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Fox News Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage
Q: Who else should we expect to drop after the first two contests? Fiorina? Carson? — commenter Dana Renee
A: For what it’s worth, our forecast model calculates a dropout probability for each candidate. If this year is like the past, we probably won’t see very many dropouts before New Hampshire, but they’ll pick up significantly after that. Here are the chances it assigns each candidate of dropping out by the time of the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.
| CANDIDATE | DROPOUT |
|---|---|
| Santorum | 62.6% |
| Christie | 57.1% |
| Paul | 56.8% |
| Fiorina | 56.8% |
| Huckabee | 52.7% |
| Carson | 45.0% |
| Kasich | 41.1% |
| Bush | 29.5% |
| Rubio | 23.4% |
| Cruz | 22.5% |
| Trump | 5.9% |
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Meet Jim Gilmore, The Howard Hughes Of This Race
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.”