Presidential Race Field Set? More or Less

Is the 2008 presidential race already down to 7 or 8 real candidates, even in early 2006? Stu Rothenberg, writing in Roll Call seems to think so:

If I’m right that the fundamentals of a presidential race have made it more difficult for long shots to pull off surprise victories, then we already have a pretty good idea who the 2008 White House nominees will be.

The GOP will nominate Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) or George Allen (Va.) or Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The Democrats will nominate Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) or Evan Bayh (Ind.), former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner or former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.). That’s it. The odds are very, very good that two of those seven hopefuls will be on the ballot for president in November 2008. One or two others may be in the No. 2 slot.

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Even though the next president will come from a group of six or seven people we can now identify, that is no reason to ignore other hopefuls at this point. As a sitting governor, Huckabee surely deserves the opportunity to make his case to the public, and a surprisingly strong effort could credential him as someone’s vice presidential running mate.

Moreover, long shots in one election cycle can become top-tier contenders four years later, as Reagan found out.

But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that long shots have an increasingly miniscule chance of winning a presidential nomination — no matter how much we journalists and political junkies hold onto the romantic notion of a deadlocked convention or a dark horse nipping one of the favorites at the wire.