The invaluable Jay Cost has penned a characteristically invaluable essay that uses his usual combination of painstaking logic and statistical analysis to show that it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Mitt Romney would beat John McCain is a head-to-head match-up if Mike Huckabee were to drop out. But first Cost, using “Arrow’s Theorem,” shows how Mike Huckabee’s presence is indeed distorting the race between John McCain and Mitt Romney:
The point of Arrow’s Nobel Prize winning theorem, Cost tells us, is that in politics, pizza does change the dynamic between ice cream and hamburger, even though it shouldn’t. Other than that, two thoughts leap to mind regarding the passage: 1) As a point of clarification, Mike Huckabee is “pizza.” Given his current dietary habits, I think it would have been more accurate and less confusing to have Huckabee represented by “a lightly dressed salad of mixed greens.” On the other hand, McCain and Romney being represented by ice cream and hamburger somehow makes perfect sense. 2) Boy am I hungry. But not so fast, Romney triumphalists. Cost’s subsequent statistical analysis shows that McCain would be likely to win the head-to-head contest with Romney, at least based on the results of the past primaries. At the risk of adding to Cost’s pretty perfect essay, I’ll just say that Cost proves precisely why Huckabee should drop out, even assuming the conventional wisdom that Huckabee remains in the race just to do a solid for McCain. Whoever emerges from the Democratic side will have the benefit of having beaten their opposition fair and square and even-up (unless of course Hillary wins by getting the Florida delegates seated, but that’s a topic for another day). Assuming the race continues beyond tonight and McCain wins the nomination over a fractured field, McCain’s conservative detractors will have an excuse for sour grapes, not that all of them will need one. Mike Huckabee’s continuing presence will make Presumptive Nominee McCain’s job of uniting the party even harder than it already will be.
