Michele Bachmann is starting to look like a frontrunner: With her win yesterday in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann sent a message to any potential challengers: Iowa is hers to lose—and for once, people are starting to believe her. After two convincing debate performances and a straw poll victory over rivals Tim Pawlenty and Ron Paul, Bachmann has turned into a force that the GOP establishment, and the Democratic Party, for that matter, can no longer ignore. She has strong and enduring Tea Party support and has been surprisingly short on gaffes this summer—in a way, she's become the candidate that Sarah Palin always wanted to be. As much as members of both parties still want to write her off for being too extreme in her views, the fact is that Bachmann has built up a strong support base among the Tea Party, an organization that no one should underestimate (remember 2010, kids). Will her popularity translate outside of Iowa? Maybe not, but until we find out for sure, Bachmann has got to be worrying the Romney campaign and national Republicans alike.
And then there were nine: Nine presidential candidates, that is. On Saturday, Texas Governor Rick Perry officially entered the presidential race with a speech in South Carolina, joining the eight candidates who debated in Iowa last Thursday. While it is, arguably, too early to judge whether Perry’s campaign will be successful, he enters the race accompanied by a huge amount of hype after running second in national polls in recent weeks, trailing only Mitt Romney. The very fact that there was an opening for Perry to enter the race so late in the game is astounding: to compare, in 2007, most candidates (of both parties) had gotten into the race by April—former Senator John Edwards (remember him?) actually announced his campaign in 2006.
And then there were just eight again: Just one day after a disappointing third place finish at the Ames Straw Poll, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, my pick to win the Republican nomination, dropped out of the race, becoming the first major candidate to do so. I’ll be writing an entire post on good ol’ T-Paw tomorrow, but for now I’ll just say that he was a good candidate running at the wrong time. His exit makes even more room for Perry as the official “establishment alternative to Mitt Romney” candidate for Republicans, an identity which may bring Perry the fundraising and support that Pawlenty desperately needed but never received.
Ron Paul still has no chance: Sorry to any fans of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, but you shouldn’t get too excited about his strong second place showing at the Ames Straw Poll this weekend. As I have said before, he has an incredible base of supporters who are more enthusiastic about him than pretty much any other candidate in modern history (Senator Obama in 2008 included), but that base is extremely narrow and Paul’s social, foreign policy and economic views are way too far out of the mainstream to get him elected by a large number of people. It was indeed impressive that Paul was able to muster over 4,000 votes at the straw poll, and I even envision him putting up a fight at the Iowa caucuses in February, as they are also an event that favors candidates with strong organizations. But he won’t win the caucuses and as soon as an actual primary election rolls around he will get destroyed. He’s running a much better race than he did in 2008, but it won’t matter in the end.
Can Mitt Romney win Iowa? The entrance of Rick Perry into the presidential race may give an unexpected candidate a boost in the state: former Governor Mitt Romney. While Bachmann and Perry spar over the state’s socially conservative voters, there would appear to be a vacuum surrounding conservatives who are less inclined to prescribe to the extreme views of those two candidates. And just like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. After all but giving up on the state this year, many observers are whispering that Romney may try to make a run at winning the Iowa caucuses after all. He may not be able to win, but coming in a close second to either Bachmann or Perry would greatly strengthen him going into his own territory in New Hampshire. It’s not a certainty by any stretch, but it’s a possibility that the Romney campaign has to be looking at.
What happens if everyone wins? So far in this post, I’ve said that Bachmann is the frontrunner in Iowa and Mitt Romney is the frontrunner in New Hampshire. Now that Rick Perry has entered the race, he will undoubtedly try to win one, if not both, of those crucially important states, but its important to remember that the third primary, South Carolina, would appear to lean towards him by nature of being a southern state. So, what happens if each candidate wins the state they’re supposed to win? If we get through the first three contests with one win for each major candidate, who gets to claim frontrunner status? If the Perry campaign is as successful as people seem to believe it will be, this is a very real possibility and one that could send the Republican Party hurtling headfirst into a long, drawn-out primary season. One could assume that such a scenario would favor the candidate with the most resources (Romney), but it could also draw attention to the fact that Republicans aren’t sold on him as their nominee yet. Will Bachmann ride Tea Party support to the nomination? Will Perry be able to take the whole field by storm and beat Bachmann or Romney on their home turf? No one seems to know, which has got to make all three campaigns a little bit nervous.
Democrats cannot take this election for granted: Just in case anyone has been living under a rock for the past few months, I’ll let you in on a secret: people don’t love President Obama. In fact, a majority of people dislikes him, according to a new Gallup poll. In the poll, Obama’s approval rating stands at 39%, a new low for the president, and his disapproval is at 54%. Now, I’m the first one to say that polls this early mean next to nothing: he doesn’t have an opponent yet and many liberals are saying they disapprove of him but will vote for him anyway come 2012. But this poll, and others that have preceded it, show that Democrats cannot simply rely on the hope that Republicans will nominate someone unelectable. At this rate, especially with the economy unlikely to improve significantly by November 2012, Team Obama needs to figure out how they are going to make sure that when they try to frame the race as “which of these two people do you hate more,” they don’t come out on the losing end of that question. Otherwise, a candidate who should be unelectable may end up as president of the United States.
Fun Facts of the Day: Out of over 15,000 votes cast at the Ames Straw Poll, 162 were cast for candidates who aren’t running. The working theory is that most of them were for either former Governor Sarah Palin (which would be a shockingly bad showing, if that’s all she got) or for Rick “Parry,” the fake candidate that Stephen Colbert advertised prior to the poll. Additionally, according to Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake, three votes were cast for the Iowa State Fair Butter Cow.
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