So the results are finally in from the 2012 US presidential election, or as it is also known, the first tracking poll for the 2016 US presidential election.

In the last couple of days, I’ve posted a few comments in miscellaneous places making guesses about 2016.  On political science blog The Monkey Cage, I responded to Andrew Gelman’s prediction that the Republican and Democratic nominees in 2016 would be Paul Ryan and Hillary Clinton thus:

The Republicans have a strong history of settling on a presidential nominee early, and defeated vice-presidential candidates need time to put space between themselves and the slough of resentment that follows a loss. So I’d say that Mr Ryan is very unlikely to be the Republican nominee in 2016. The Democrats tend to look for fresh faces and to favor youth; someone like Ms Clinton, who has been a household name for decades, would therefore labor under a disadvantage in a 2016 bid, though her odds would surely not be as long as those confronting Mr Ryan. If I had to guess, I would say a likelier pair of finalists would be Mike Huckabee for the Republicans and Martin O’Malley for the Democrats. I hasten to add emphasis to the words “guess” and “likelier”; I’d be surprised if that were the matchup, just not quite as surprised as I would be to see a Clinton vs Ryan contest.

In response to a post by Daniel Larison on The American Conservative’s website, I expressed the same surmise about Mr Huckabee.
In response to another of Mr Larison’s posts, I explained why I don’t think that the Republicans will be nominating any Mormons for president any time soon.