Thread: Mike Huckabee Still at 50 to 1: Romney and Paul Stay at 8

Mike Huckabee Still at 50 to 1: Romney and Paul Stay at 8 to 1

Gambling 911
Monday Aug 13, 2007

Straw Poll results seem not to have mattered as far as the online bookmakers go. The folks at Sportsbook.com have kept big second place winner Mike Huckabee at 50 to 1 odds. Neither did Mitt Romney or Ron Paul's numbers change. They remained at 8 to 1.

This is Carrie Stroup reporting for Gambling911.com.

While Mitt Romney won Saturday's Straw Poll by a decent size margin, he is also reported to have spent the most money to get Iowans to the event - a few million to be exact. Huckabee admittedly only spent just over $100,000 and still came out a respectable second place.

His second place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll vaults Mike Huckabee into the top tier of Republican presidential candidates, the former Arkansas Governor said Sunday on Face The Nation.

"We're in fact in the first tier, I think, by everybody's estimation, and here's why," Huckabee told Jim Axelrod. "It wasn't just that we surprised people with a second showing, it's that we did it with so few resources. I mean, this really was feeding the 5,000 with two fish and five loaves, an amazing kind of day for us."

The Huckabee campaign spent about $150,000 in the weeks before voters descended on Ames, and Huckabee said it had no bus caravans or campaign ads to attract more support.

"So when you look at what we were able to achieve, it was because people came to Ames to vote for us," he said. "And we had remarkable stories of people who came literally from all over America to work for us."

Sam Brownback would like to have come in second but a third place finish thanks mainly to the absence of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson, means he'll be staying in the race a little longer.

Likewise, Tom Tancredo with 100-1 odds, had a better showing than what was initially expected.

Ron Paul's supporters hoped for an upset, but in the end he walked off with just shy of 10% of the vote. That's better than the 2% of the vote he supposedly has in national polls, however. His base in Ames, Iowa was rather enormous, the only probably being very few of those people could actually vote since they mostly came from out of state.

Paul's supporters also offered up what they feel are more accurate results of their presidential candidate's performance at the Iowa Straw Polls once you get beyond the entire "Rent-a-Republican-for-a-Day" concept.

'Ron (Paul) received nearly 77 votes per day he campaigned in Iowa, the best of all other candidates," one Ron Paul supporter alerted us on Sunday. "In 1979, Ronald Reagan lost the Iowa Straw vote by a lot of votes. But after the loss, the first thing the campaign looked at was the vote ratio it received to the amount of time the campaign spent in Iowa. The ratio showed that Reagan did much better than all the other candidates for the amount of time he spent in Iowa, and this told the campaign that Reagan was very electable, and of course he went on to become President".

Ron Paul, it should be pointed out, was very instrumental in getting that other Ron elected.

This is something that bodes well with diehard Republicans disenchanted with the current Bush administration. Ronald Reagan is looked upon as the "last great Republican". Paul would do well to draw the connection more often in his campaigning from here on out.

After all, it seems to have worked for Charlie Crist, the newly elected Republican Governor of Florida. Crist campaign ads made mention of him as a "strong Ronald Reagan Republican".

Ron Paul spoke to Gambling911 just one week prior to the Straw Poll. He is a co-sponsor with Democrat Barney Frank of legislation that would abolish online poker prohibition passed into law last October.

The good news for Romney and Huckabee may be offset by the fact that only half the expected 30,000 attendees actually decided to show up, perhaps an indication of disillusion with the Republican party.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/au ... ckabee.htm

And as any race fan knows, longshots can and do win. GO TANCREDO!!!