New Hampshire Primary Preview

Mac that is in some­ways hard to say. Just for chuck­les I called a cousin that lives down there and then a for­mer coworker. I for­got my for­mer co-​​worker is a Demo­c­rat and was sur­prised that my Repub­li­can cousin and her hus­band both cast bal­lots for Hunts­man. But it makes 3 for 3 say­ing that at least to this point and in the precincts they are famil­iar with the vote is off. All have said though that they expect some pickup as folks get out of work but who knows. The sec­re­tary of state down there had pllanned on a big turn out and some net sites are still pre­dict­ing that but it may just not be hap­pen­ing in a num­ber of places.
Now if one con­sid­ers that in many places older vot­ers tend to vote early or dur­ing the day one could infer that group to more heav­ily be going towards Mitt and if they are not turn­ing out that would be a sign that Mitt sup­port is actu­ally softer than reported. I read some where once that peo­ple that have often had their minds made up the longest may be the ones most likely to stay home at the last minute or to see things like the poll num­bers for Mitt and fig­ure why bother. On the other hand peo­ple that make up their minds late or that even change their minds late tend to go vote. If that is indeed the case then plus for Hunts­man or maybe Newt.
This could well be bad for San­to­rum too if he is count­ing on older Catholics but I can’t find any one that I know down there that thinks he is going to do very well any way One thing that could well be fac­tored in is NH has had some expe­ri­ence with folks like Bain Capi­tol. Older busi­nesses that have been bought out and liq­ui­dated. This may be a big­ger deal than was expected.
I still say the closer they can get Mitts num­bers to 30% the bet­ter for Hunts­man and Newt even if they come in sec­ond and lose by 10 points. Ron Paul is going to get Ron Paul’s votes and what ever % of the vot­ers con­sider them­selves to be so will most likely show up. So I see no upside for Mitt in a reduced turn out and sev­eral sce­nar­ios where his oppo­si­tion ben­e­fits. Now we just have to wait and see what the turn out actu­ally is.

Yup Mono sounds like rag­ing enthu­si­asm to me and they feed these peo­ple after they vote or at least they used to. Good church supper/​Grange hall food too.

Hard to tell Shiloh but of course the over all vote num­bers will be off. But one might expect Repub­li­can num­bers to be roughly equal. In look­ing at the 2008 Repub­li­can results in the pri­mary McCain received 88,571 votes for 37.71%, Mitt got 75,546 for 32.17%, Huck got 26,859 for 11.4%, and Paul got18,308 for 7.8%.
Mitt does not need another state where he does not get as many votes this time as in 2008. San­to­rum isn’t polling as well as Huck. It will be interesting.

So to fin­ish my thoughts on my last post. If the final track­ing poll aired this AM is cor­rect and Mitt has 37% sup­port then one should expect him to get roughly the same num­ber of votes McCain got in 2008 or roughly 88,571. What he really can’t afford is to have another Iowa per­for­mance where he received sev­eral hun­dred less votes than he did in 2008.

Wow math­mat­i­cally at least it appears that Mitt may yet again not get as many votes as he did in 2008. Hmm­mmm miss­ing by as much as 5K. Still early but that would be wild.

Yup I was just look­ing at old data, you are right. Now what isn’t com­fort­able I pro­jected poten­tial total vote count for Mitt at 10%, 20% and 25% report­ing. Will do the same at 33 and 50% his poten­tial vote could be well under his 2008 performance.

How about 5 years of cam­paign­ing to get maybe 5 thou­sand less votes which at this point is quite pos­si­ble. I’m also think­ing the turn out over all is poten­tially well off for the Repub­li­cans from 2008.Need to look and see what total num­bers were then.

Michael while you are pat­ting your­self on the back you might want to save a few for Mitt. I know a win is a win but for how many con­ven­tion del­e­gates and at what cost in time and money? Perry is going to be around cer­tainly through SC and most likely Florida. I would fig­ure after that it will be all Texas two step home.
Rom­ney needed a much stronger win than this before going South.
Shiloh, I’m not sure that Paul will go 3^rd party but he might just as well. There is no viable path to the top for him.

hmmmm in 2008 the total Repub­li­can pri­mary vote was 234,851 with out doing the math it doesn’t look like they will equal that.

RGB, a point well worth pon­der­ing. It will be inter­est­ing to see what is actu­ally in the Gin­grich Bain infomer­cial. All any one has at this point is the trailer and rumors. I find it telling that the report of Bain hav­ing out­sourc­ing info on their web site that got reported ear­lier yes­ter­day saw that mate­r­ial scrubbed before the day was over. It may well be that there are other dubi­ous tracks that both Mitt and Bain have left behind and you can be pretty sure not just Gin­grich is look­ing for them.
You or Grog asked the good ques­tion on how the Bain record com­pares with other sim­i­lar lever­aged buy out groups.…..not well. Where oth­ers in the busi­ness on aver­age see 5–6% bank­rupt firms left behind them, Bain appears to have been at the 25–30% range (var­i­ous fig­ures out there hence the range) with 6–8 other com­pa­nies that just ended up lay­ing every one off (that sounds like flat out out­sourc­ing).
As was stated above even that may not be the bad bul­let in this though. Bain and their fees and profit tak­ing were way above the pale for even some avowed vul­tures. Again lets see how this plays out in SC where Bain actu­ally appears to have done some of their games. In places where unem­ploye­ment has stayed low such as Iowa and NH this might not get the trac­tion it will in places that have been really hit by such actions. I wouldn’t want to be seen as a vul­ture any thing regard­ing busi­ness in places like PA,OH, MI,NV, CA or prob­a­bly a bunch of other places. How much angst do you want towards your cam­paign in swing states?
All that said I still think Mitt will get it. It may just be a lit­tle longer and much more painful process to accom­plish it than might have had to be.

Thanks Max, that is a start. I’m hav­ing a hell of a time back track­ing to where I got the info. The stuff on the Texas steel mill is the pen­sion piece or one of them. Grog I am still dig­ging as time allows but I may not have my answer until this evening.