2012 Republican Party presidential nomination

The Republican race to choose a candidate to challenge President Barack Obama clearly, firmly, and irrevocably proved, for everyone to see, that the Republicans are utterly batshit insane and need to be put down.

This was largely a clown show, with Mitt Romney, former 2008 candidate, as the frontrunner, and everyone else rising as alternatives shortly before crashing utterly. The race for all intents and purposes ended on April 10, 2012 when Rick Santorum suspended his campaign, finally making Mitt Romney the presumptive Republican presidential candidate.

In to the end
Candidates who officially declared their candidacy or formed exploratory committees, but had an effectively zero chance of winning.

Minor candidates
The rest of the field; a bunch of long-shots who officially declared their candidacies but lacked both the resources and the media attention to be effective contenders.

Dropped out
Candidates who dropped out.

Looked like they were going to, but declined
The candidates below were at one point considered possible nominees, but decided not to run in the first place.

Polling averages


Shown at the right is a moving average of recent primary polls, obtained from RCP's polling database. For several reasons, these numbers should be taken with a huge grain of salt:
 * The field of candidates is still not settled, and different polls have often offered the respondents a different choice of candidates. For example, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels were generally considered to be likely contenders and polled quite well until they declared not to seek the nomination after all. Sometimes, pollsters will retroactively process their data and assign respondents' votes for candidates who are no longer running to their second preferences, but sometimes such a choice was never offered and these responses are simply thrown out or just not shown anymore.


 * This early in the cycle, only very few eligible voters have seriously spent time thinking about their upcoming choices, let alone made their mind up. Some candidates are still unknown to many voters, while others will gain a boost simply by virtue of greater prominence. This allows for massive fluctuations in the run-up to the primaries.


 * There are only a handful of firms already in the field with regular polls, and the sample can't be held constant across the different intervals. So far, only Gallup, CNN and PPP are consistently represented, while others are included based on availability.


 * It's still a long time until the primaries, and there's a lot that can happen. At most, these numbers can provide information about how the field developed, but their predictive ability is extremely limited.

Alternative indicators
An alternative measure for predicting the candidates' chances of winning the nomination is having a look at the odds they're given at betting markets. Intrade allows bettors to take out long and short positions on contracts that trade between zero and 100 points, with each contract assigned to an event that can happen or not — in this case, a given candidate becoming the Republican nominee. As soon as the outcome is clear, contracts expire at either maximum or minimum value. In the meantime, they can be freely traded, and the current point value can be read as the market's overall consensus about a candidate's chances expressed in percentage points.

States won thus far
Below are the winners of the states which have held primaries or caucuses so far:


 * Romney:
 * Alaska
 * Arizona
 * Florida
 * Hawaii
 * Idaho
 * Illinois
 * Maine
 * Massachusetts
 * Michigan
 * Nevada
 * New Hampshire
 * Ohio
 * Vermont
 * Virginia
 * Washington
 * Wyoming


 * Santorum:
 * Alabama
 * Colorado
 * Iowa
 * Kansas
 * Louisiana
 * Minnesota
 * Mississippi
 * Missouri (with no delegates at stake)
 * North Dakota
 * Oklahoma
 * Tennessee


 * Gingrich:
 * Georgia
 * South Carolina


 * Paul
 * None