Can any Republican beat the odds?

Thursday, Mar. 22, 2007

Sweet and Sour 16: If you got knocked out of the running in your office pool last weekend because you picked a few upsets, now you know what 2008 will be like for most presidential candidates. March Madness lasts three weeks and will be over the first Monday in April. In the 2008 presidential primaries, January Madness will last three weeks and be over the first Tuesday in February.

Like everything else in life, the presidential race is just another set of brackets. But before you start betting your fortune on political futures, you might want to check how well long shots are faring against the odds.

Last week, I filled out NCAA brackets for the Republican candidates, based on the particular strategies they've chosen for their campaigns. What does this have to do with their actual prospects? Nothing! But then, neither does most coverage of the presidential race you'll be forced to read this year. Even so, one weekend of basketball proved what all those dark horses will spend the next nine months traipsing through Iowa to learn: If you're one of the bottom seeds when the tournament begins, you probably won't still be around when it ends.

So far, this year's NCAA tourney has been a front-runner's paradise. If you picked the favorite to win every game, you're in the upper quarter of the millions who've entered the NCAA pool at ESPN.com. If you picked every underdog, you can stop checking—your Cinderella run is over.

Long shots Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul went against the grain on every pick and had all four No. 16 seeds reaching the Final Four. They guessed just five of the first 32 games correctly, and even those 5 upset winners lost in the next round. Out of a possible 1680 points, their bracket will end up with just 50. If ESPN had a leaderboard for losers, Hunter and Paul would be virtually guaranteed to finish with the worst bracket in the country.

The superfecta entry of also-rans—Brownback, Huckabee, Gilmore, and Thompson—followed the home-state version of the same uphill strategy, picking their local underdogs to go all the way. Thanks to Brownback's Kansas Jayhawks, this entry still has one team left in its Final Four, but that's their only team still standing. The other three candidates' home teams have all gone home empty-handed. Favorite son, favorite loser: Their ESPN rank matches their standing in national polls—in the bottom two-tenths of 1 percent.

Along with Brownback, the second-tier candidate with the clearest niche might be Tom Tancredo, whose fervent opposition to immigration strikes a chord with many conservatives. Apparently, top basketball players don't choose colleges the way Tancredo did—the farther from the Mexican border, the better. All the congressman's finalists bowed out in the first round. Tancredo's bracket would be doing better if his campaign were based on fear of illegal immigrants from Canada. For now, his ESPN ranking is stuck in the bottom six-tenths of 1 percent.

No matter how much the second tier stumbles, however, the front-runners can't seem to put this race away. John McCain's bracket hardly lit up the scoreboard this weekend, although he's in good shape to soldier on in later rounds. I thought that by picking all the No. 1 seeds to make the Final Four, he was being too conservative, so I gave him all the No. 12 seeds in the opening round and a Final Four of No. 2 seeds instead. So far, it looks like I was wrong—he wasn't being conservative enough. All four No. 12 seeds lost, all four top seeds survived, and one second-seed (Wisconsin) tumbled. Most of the few upsets McCain picked let him down—Georgia Tech didn't beat UNLV, Gonzaga lost to Indiana, Duke failed to make the Sweet 16 by losing the opener to VCU. As a result, McCain's ESPN rating matches his last showing in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: 24 percent.

Rudy Giuliani, the runaway early front-runner in the polls, is also the runaway early leader in the brackets. He picked every favorite except Texas Tech and landed at 69 percent in the ESPN rankings. But his current lead is far more vulnerable than it looks. If No. 2 seeds make a comeback this weekend, McCain will pass Giuliani, and Rudy may be looking to make a deal with Brownback.