We Miss Dan Hoover

S.C. straw polls are about as reliable at predicting political winners as S.C. weathermen are at predicting snowfall.

Which is to say “not very.”

In fact, watching a straw poll in South Carolina is a lot like watching a bunch of kids play “pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey,” except the poll features more whining and is less relevant.

Anyway, the Greenville County Republican Party conducted a 2010 gubernatorial straw poll as part of its “precinct reorganization” on Monday night, but for some reason absolutely nobody in the media covered it, and two days later we still have no idea who won.

Not that it matters, obviously, but this is precisely the sort of thing that former Greenville News reporter Dan Hoover would have brought to our attention like that (snapping our fingers).

Hoover would have also used the occasion to examine the 2010 gubernatorial field and offer his thoughts on the root perceptions confronting each various campaign – which would then invariably become unchallenged gospel, in no small part because he typically hit the nail on the head.

We miss Dan’s reporting. And frankly, we hope we can get him to contribute here on FITS every once and awhile when the mood strikes him.

As far as the 2010 race is concerned, though, the real story at this point isn’t who won the straw poll, it’s which candidates Greenville Republicans felt compelled to include on the ballot.

Tom Davis and Nikki Haley were included on the ballot, for example, even though they are both largely unknown in that neck of the woods.

Haley has made two recent trips to Greenville (click here to see more on that), but Davis apparently made the ballot because one of the GOP activists up there “liked what he had to say in the newspaper.”

Interesting …

One of our readers is bound to post the straw poll results below, so stay tuned for that, but just remember as you read them that Rudy Giuliani won the biggest S.C. straw poll of them all in advance of the 2008 presidential primaries in South Carolina … and ended up finishing sixth in the state with 2% of the vote.

Oh, and it’s going to snow tomorrow in Columbia (yeah rite).

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