Updated Below 

1) McCain 164 (24.4%)  2) Giuliani 162 (24.1%)  3) Hunter 158 (23.5%) 4) Brownback 85 (12.6%) 5) Romney 80 (11.9%) 6)Huckabee (3.1%)

Let me start by saying that straw polls are pretty meaningless, especially when they are held 10 months before any primary votes are cast.  The Spartanburg straw poll is just such a meaningless straw poll.  In another five months, the Ames straw poll might tell us something more reliable.  Even so, the South Carolina straw poll can tell us some potentially interesting things. 

One of these things is that Romney’s vaunted organisation is completely failing to win the candidate much support even for symbolic votes.  Winning CPAC’s fairly meaningless straw poll will become that much more important to Romney. 

Update: According to Hotline, McCain, Giuliani and Hunter were the top finishers, followed by Brownback, Romney and Huckabee in that order.  McCain has to be less than thrilled with his finish, since it feeds into this sense that his campaign is faltering (whether or not it actually is faltering).  McCain pulled out a squeaker at the end, bumping Giuliani down a notch with Hunter a close third.  Virtually nobody hearts Huckabee. 

The other thing we can take away from this is that the media–and here I include the conservative opinion journals and Republican blogs–will have to stop pretending that the Terrible Trio are the natural triumvirate of Republican presidential candidates.  Hunter and Brownback are not only potentially credible challengers, but, if we took this straw poll really seriously as a gauge of grassroots attitudes (which I don’t), would have to be considered the close second and fourth-place candidates right now.  Even though the poll is not that meaningful, the main question coming out of this has to be: how long before Romney drops out?  He can certainly raise enough money to keep going, and he has a fair amount of the stuff himself, but at what point does he take his underperforming campaign and uninteresting message and go home?  Romney has been working South Carolina for years at this point, and he can’t come up with a better showing than this?  He has his resources and organisation and can’t beat out the relative shoe-string operation of Brownback?  Is this an early sign of the anti-Mormon factor?  Possibly, but it’s hard to say. 

Brownback’s campaign is already trying to spin Hunter’s success here as being simply a function of a good match between Hunter’s opposition to “free trade” and local conditions, but that drives home the point that Hunter’s views on trade (obviously unpopular with corporate Republicans) may be far more appealing in our present populist moment than Samnesty’s embrace of “free trade” dogma.  Hunter’s fairly solid record of opposition to immigration will also be a winner in GOP primaries, while Samnesty, McCain and Giuliani have nothing to offer conservatives on this question.  People should be taking Duncan Hunter much more seriously than they are.    

Having said all of this, as fun as it is, I have to stress again how relatively unimportant this result really is.  As someone who has said that Hunter is the dark horse who will come out of nowhere to seize the nomination, and as someone who agrees with Hunter on immigration and trade, I would like to think that his candidacy is a serious and competitive one.  However, I must recognise that he will have a horrible time raising money and will have the bulk of the establishment against him.  This result may help him a little in fundraising and getting some more publicity. 

There will be a wave of posts and articles latching on to Giuliani’s narrow first- second-place finish as proof of something.  What it will really indicate is that Giuliani’s celebrity wins over straw poll voters just as it wins over voters when they are being polled on presidential preferences.  Can a man run an entire presidential campaign on not much more than celebrity and a mayoral record?   Obviously, it’s never been done before, and there seem to be a lot of reasons why it won’t work.  It is somewhat telling that candidates who were not named Giuliani and McCain took nearly three-fifths of the votes about half of the votes.  Most Republicans do not want these old, unconservative candidates who are being foisted on them, and it’s no surprise.  They’re bad candidates who have any number of problems that make them unelectable in the general election.  It’s high time that pundits and voters started paying attention to the rest of the field.