginning of the campaigns, and each is about as believably conservative. IE not very, but you can probably hold them to mostly following them for at least the first term.
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        McCain and Trump? Trump, at least, doesn’t want conservatives to die in a fire currently, and on that, McCain’s never wavered.
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        I really hope that by the time we get to Texas in a few weeks that I can still vote for Cruz. If he’s effectively eliminated and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a brokered convention, then I have a real quandary. Do I vote for the mostly conservative Rubio, who I know is going to stab me in the back on an issue I care about, because he’s already gone back on his word and done so previously, or the mostly not conservative Trump, who at least has the benefit of not having tried to screw me over yet? It’s a tough call, and one that Trump very well may win.

      2. …. Trump is a *better* populist.
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        That is, Trump doesn’t give off the aura of one who takes the nomination for granted. (this year, that was Jeb!’s aura ..)
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        McCain and Romney both attempted some populist positions, but .. they weren’t believable. Trump, whether actually populist or not, is a better showman, and .. it shows.
        .
        Mew

      3. Trump is crony capitalist liberal Democrat. Romney is a moderate Republican. No amount of campaign rhetoric is going to change this for Trump now, any more than it did for Romney in 2008 or 2012.

      4. Romney was not an opportunist; he was a moderate. There is a difference. And to compare Romney’s (much more limited) big-government proclivities to Trump’s is to compare, not apples and oranges, but apples and skyscrapers. Also, Romney is a decent man, and Trump is a moral cesspool. I will never regret not voting for Romney in the primary, but I will also never regret voting for him in the general.
        .
        As for McCain…well, I won’t defend McCain. I will merely note that there was no one else the GOP could have run in 2008 and had even a prayer of winning — except for maybe Giuliani, who couldn’t win the nomination. And though I shouldn’t have to say this, if you don’t win the election, you can’t stop bad things from happening. (See also: Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the stimulus.)
        .
        Oh, but burn it down, right? Sorry, I forgot your game for a second.

        1. I disagree, in no universe was Romney a moderate. Romney was a big-government, pro-choice liberal Republican, which was what was required to be elected in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts at the time. He only suddenly developed conservative ideas when that was what was required to get the Republican nomination for President. If you want to average the 90s and early 2000s Romney with the 2012 one, sure, that gets you to moderate, but he ran as a straight-up liberal.
          In this, moving from very believable liberal to very unbelievable conservative, he’s indistinguishable from Trump.

  4. I buy Trump winning. It’s been awhile since Buchanan won NH, but I don’t think their culture had changed that much.
    I buy Cruz getting support in the low 20s. It is New England, after all.
    I do not buy Rubio consolidating the establishment vote that easily, or to that extent, at least in NH. Christie is almost a local, and Jeb has a lot in the way of institutional support there. Plus, at least some of the more aware establishment figures realize that many of the Cruz and Trump voters will never vote for Rubio.

  5. I’ve been saying since before Iowa that Rubio was going to win NH (I also said that Cruz was going to win Iowa).
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    Rubio/Trump/Cruz is my thought.
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    Anything less than a 5% plus win for Trump is a “loss”

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