With the NCAA basketball tournament about to get underway, I decided to look back into the Political Junkie archives at the March Madness brackets I put together a year ago. Last March 19, I listed 32 potential (and admittedly some far-fetched) Republican presidential candidates for 2012. The idea was nothing more than a fun way to "determine" who would be the GOP nominee against President Obama in 2012.

There were five rounds of voting. In the final round, an astounding 963,719 votes were cast. Your final showed Rep. Ron Paul of Texas defeating South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint by 13 points. (See writeup here.) My final had former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney beating ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. You can see the two sets of brackets here.

But here's what struck me. Both you and I had Mark Sanford — yes, Mark Sanford — in the Final Four. You had Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, beating Rudy Giuliani, Meg Whitman and Charlie Crist, losing in the semi-finals to Paul. I had Sanford over Giuliani, John Thune and Bobby Jindal, ultimately losing to Romney.

As I said, it was all in fun (though you'd never know it by some of the e-mails I received), but there is one lasting thing that I got out of it: Sanford is no longer on the list of potential 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls.

By the way, Sen. Jon Ensign of Nevada was also in the brackets last year; we both had him losing in the first round to then-Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.

Tags: On The Ballot