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Source: It’s Not Pawlenty

Just repeating what I reported in the Twitter thread, but I have a trustworthy source telling me that the GOP VP nominee will be someone other than Tim Pawlenty.

That’s all I can report to you because that’s all that I know. My source believes he knows the identity of the actual VP nominee but will not tell me who it is. None of this is 100%. It’s possible that I’m being played, and it’s possible that my source is. But I don’t think so, and I believe it’s more likely that the McCain campaign was playing the media.

Consider particularly that a lot of the fuel for this rumor seems to be coming from Drudge, who is one of the first two places that a conservative campaign will go if it wants to circulate a false rumor to deke the media (Bob Novak still probably being the other). And also consider that there’s very little downside in doing this. It eats up column inches from Obama’s excellent performance at Invesco tonight, while still generating plenty of buzz when the name of the actual VP is revealed.

Nate Silver founded and was the editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

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