No way is Dan Onorato running for Congress.  County Exec is a great gig.  I'm also pretty sure he doesn't live in the district.

Darnit Chris, I just spent two hours writing something.  And here yours is much better than mine.

Thanks for putting it so well.

I think it's a bit shortsighted to try to stake out a position as the clear leader in May.  That leaves the rest of the field 8 months to take you out.  

And here I thought Edwards was already doing that.

He showed them no such thing.  He lost the primary -- he did not survive the primary challenge.

No Senator wants to be bounced from their party and forced to run as an independent.  In a lot of states, it legally can't be done.  In a lot of states, a credible Republican would be on the ballot and the independent would lose.

And he really didn't enjoy the experience.

Moreover, I think the press has been ignoring him because it's clear he doesn't speak for any constituency in the Democratic Party and therefore his views don't have a lot of relevance as an indicator of "division" within the party.

Ross Perot the populist (at least wrt trade) got 19% of the vote in 1992.  Maybe you ought to rethink your argument there.

In the first Round, Bayh has 82 votes and is in 7th place.  

By the ninth round, Bayh is in fifth place with 193 votes.  This makes quite a bit of sense, as a lot of the Daschle, Vilsack, Biden voters no doubt see Bayh as a natural second choice.  

Also in the ninth round, Kerry has only 149 votes and is eliminated.  In the tenth round, with Kerry's votes redistributed, Bayh is all of a sudden at 333!  That means that 140 of the 149 Kerry voters prefer Bayh to Clark, Obama, Edwards, and Gore.  Which seems unlikely.

In the 11th round, Bayh has the lowest total, with 340 votes.  "None of these," which has been slowly gaining votes every round, stands at 54.  After Bayh's elimination and the distribution of his votes, "None of these" has 326.  That means that 272 of Bayh's 340 supporters had no preference among the top candidates of Obama, Gore, and Edwards.

It's all a little fishy to me.

And against a total joke?

So nice of you to join us to point that out.

This is all great stuff.  I'm thinking, though, that it'll be equally important in 2008 to make sure to optimize search results for the challengers.  

Incumbents are better known by the electorate, by and large, than challengers.  So undecided voters are much more likely to google the challenger, and, with less other info about the challenger in their heads already, they are more likely to be swayed by the results.

Ditto.  Take PA off the board.

Not to mention that Leet, Marshall, and Indiana are on there twice.  And it's been like that for years.

PA is 10/10.

All it does is enable him to capture those who practice Judiaism.  It's problematic to have separate boxes for white people and jewish people, so he differentiates by adding the religious dimension.  It's a kludge, sort of like how the government has separate boxes for race and also for hispanic origin.

I have to think they would've said -- otherwise pretty dishonest.  The previous Altmire poll had the horse race before the messaging, I seem to recall.