Six reasons Mitt Romney is likely to win the Florida primary
Mitt Romney looks ready to take the Florida primary. DCDecoder looks at six indicators of a big win for Romney Tuesday.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney makes a campaign stop Monday, Jan. 30, 2012 in Jacksonville, Fla.
(AP Photo/Florida Times-Union, Bruce Lipsky)
Washington
Mitt Romney has a 98 percent likelihood of winning the Florida primary, if the prediction market InTrade is correct.
InTrade is an online market that allows individuals to buy and sell shares in a market to make predictions on the outcome of real-world events. Intrade describes itself as an exchange - like the New York or London stock exchanges. When you buy shares you are buying them from another member of Intrade. And when you sell shares, another member of the exchange is buying them from you. According to folks who are willing to put money behind their prediction, Romney is a lock.
In addition to the wide margin of victory predicted by recent polls, here are five other reasons why Mitt Romney is likely to win Florida:
- Newt Gingrich, who was once leading in the Florida polls, has been massively outspent in Florida: Romney and his allies have ponied up the money for 12,768 television commercials to Gingrich’s comparatively paltry 210.
- In total ad spending, Gingrich may have been lapped as badly as five to one.
- Spending by outside groups (meaning not the presidential campaigns themselves) is up a whopping 1,600 percent versus the same time in 2008, POLITICO reports.
- Romney proves organization is worth something: Nearly 40 percent of GOP Floridians cast their vote as an absentee ballot or in early voting and Romney won these voters by 12.5 percent over Gingrich. If you walk into election day with a 12.5 percent lead, you’re going to be hard pressed to lose the top spot.
- Ron Paul and Rick Santorum have left the state. Why? Because Florida awards all of its 50 delegates to the winner of the overall state ballot. At least they think they do…
- … because while Florida’s state Republican Party wants a winner-take-all system, all Republican contests held before April are supposed to reward their delegates proportionally. POLITICO explains why this could get messy if the GOP convention comes down to counting delegates.
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