By Very Afraid

To reiterate, barring a major economic turnaround pretty much any Republican nominee will have a very good chance to win. Although not everyone interprets the data that way:

And then there’s the nomination process. It could be that in all the elections incorporated into current models, the parties nominated relatively mainstream, electable candidates, which could mean the models will fail if an unusually extreme candidate is nominated. “I’m conditioning on the last 20-some odd elections, and each time the party didn’t nominate some extremist,” Fair says. “They didn’t nominate people like [Rep.] Michele Bachmann…and if they did do that, then my equation would probably be quite a bit off.” The nomination of someone like Bachmann or former Alaska governor Sarah Palin would be “a gift from Tea Party heaven,” Hibbs quips. “All bets would be off from the normal thinking.”

Well, maybe.   But I still think that people are understating the extent to which Bachmann now represents mainstream Republican views; she might have less of a chance of winning, but I doubt it’s a lot.   And Perry represents someone with Bachmann’s views or worse but the genitalia to be taken more seriously by the media, which is really frightening.