The next Republican debate is on CNN September 16th. Debating (if you can call it that) will be any candidate who has reached an average of 1 percent or more in three national polls: Rasmussen, Fox News and Bloomberg/BusinessWeek. For some reason, CNN is not considering the CNN/ORC poll. Make of that what you will.
At the moment, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore has not reached that mark and most reports are presuming he won't make it. In other words, it's unlikely he's going to improve from 0% support to 1% support in a month. If that's his pace — if he's going to grow at less than 1% a month — why, he might just make it all the way to 5% by the time the Republican primaries roll around.
I'm always curious as to the ways in which a person benefits if he or she spends months running for president and winds up, as they should have known they would, at the bottom of the heap. I'm sure they are many which is why we have all these candidates who don't have a prayer of becoming Commander in Chief. Some of them undoubtedly are following Max Bialystock's business model of trying to make money off a flop but there other rewards besides that or a job at Fox News.
It looks like Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and George Pataki will all be included in the CNN event. They're each polling at about 1%, though Fiorina is expected to rise a bit as the polls taken after the G.O.P. debate mount up. Isn't there something a little bizarre about the concept that Gilmore is out because he hasn't proven yet that he's a serious candidate but those four others are in because 1% support proves it?
Keep in mind, that's 1% support according to polls that have margins of error greater than 1%. The margin of error on the Rasmussen Poll is +/- 4 percentage points. The margin of error in the Fox News poll is +/- 4 percentage points. And the margin of error on the Bloomberg/Business Week poll is +/- 4.4 percentage points. So is the difference between 0% and 1% really significant? Theoretically, Gilmore could have more support than the four one-percenters combined.
In the 2012 presidential election, Obama beat Romney 51.1 to 47.2. Rasmussen predicted Romney would win by 1 point. Fox News predicted a tie. Bloomberg predicted Obama would beat Romney by 6 points. They were all correct but only if you applied a four point margin of error. If you took the numbers literally, they were all wrong.