America, tonight you are in for a treat. Tonight you get to meet Jim Gilmore. He is a bona fide Republican candidate for president, and to prove it, he has a television commercial that NBC let him air after Donald Trump hosted “Saturday Night Live.” I’m sure the footage will prove useful, since I’m guessing you have no idea what he looks like.
Gilmore is a former governor of Virginia — he ran the state from 1998 to 2002 — a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and … a former presidential candidate! He dropped out early on in the 2008 cycle because of fundraising trouble.
This time around, Gilmore decided to come in hot. He joined the race on July 30, becoming the 17th person to do so, with a 10:47-minute video oh-so-subtly shot in front of a portrait of fellow Virginian George Washington. And that was pretty much the last time anyone heard from him. It was almost as if he had lingered on the opening lines of his announcement video and thought better of his bid: “With so many candidates already in the race, some may ask why i’m running. That’s a fair question.”
Gilmore is a former intelligence agent for the Army, a fact that I’m sure he will mention during the debate, since the few times he’s gone on the record these past few months, he’s spoken about global security threats. In an interview with MSNBC today, he spoke of veterans’ health care and generally hammered home the point that he’s held real, tough jobs in the public sector — which he has. Gilmore has a pretty solid political résumé; it’s just that, well, his presidential bids aren’t as solid. “My job,” he said, “even in the undercard [debate], is to shape the race differently.” I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how he will do that, given that he didn’t make the ballot in big states like Ohio and Illinois. (To be fair, Gilmore has made the ballot in places like New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee).
Say what you will about Gilmore, but the man certainly does not suffer from imposter’s syndrome: He charmingly still believes, “I should be the president of the United States, I’m going to be the president of the United States.”
Ella Koeze
Carl Bialik
Jim Gilmore Modestly Breaks Through In A Poll
Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has stuck with the race, and some pollsters have kept asking about him even though the vast majority of the time he gets so little support that his share of respondents rounds to 0 percent. Finally, his stick-to-it attitude has paid off: Gilmore got 1 percent in a Fox News poll last week, good enough to qualify him for tonight’s undercard debate. It’s his first appearance on a debate stage since the first Republican debate almost six months ago, also on Fox News.
HuffPost Pollster has compiled 275 polls of the Republican national primary. Gilmore has been included in 102 of them, the least of any Republican candidate, including the ones who’ve already dropped out. That’s partly because he didn’t formally enter the race until late July, but even since his entry, Gilmore has been asked about less often than any of the candidates who are still in the race. One big reason: Gilmore polled at 1 percent or above in just 14 percent of the polls that asked about him. (Our collection of national primary polls omits Gilmore.)
Given Gilmore’s persistent inability to register with poll respondents, it’s surprising not that so many pollsters have dropped Gilmore, but that more haven’t. “All media pollsters have struggled with how to ask about a list of candidates in the double digits,” Mark Blumenthal, head of election polling for the online-polling company SurveyMonkey, said in an interview. “There is no good way to do it, particularly on the phone. A lot of these names are unfamiliar to a lot of voters, and they can’t hold that many names in their head to get an answer.” Gilmore’s best results have come in online polls — Fox News’s poll was the first conducted with live telephone interviews in which he registered as high as 1 percent.
