Friday, December 18, 2015

Dead Campaign Walking

This sort of news from the Huckabee campaign makes me think he might want to consider going back to doing radio. What's going on is:

Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign is slashing salaries for senior campaign staff in the wake of poor polling and difficulty fundraising, sources told Politico on Thursday.

Campaign officials said the austerity measures will help redirect more funds toward evangelical-heavy Iowa, where Huckabee, a former pastor, won the 2008 Republican caucuses.

The salary reductions took place over the last few weeks, amid the abrupt departure of communications director Alice Stewart. 
Take a look at the GOP Iowa spread, and you can not think that by February 1st, with what Huckabee has on hand, he's going to do much to break what looks like a toss-up between Cruz and Trump.  Then he goes on to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Super Tuesday.

He's got to make absolutely absurd gains to get there. He isn't going to make them in New Hampshire, and even if he figures out a way to score points in South Carolina, it isn't enough to encourage donors through Super Tuesday.

I totally had Santorum as next on the drop-dead rota, but I don't even know if he has staff to cut the salaries of anymore. I don't know what he's running on. Hope that at least he's doing better than that bastard Pataki?  (I know why Senator Graham is in, I think. Keeping it real, FWIW.)

Anyhow, I call Huckabee sensible enough to creep out of the race before massive campaign debts accrue. That's the best I'll say for him.

2 comments:

mikey said...

I'll never understand the motivation of these 1%ers. They CAN'T truly believe they have any hope. Yet they spend more money than they have, so even profit motive seems unlikely. Carson's set himself up to do teevee, but Huck's already there - to whatever extent he's every going to be.

It must be ego, the fawning of sycophantic followers, and a delusional form of hope in some combination. Hard to understand why they bother.

Vixen Strangely said...

As a kind of donor-funded book tour and profile-raising mission, it might have some self-promotional value--but I'd still have a pang of conscience or a dozen about setting the money of misguided individual donors on fire like that.

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