Sheldon
Senior Member
- Apr 2, 2010
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Hello and good morning.
It is spoken often here that Gingrich may be Mitt's VP or vice versa....Or perhaps Paul would be the VP or Santorum or whomever.
My question is this:
Why all the suspense? It would seem to me that the benefits of naming your running mate early on in the race would give your campaign a bump (it doesn't need to be a fellow candidate for POTUS). It also would seem to me that while the top or bottom of the ticket is in Iowa, the other end of the ticket could be in SC or NH or doing fundraising in New York.
I think that the main reason is because there isn't enough money from fundraising to support basically two campaigns at one time.
Is there a better reason?
This may have already been mentioned but I'm too lazy to read the whole thread right now. A possible reason why candidates wait until later is that the announcement may create a larger bump in polling. You hold it off, let the media build suspense, get people talking and speculating, then make the announcement and if it's the right call you get a bigger orgasm in the polls than if you had given the answer before people started becoming really interested in the question.
Another reason could be, assuming you pick someone not whoring the straw polls at the moment, if you choose them earlier you've now got a campaign that has to mitigate the dirt-digging on two politicians instead of just one. Of course if something awful comes up from your VP nom's background you can just dump them but this calls into question your judgement and would be a money shot for opponents.