According to CNN, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has won a large victory in the Florida primary, receiving 46 percent of the vote to challenger Newt Gingrich's 32 percent. Many political commentators, feeling assured of Romney's victory in Florida due to his overwhelming popularity in the polls, were calling for Gingrich, Romney's primary challenger, to drop out of the race.
Regardless of one's current polling position, American politics has a rich history of reversals of fortune.
According to the website 270towin.com:
In 1912 incumbent president William Howard Taft was unexpectedly trounced in the general election after his challenger for the Republican nomination, former President Theodore Roosevelt, formed his own Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party) following his primary loss to Taft. Despite winning the GOP nomination, Taft lost in the general election by a tremendous margin to both Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won the presidency easily with 435 electoral votes while Roosevelt beat Taft 88 to 8 in the electoral vote count. Roosevelt also received about 635,000 more votes in the popular vote than Taft.
Roosevelt's entry into the race as an independent split the general vote and assured Wilson's easy victory.
In 1948, in what is widely considered the greatest upset in American presidential politics, Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman was predicted to lose to Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. Famously, newspapers printed headlines of Dewey's predicted victory in advance. Instead, Truman routed Dewey in the electoral college and the popular vote, winning 114 more electoral votes and 2.1 million more individual votes.
In 1960 Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Republican vice president Richard M. Nixon. Some historians suspect that voter fraud gave Kennedy the victory, reports Salon.
The 1968 Democratic primary is one for the history books, with incumbent president Lyndon Johnson withdrawing his bid for re-election on March 31, 1968, according to the University of Virginia. The rest of the Democratic field became heavily split between vice president Hubert Humphrey, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The primary became tense and traumatic, especially with the ongoing Vietnam war protests and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the Democrats were fragmented. Eventual nominee Hubert Humphrey lost to Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon.
The 1980 Democratic primary is also noteworthy in that it was the last time a candidate from either party tried to get delegates released from their states' voting commitments. According to the New York Times, Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy tried to get delegates released from their voting commitments at the Democratic National Convention in August 1980 in a last-ditch attempt to defeat incumbent president Jimmy Carter for the party's nomination. Despite great tensions, Kennedy finally endorsed Carter after losing the nomination in one of the longest-fought primary contests in presidential election history.
In 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot, a billionaire from Texas, became the unlikely frontrunner in the presidential race in June, according to Time Magazine. Perot received 37 percent of the votes in a Time/CNN poll while incumbent Republican president George Bush Sr. and Democratic candidate Bill Clinton each received 24 percent. Perot ended up being the most successful candidate from outside the two major political parties since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
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