With polls coming out surveying actual state delegates we are beginning to get our first picture of where Bob Bennett’s chances really stand. Of course we should never implicitly trust a first picture but it’s better than all the guesswork before the delegates had even been selected and more grounded in reality than straw polls or surveys of likely primary voters.
The Bennett campaign continues to say publicly that they think they have a decent shot and that they are making headway among the delegates. We should expect that kind of public statement from the campaign because any serious candidate must be at least publicly optimistic about their chances or else they have no reason to stay in the race. Consider that, like the Bennett campaign, the official line from the Lee and Bridgewater campaigns is that they are making headway among the delegates. I’m sure if you added all their optimism up it would add to well over 100% of all delegates – and that doesn’t count the optimism from any of the other five candidates.
Along with polls come public discussions such as this one of what the polls actually mean and how the convention will play out. Of course all such discussions are nothing more than guesswork but there are a few facts that can tell us a lot about how long Bennett will hold a seat in the Senate. The first fact is that he needs to receive votes from 40% of the delegates to even land in a primary. Also, all the rhetoric from the various campaigns and the delegate poll seems to be remarkably consistent in placing Bennett-supporting delagates somewhere in the low 20% range right now. There is also strong consensus that Bennett is highly unlikely to be the second choice for many delegates because a large portion (easily over 40%, almost certainly over 50%, and quite possibly over 60%) will vote for anyone except Bob Bennett this year. Because of this I feel very confident in saying that Bennett’s magic number at the convention in first round voting is 30% of the votes.
Even if Bennett were the top vote getter in the first round, if he only received 29.5% of the votes in that first round I am very confident that he would not be able to pick up enough votes in later rounds to reach the 40% plateau no matter which of his challengers were left in the top three. (I am not limiting that possibility to Lee and Bridgewater even if they are the only challengers I have mentioned in the post.) Even if he were to receive the most votes in the second round, say 36% (that is my wildest imagination if the first round generated only 29.5% for him), the third round would see virtually every delegate who had not already voted for him voting for whoever was left of his challengers and there would be no primary.
If Bob Bennett currently has the support of 22% of the state delegates, as this poll has indicated, that would mean he needs to convince another 8% to support him in the first round. That is approximately 300 delegates he will need to sway in this highly anti-incumbent atmosphere to have any chance of surviving into a primary.
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