The march to the White House promises to be most entertaining. In an increasingly crowded field, the Republican Party has a potential field of 17 to 20 candidates. The latest candidate to announce is former Senator Rick Santorum.

The former senator hopes to improve on his last attempt at the presidency by running once more. He is a conservative Catholic candidate who wears his religion on his sleeve.

There are so many right wing conservative Christians running to hopefully win over the tried and true evangelical vote, it may open up two possibilities. One by having so many competing for the same voter demographic they may give an opening for success to Jeb Bush and the Silky Sullivan of the race to the White House, Governor John Kasich of Ohio. For all of you who don’t remember Silky Sullivan, he was a horse who always won by coming from way behind. The second possible outcome is that once we get to the Republican Convention we may have real excitement for once. We might not know who the nominee might be.

We have not had a political convention for some time where the outcome is really in doubt. It would make for great TV. There used to a term or phrase called favorite sons, candidates who have their own states, convention votes tied up and up for auction to the highest bidder for favors and votes to help determine who the ultimate candidate will be. Governors were typical favorite sons, but senators in bell-weather states like South Carolina may wind up having more influence than normal in a contested nomination process.

There are only so many fundamentalists, or evangelical votes to split up and the wing of the Republican Party might be shooting themselves in the foot by having too many candidates.

Governor Kasich is my dark horse pick because he is experienced, very experienced. I don’t expect him to make mistakes, critical to the credibility of a candidate. He knows how the system works. Ohio besides Virginia has a history of providing nominees and Presidents. His state of Ohio will have plenty of nominee votes.

Jeb Bush and Senator Rubio come from nominee vote rich Florida but they might very well split the vote in Florida. The same goes for Texas where you have Perry and Cruz.

The eventual nominee might be determined by who does well in New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. With a few of the large states having a winner take all policy you can expect to see a whole lot of the candidates in those states, mining the votes.

The early primary states might have such a low percentage for each candidate that the normal weening out process might not happen. You will need to be well financed because the race to the White House in 2016 is going to be a marathon and not a sprint.