McCain and Rudy Giuliani have seen their early national leads over the Republican field shrink precipitously.
Giulaini and McCain, the purple and orange lines trending down respectively, are big names, but their positive images among the national electorate, including the Republican electorate, are thin and backed up by little. The advantage both started with in the campaign for the Republican nomination is a dead ringer for Lieberman’s advantage over the Democratic field in 2003-2004: both are vaguely thought to be “moderates,” and are favorites of the neoliberals who hold disproportionate sway over political television talk show culture and other established outlets of our national political discourse. However, outside of low information voters, politicians of this sort have little in the way of a natural base in the electorate. Once voters become more engaged, they generally are not impressed by what they see, and turn to other options so far, we have seen this not only within the Republican field, but also in potential general election matchups, where both McCain and Giuliani have seen their once double-digit leads against all Democrats disappear entirely, and be replaced by deficits across the board, in the first half of 2007.
McCain and Giuliani saw their positions furthered weakened by generally sharing the same group of potential voters: low-information types and the few remaining Republican “moderates.” However, Giuliani was particularly strong these groups, and also among wealthy neoliberals. In an April poll from Pew, he scored scoring 38% of national primary support among moderate and liberal Republicans (29% among cons), and 42% of national primary support among those who make over $100,000 a year (low thirties for all other income groups). Now, he stands to benefit quite a bit from a rapidly weakening McCain. First, from Mystery Pollster:
The results show that without McCain in the race, Giuliani's support increases by 7 or 8 percentage points, while none of the other candidates gets a boost of more than 2 points. This means that while Giuliani is the first choice of 20-21% of Republicans, he is the second choice of roughly 35-40% of those who supported McCain in June. So for the moment, a collapse in McCain's support should work to Giuliani's advantage.
Also, from Gallup:
To answer this question, we aggregated the last three Gallup polls in which the Republican trial heat was included – conducted June 1-3, June 11-14, and July 6-8. Across those three polls McCain’s percent of the vote averaged 18%. In each poll, we ask voters to name their second choice. So for this analysis, we removed McCain’s votes, and reallocated his voters’ choices to their second choice candidates.
The results? Rudy Giuliani picks up the most of McCain’s votes, going from a 30% share of Republican choices with McCain on the ballot to 38% with McCain removed.
Fred Thompson moves from 16% to 18%. Mitt Romney goes from 9% to 11%. Newt Gingrich gains a point, from 7% to 8%. Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson and Mike Huckabee all gain a point, but remain at 3% or less of the vote.
Gallup’s article is framed as a question of who benefits in the event that McCain drops out. However, he does not have to drop out in order for Giuliani to benefit. Instead, he could simply start bleeding support at an even faster rate than Giuliani. If this were to happen, since most of McCain’s supporters would switch to Giuliani, it could very well cause Giuliani’s support to stablize, or even increase, at least temporarily. This could not only solidify Giuliani’s national lead, but it could also improve his faltering support in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even though both have been trending down in polls for some time, a more rapid McCain collapse could very well be to Giuliani’s great beneit.
Progressives spent a lot of effort targeting McCain in the first few months of 2007, with efforts such as The Real John McCain.
We should be proud in helping to defeat a potentially dangerous Republican nominee, whose collapse has been a sight to see. However, it now seems prudent to spend our efforts targeting the remaining potentially strong Republican nominee, Rudy Giuliani. Even if Giuliani is by no means a lock to win the Republican nomination or even, for that matter, the clear frontrunner, he easily performs the best among all potential Republicans in general election trial heats against Democrats. Also, there is the general principle of making sure that Republicans and conservatives have no effective, popular national spokespeople whatsoever—something which they have often attempted to do against Democrats and progressives. Rudy Giuliani still has a high net favorable ratio, and we should take some direct action to help lower that a few points.
As such, I will spend some time today digging up article to help Googlebomb conduct a search engine optimization campaign against Rudy Giuliani, and then send those articles around for others in the blogosphere to participate. Of course, any help people want to give by digging up some useful articles to use for the campaign, please post them in the comments. Remember, the key in these campaigns is always to find negative articles on Giuliani from established news sources. As with the original Googlebomb campaign last October, we are not looking for anything overtly partisan, or that is obviously opinion journalism. The best search engine optimization campaigns are those where the people conducting the searches do not even realize that such a campaign is responsible for encountering the articles you wish them to see. So, start digging, and I’ll post the best results to get started with later today. If it works out well, we can start with Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney later in the month.
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