In the last week or so there's been a wave of interest in the status of the ~20 campaigns for the White House, and rather than dig up each of the individual threads it's probably time for them all to converge. Bush made the big news today, shaking up his campaign team to bring in a new manager to replace Dave Kochel: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/08/politics/danny-diaz-jeb-bush-campaign-manager/

Rubio's strategy of focusing on South Carolina is starting to leak out to the media too: http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/his-state-to-lose-20150522

Recently there's been a smattering of critical articles on the struggling second-tier campaigns involving Rand Paul, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/rand-pauls-struggling-presidential-campaign/394970/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ben-carsons-campaign-faces-turmoil-after-staff-exits-and-super-pac-chaos/2015/06/05/ce08f9b2-0ba8-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html?postshare=1151433545936709
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-he-nears-a-2016-bid-louisianas-bobby-jindal-hits-political-bottom/2015/06/06/26f9c98e-0a28-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html?postshare=4451433636341806

On the Democratic side, the New York Times is being torched for going ahead with a poorly-thought out article on the alleged strategic mistake of the Clinton campaign. It predictably set off a firestorm of controversy by trying to use the thoughts of 1-2 red state Democratic Senators to criticize what is obviously the correct national strategy for Democrats moving forward: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/us/politics/hillary-clinton-traces-friendly-path-troubling-party.html?smid=tw-share

Lol, Rand's second tier campaign. Does he have a substantial ground game going in all 50 states? Yes. Does he have a messaging problem trying to win over a party half full (or more) with statists and warmongers? Sure, but that's to be expected. This is still way early and lumping together someone actually working at contending with the joke campaigns of Jindal and Carson is disingenuous. I look forward to Rand correctly emphasizing his better position relative to Clinton than pretty much the whole pack, because when we get closer, that is going to mean something.

How's he doing on fundraising?

Also, calling Jindal's campaign 2nd tier is very generous.

This post was edited by thundercock on Jun 8 2015 08:21pm

I'd imagine not well.

It's just because at this stage you could quickly classify even this large field into two easily-definable tiers -- one with Walker, Bush, and Rubio, and one with everyone else.
Yes if we really wanted to break the ~20 campaigns into 4-5 tiers it would look like this:

1) Walker, Bush, Rubio
2) Cruz, Paul, Huckabee, Carson
3) Kasich, Santorum, Perry, Christie
4) Jindal, Graham, Fiorina, Pataki, Trump

To answer your question about Paul's fundraising: he's doing terribly. He's the only major candidate without a billionaire bankrolling him, which is everything in this party, and his small-dollar donor network doesn't really stand out from any of the other declare candidates.




Not only does Paul not have a substantial ground game in 50 states (LOL), he doesn't even have a substantial ground game in the first 4 states. Paul definitely isn't better equipped to face Clinton than the rest of the field though, he's actually worse off among most of those in/above his tier. There's an artificial element to his head-to-head numbers that will be removed once we get closer to September, and it's actually more likely that his relative strength will fall rather than rise.

Doesn't matter, Bernie has it i the bag.

Then he's a 2nd tier candidate...

Just wow. Your OWN SOURCE:



You also ignore the head-to-head polling (like, what?) by calling it "artificial???"

I really wish the Democrats would nominate this guy.

He's got a long way to go before he's even competitive as much as I like him