Dean: 100.0
Clark: 63.1
Kerry: 39.8
Gephardt: 35.1
Edwards: 32.1
Lieberman: 25.0
Sharpton: 9.2
Kucinich: 7.7
Five months to the day after I posted the first Empirical Cattle Call back on legacy dkos, today I am posting the final one. After my best efforts to accumulate data with a proven record of predicting the winner of nomination campaigns, Howard Dean has emerged the clear winner and Wesley Clark has emerged as his strongest challenger. The Empirical Cattle Call projects that Dean will be the nominee, and only Clark will be competitive all the way until Super Tuesday.
This view of the campaign is significantly at odds with the scenarios currently being passed around in the media. We are told that the nomination battle is wide open, and that five or six candidates could be viable even after Super Tuesday. Hell, in the daily updates of their national tracking poll, Rasmussen lets us know that the nomination probably will not be decided until the convention. Supposedly, since nothing besides Iowa and New Hampshire are relevant, the campaign could hardly be any closer than it is right now.
My response to this is twofold. First, it ignores broad historical trends that have actually made it quite easy to predict the nominee before the voting begins. Second, it reveals serious, undemocratic flaws in the structure of the primary system. Specifically, these flaws are the influence of money, the cascading system of states, and an irresponsible, sensationalist, for-profit corporate media. Reform in all three areas is needed more now than at any time since 1972. Frankly, I believe the reason the media goes on and on about how close this race is despite overwhelming evidence showing otherwise is to hide the undemocratic nature of the selection process, and to preserve the notion that those people who do not actively participate in the invisible primary have a choice during the "selection process."
Although I have engaged in anti-momentum discussions repeatedly in the past, I will offer one final paragraph for those of you who still believe that momentum is key to the primary season. No one has won a primary season based on momentum from early wins since Carter in 1976. Since then, the frontrunner has won every single time (and, with the exception of Mondale in 1984, won quite easily). Since 1976, both Iowa and New Hampshire have actually been negative predictors of the eventual nominee, as both states have chosen a candidate who failed to win the nomination more often than they have picked the eventual winner. Further, in this season, there are seven days between New Hampshire and the next seven states. Even in 2000, another frontloaded season, there were 18 days between McCain's victory in New Hampshire and Bush's double-digit victory in South Carolina, with only Delaware in between. Now, there is far less time for momentum to carry someone over the top, and far more states where an upstart will immediately need to go over the top. Momentum is even more irrelevant now than in the past.
Then again, I could be wrong.