Will It Be Rice or Bauer? Our Guess Is As Good As Anyone's

We Put Our Quarter in the Machine, And Zoltar Has Told Us Whether Andre Bauer or Tom Rice Will Be 'Big' Tomorrow Night..


     It's a tad late, and we got sick earlier today, so we're going to bed soon so we'll be nice and perky for tomorrow's appearance on In the Pickle Barrel... In all honesty, we have no real polling to go on, and when that happens, we sometimes are accurate - and sometimes we are dead wrong.  We're flying blind, but we'll take a stab at tomorrow's 7th District GOP Runoff between Tom Rice and Andre Bauer....


    We'll try to do this briefly, but to explain our partially scientific guess on the vote.  Here it goes.. Voting and elections are very emotionally involved, but we're numbers people here.  Our thoughts on this are simple - everyone who voted for Rice and Bauer will do so again tomorrow. You don't change your mind when you're right the first time.  Bauer took that 32-27.  That leaves 41% of the total vote up for grabs.


    We simply broke up the 41% into two groups: Jay Jordan's 22%, and the 19% remaining from the Myrtle Beach based candidates.  We'll do the Grand Strand first.  Tom Rice will take it, but it won't be a landslide - solid, but not a landslide.  Rice got Randal Wallace's and Chad Prosser's endorsements.  Andre got Katherine Jenerette's nod.  This will give Rice a sizeable edge in the area, but not all 19%.  Our guess is he'll pull about 60-65% of what's left, which is about 12 of the 19 percentage points.  Onto the Pee Dee...



    The main thing Bauer has going for him is name recognition, and it showed in the Primary. In every county, he either finished first or second.  So, a dominant amount of people had Andre as their first or second choice.  With Jay Jordan staying out of the endorsing game (the only one it seems), Florence and Darlington Counties were a bonanza of available votes - even more so than the Grand Strand.  Bauer's organization is much stronger here than Rice's, so we see about 60% of the undecideds in the Pee Dee, which translates into 13 of the 22 percentage points for Bauer... Time to add it all up.


                   Primary     Strand       Pee Dee          Total

Bauer              32      +    7         +     13         =      52

Rice                 27      +    12       +      9          =      48



    Like we said, we're doing this mostly by the numbers, but there is one intangible that we will add into his: Andre Bauer never loses a close race.  That, and his organization is stronger.  Rice has the FCGOP assist a lot, and although they work hard, they don't have the strongest track record.  But hey, our election prediction record isn't perfect either. Obviously, it's going to be pretty close, and if Bauer fails to get his people out, Rice could very easily win with a better turnout than in the Primary.  Lots of variables...  Zoltar has given back the card and it says 'Andre Bauer, you wish is granted'.  We'll see....


.