Last night I took a gander at recent polling from Rasmussen Reports and noticed that the ever-rightward-drifting used-to-be-thought-of-as-a-maverick-but- now-we-know-he-is-just-a-partisan-and-id eological-hack John McCain is tanking in the polls. But it seems the Arizona Senator is not the only leading GOP candidate who is coming up short these days. Take a look at some of the head-to-head numbers found in the latest Newsweek survey.
1/24-25/2007, Registered Voters, MoE +/- 4.0%
All Dem GOP Ind 1/18 Giuliani 46 12 88 50 48 Clinton 49 85 9 42 47 Giuliani 44 15 87 43 47 Obama 47 78 7 45 45 Giuliani 47 20 86 46 45 Edwards 46 75 10 44 48
These numbers are not completely rosy for the Democrats and are certainly not as good as the numbers showing John McCain quickly sliding backwards against a whole slew of potential Democratic candidates. For one, the Democrats aren't pulling in the types of numbers among independents that would likely be necessary to defeat Giuliani -- or any other GOP candidate, for that matter. What's more, each of the three Democratic candidates listed polls only within the margin of error against Giuliani despite the fact that the partisan makeup of the poll is 35% D, 27% R, and 33% I. I would suspect that many of the self-proclaimed independents in the poll are actually Republicans ashamed of admitting their partisan preference, perhaps indicating that the Democrats are not bound to perform quite so poorly among indies -- or overall -- as this poll might indicate (though admittedly I don't know this for sure; it's a hunch not based on first-hand knowledge of the internals of the poll).
That said, Giuliani is supposed to be the Republican candidate with the widest potential for appeal, the candidate that Democrats have the most to fear from. Like Colin Powell in 1996, the media and the political punditry seem to assume that if only Giuliani can get through the Republican primary he would trounce any Democrat he faced. This poll clearly shows that this is not the case. And that the poll also shows John McCain trailing by between 4 and 6 points against any of the three Democratic candidates listed above and voters generically backing the Democratic candidate for 2008 by a sizeable 49 percent to 28 percent margin (including 42 percent to 19 percent among independents, with just 78 percent of Republicans backing the generic GOP candidate) should have Republicans very worried about their current standing among the electorate.
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