Thanks for the well thought out response. My initial thought, though, is that while it may be that Fred could win if its him vs. Obama… he’s got to beat Rudy, McCain and Mitt before he’s gonna get a chance at that. He placed badly in Iowa, he’s tracking to place badly in NH… how many more of these primaries do you think he’ll stay in with that kind of response?

Fred might not do too badly for the GOP in terms of base… but I’d probably still put my money on McCain vs. Democrat than Fred vs. Democrat for the win. While there are some drawbacks on McCain’s side (Campaign finance etc), he has experience, he’s respected on both sides of the aisle, he has strong approval ratings among Dems, the GOP and Independents. If the MS were trying to hide a potentially winning GOP candidate… Fred seems a lot less of a threat than John.

If Fred doesn’t do something to drastically improve his visibility (and soon) this whole discussion will be moot, maybe we can agree on that?

Great interview, great content, and video quality.

I know you live in Los Angeles, as do I, and that nobody really wears a coat & tie anymore.

I really think that as a show of respect towards a Senator, you should have worn a coat & tie.

Or am I being “stuffy”…

Sincerely,

Alejandro

Fred hasn’t had much MSM exposure. His campaign ads are only airing in battleground states. So his image to the public is very hazy right now. Candidates are also perceived very differently in the primaries vs the general, for one. So you have to take the raw poll data as what it is: a snapshot of a public that by and large only recently started paying attention at all. Even in the battlegrounds, the polls are saying that people are not married to their current choices.

Once we get past the convention, the Republican candidate, whoever he is, will need to do three things. First, bring out the full GOP base. Second, bring over enough independents. Finally, if possible, suppress democratic voter turnout. This is all complicated if there’s a sufficiently viable third party candidate again. George W. Bush owes his first time, and Clinton both his terms, to third party spoiler candidates.

I say Fred has a better shot in the general election because he has the ability to appeal to the entire conservative coalition without having small but crucial segments staying home on election day. If Obama’s the nominee, you can forget about the democrats staying home– they’ll turn out in droves, *especially* if the GOP candidate goes negative (if he does, it will have to be done very delicately). With Clinton and Edwards, things are much more like they usually are– deeply negative campaigns on both sides.

Once you have a candidate who can bring out the whole GOP base, then the question is can this person win independents over? That’s a tougher question than it seems, since independents often vote based on intangibles like personality and style.

If I did want to make predictions about the candidates, I’d be on better ground using a different kind of survey instrument than is used by conventional political pollsters. I’d use a technique from statistical market research to create a perceptual map that identifies key issues or candidate attributes, then place candidates on that map to determine theoretical matches between nominees.

When you use this to map products like cars or soap, you can get accuracy from a relatively small sample to within +/- 0.5% points. You can also do what-if scenarios that can forecast the effects of changing your message. The technique would have to be tweaked to cover people staying at home, but I think it would help correct for media exposure effects that we’re seeing this early in the campaign.

So no, now that you mention it, this isn’t a rigorous finding, just an informed gut feeling. I’m getting tempted to try to really do some measurements though.

What are you basing the “Fred can win the general election” comment off of? Most of the polls I’ve seen across the fifty states put in in single or barely double digits. Maybe its all a vast Left-Wing CoN… but is there other data that indicates he’s doing anything besides falling over?

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/candidates/Fred-Thompson.html

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/

In NH he’s currently looking at 2%… In SC he’s all the way up to 11% but Huck is 25 points ahead of him, McCain is 6 points ahead and Mitt is 8 points ahead… so even in the state where he has double digits, he’s still in 4th. Maybe those polls are biased and maybe the MSM is hiding how good he’s really doing, but I haven’t seen any data to support that theory.

Do you have some data to support it?

I’m a big Fred supporter. Near as I can tell, the media simply has a story about him that they push as hard as they can. Whenever Fred is mentioned in the press, it’s in the context of “he can’t win”. Whenever they interview him, they skip the substantial questions and ask horse racy “why are you losing” questions instead. Very disappointing. If he wins SC, watch for that to change.

In the MSM’s defense, though Glenn Reynolds had a similar story about disorganization in the campaign’s earliest days. I’ve served in political campaigns before and it doesn’t surprise me, but it might be that there was an early, long-remedied grain of truth to the story.

Maybe the press hates Fred because he can win the general election. Who knows.

(Although, given the vapidity of their remarks on the Long War to date, maybe the Democrats and Huck should take a pass.)

That candidate doesn’t exist in Fred’s estimation, and I would agree.

He doesn’t appear to think very highly of the media (another plus!) and they don’t like him either. Also I think the media are more afraid of him than any other Republican candidate, were he to catch fire, so they try to starve him with little or no coverage.

If he does well in a primary like SC and gets sufficient exposure he will catch on and prove to be the best candidate by far imo. I think he’s the only one who can beat Obama, who appears unstoppable at this point.