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Jennifer: I don't know how many votes Tancredo swings to Romney (I suspect it's small but -- certainly in the caucuses -- significant). But to suggest that Jim Gilchrist's Huckabee endorsement makes Tancredo's endorsement a "wash" strikes me as misguided, even bordering on daft. Gilchrist is a fairly obscure figure outside of California. Tancredo is pretty securely positioned, thanks to his presidential run, as a prominent spokesman for hardline immigration restrictionism. A quick and dirty measure of their influence:

Google hits for "tom tancredo" = 555,000
Google hits for "thomas tancredo" = 20,900
Tancredo sum = 576,900

Google hits for "jim gilchrist" = 126,000
Google hits for "james gilchrist" = 69,100
Gilchrist sum = 195,100

576,900 / 195,100 = about 2.957 -- in other words, Tancredo is nearly three times better-known than Gilchrist by this measure. (This almost surely understates the disparity, in fact. There are 1.84 million hits for the word "tancredo," almost all of them referring to the congressman, and while there are more for "gilchrist," that name is too common to allow an apples-to-apples comparison -- the vast majority of "gilchrist" hits don't refer to the Minuteman leader.)

topics:
Immigration