Weekend Predictions South Carolina and Nevada Style

With the coming Primaries and Caucuses coming on a Saturday (quite weird right?) it is now time to make some predictions.

NEVADA:

GOP- Romney wins...big. The Mormon vote will carry him to a fairly decisive victory with McCain and Thompson trailing, and perhaps double digits for Ron Paul.

Dems- Obama wins by the smallest of margins. The culinary union should give him the edge over Clinton and Edwards who has been polling pretty well but I don't see him overtaking Hillary for 2nd.

SOUTH CAROLINA:

GOP- This will be where all the real action will be on Saturday, the latest Real Clear Politics poll (this company takes a whole bunch of polls and averages them out) has McCain leading with 28% but is only 4 points ahead of Huckabee 24% followed by Romney at 16 then Thompson at 14. I believe the Evangelicals will come storming out for Huckabee on Saturday, I envision them pulling up to polling places in school buses with huge Crucifixes on the top. McCain will have to try real hard to pull in the Conservative voters and not rely only on Independents and Democrats who can vote in this open primary, he must take more conservatives if he wants to beat Huckabee and his religious supporters. It could be conceivable that whoever does the poorest between Huckabee and McCain would be pretty much out of the race unless they finish a close 1-2.

Rudy is rooting for Thompson to pull a miracle to keep up his chaos strategy going. If Thompson wins South Carolina that would give the GOP 4 different winners in the 1st 4 big states and it wouldn't matter if Romney took Nevada because you could argue that that was a sure thing. IF Thompson pulled it out Rudy could still be feasible as a front runner especially if he does well in Florida.

So there you go, it should be a great Saturday and as the Presidential picture gets clearer it keeps getting exponentially more exciting.