Goodbye Rudy Tuesday

So, Rudy has dropped out of the race of the Republican nomination. You could of course be forgiven that he was even still in it, given how low his media profile has been over the last couple of months. To an outside observer the most obvious question is ‘how someone who was the front runner so long screw up so badly?’ - to which the answer has to be strategy.

It is easy to see how the idea was sold to Rudy - forget the early states - you can’t win them, they don’t have many delegates and they will just waste your time and money. Leave them to the others whilst you focus on the real prizes like Florida. And you can see why he bought it - who wants to actively campaign in a state and then come in third or worse? - the risk of being branded a loser is too high. The advice was wrong. You can’t ignore the early states, even if you are going to come in third, because people forget you exist.

It is harsh, but it is true - in the 24 hour media cycle world with internet headlines updating hourly if you aren’t fighting, you aren’t news - and these days people have very short memories. It doesn’t matter how big your ad spend is in the local markets - if you aren’t in the news, you aren’t credible. To his credit, Giuliani has done a service to future Presidential candidates - he has tested a potentially viable theory and proved it wrong.

His failure has been very clear to us on WSYVF - despite the fact that our our quiz takers are not a scientific sample, the fact that out of the 4,000 self declared Republicans who have taken the test so part almost as many people were expecting to get Ron Paul as a result as were Rudy suggested that his days were numbered long before the Florida ballots were counted.