Sam Minter has been comparing Romney's acquisition of delegates this year to McCain's progress in 2008. How do they line up? Pretty closely:
As Minter says,
Romney completely dominated this race from the very beginning. There
was NEVER a point in the entire campaign where Romney was not ahead in
delegates. It was only even close for a few days after Gingrich won
South Carolina. The rest of the time, this whole campaign has just been
a story of Romney slowly but surely pulling further and further ahead.
[...]
Despite all the talk at various points in time about Romney having
problems closing the deal by comparison to 2008, this shows clearly
that no such thing was happening. Any perception to that affect was
due only to the fact that the calendar was more spread out this year
than in 2008. Comparing the two curves, sometimes Romney was ahead,
sometimes McCain was ahead, but for the most part these two lines
tracked each other closely.
Thanks for the link. It is amazing how much the PERCEPTION of momentum is effected by the change in calendar. No matter what the numbers may or may not look like, from the point of view of the casual observer, the difference is taking an unstoppable lead in February vs not taking an unstoppable lead until April.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the calendar was structured such that the beginning of February 2008 and the beginning of April 2008 were approximately equal in terms of what percentage of delegates were available ends up being invisible. All people think about is that Romney took longer to get there.
Of course, the stretched out calendar was 100% intentional, but I'm not sure the result was quite what was desired.