Pundit Watch

I pulled the September 24, 2007, copy of the New Republic out from a stack on my coffee table last night and happened on a fascinating column about the upcoming primaries. John Judis laid out in convincing detail just why the primary race was likely to go all the way to June and maybe even to the convention. He did acknowledge that people had made such predictions before:

Of course, dire prognostications of brokered conventions are made nearly every election.... But the structure of the election has changed this year. The old schedule of primaries and caucuses was designed to winnow the field. Invariably, only two candidates were left standing by March, one of whom would eventually capture enough delegates through the remaining contests to win the nomination. By contrast, the 2008 schedule concentrates more than half of the primary and caucus votes in the first month, which ends February 5. If there is no clear frontrunner by then, the race will probably continue on into June and perhaps even up until the convention.

And that's why, he said, the delegates just might find themselves choosing the nominee at their convention in Minneapolis.

Yes, Minneapolis. Not Denver. The Republican convention. Because, Judis said, it was likely that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson would divide the states on a regional basis and no one would get a majority of the delegates. "So there is a very good chance that, by June, none of the Republican candidates will have secured the nomination."

And then what would happen? Well, "the struggle for the nomination would probably move to the GOP convention's rules committee," which would have to decide, among other things, whether to disqualify delegates from Florida and other states that held their primaries too early.

TNR readers might have been worrying, Could this happen to our party? Not to worry, said Judis:

Democrats seem far less likely to face this sort of challenge next year. Indeed, Hillary Clinton appears to be putting her competition behind her, and none of her challengers has a built-in regional advantage that will ensure a respectable block of delegates....In fact, the compressed primary schedule could make a stalemate less rather than more likely for Democrats....While Republicans become ever more fractious as the general election approaches, Democrats will have already spent months coalescing around a new leader.

In this I think Judis was doubly, or triply, wrong. Not only did he get the primary process completely wrong in each party, I think he was wrong to predict that a drawn-out nominating process would be bad for the party. It seems clear today that Barack Obama has greatly benefited from the long battle with Hillary Clinton: he held the nation's attention longer, he became a sharper debater, he raised unprecedented sums of money, he built an organization in every state, he faced a lot of the revelations and charges that would otherwise have come up closer to the election.

So . . . what are the pundits predicting about the fall election?