Huntsman tiene el momentum pero le falta tiempo

Nate Silver:

In a nomination contest in which literally every other major opponent to Mitt Romney has surged in the polls at some point, it is only fitting that the candidate who seems to have the late momentum in New Hampshire is the one who hadn’t: Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah.

Two new polls out Sunday night showed a favorable trend for Mr. Huntsman. A Public Policy Polling survey, which had a very large sample size, gave him 16 percent of the vote, enough to challenge Ron Paul for second place. Another poll, by the University of New Hampshire, had Mr. Huntsman at 11 percent of the vote, although this was improved from his 7-percent standing earlier in the week.

These polls join an American Research Group poll released on Saturday, in which Mr. Huntsman was already in second place with 17 percent of the vote. His trajectory has also been favorable in the Suffolk University tracking poll.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast model, which is fairly aggressive about accounting for a candidate’s momentum, now projects Mr. Huntsman to receive 15.6 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, putting him in third place, about equidistant between Mr. Paul and Rick Santorum.

If Mr. Huntsman finished exactly as the forecast now projects, it could put him in a sort of no man’s land. Such a finish would probably beat the news media’s expectations, which often lag a few days behind the polls, possibly giving him favorable momentum headed into South Carolina. However, because Mr. Huntsman has a very modest organization in South Carolina and is not polling well there, it is not clear how he would capitalize upon it.

Instead, Mr. Huntsman probably needs a lights-out, headline-making finish to become a major player in the Republican nomination race.

The ultimate example of this would be if Mr. Huntsman actually won New Hampshire. But the chances of that are exceptionally slim.

Just how slim? Our model puts Mr. Huntsman’s odds at about 250-1 against an outright win. It would very probably be the biggest last-minute upset ever in a caucus or primary.

Mitt Romney, in all likelihood, is simply too far ahead. Mr. Romney actually has lost some support in New Hampshire — our model now projects him to get 39 percent of the vote, down from 43 percent a few days ago — but that’s something you can afford when you held a 25-point lead.

(...) Still, late momentum should not be underrated, especially in a state like New Hampshire, so it is worth taking seriously the confidence interval that our model gives for Mr. Huntsman’s forecast. That confidence interval, enough to cover 90 percent of all possible outcomes, runs between 7 percent and 26 percent of the vote.

Perhaps the best-realistic-case scenario for Mr. Huntsman is that he does not win New Hampshire but comes close enough to make the outcome murky.

For instance, if Mr. Huntsman and Ron Paul both finished with about 25 percent of the vote, and Mr. Romney with 30 percent, that would in my view pass the smell test for a manifestly “close” result and would raise a lot of questions about Mr. Romney’s staying power.

More likely, the results will stay reasonably true to the forecast, with Mr. Huntsman finishing in the mid- to high teens, and Mr. Romney finishing just north or just south of 40 percent of the vote. There will be a few days of speculation about whether Mr. Romney has cleared some arbitrary benchmark for a “good” finish in New Hampshire. Then people will remember how robust Mr. Romney’s position is for the nomination and the talk will die down.