Todd Beeton has a good analysis of the most recent Fox News poll over at MyDD. This part is particularly notable:
Interestingly, while independent support for Clinton grows modestly, their support for the Republicans in match-ups against her absolutely plummets. Against Clinton, independent support for Giuliani drops 8 points, support for Thompson drops 10 points and support for McCain drops 6 points. (The undecided column is a larger beneficiary of these defections than Clinton is.) Independents flee Giuliani and Thompson against Obama as well, although in fewer numbers: 6 points and 1 point respectively. But independents’ support of John McCain actually jumps 6 points when against Barack Obama and Obama’s support falls a stunning 13 points; in fact, independents now prefer McCain to Obama 37% to 32%. But one thing is clear: no matter who he is matched up against, Rudy Giuliani is losing independents.
This is the story that the major media are not talking about. There is absolutely a relationship between McCain’s strong performance among independents and his weak numbers among Republicans. It’s becoming ever-more clear that there is something of a zero-sum relationship between Republican support and independent support. And the big victim of that equation right now is Rudy Giuliani, who is watching his numbers among independents drop even as he solidifies his position at the top of the GOP field. The one is a consequence of the other.
The narrative on Giuliani is that he’s a “moderate” or a “liberal” Republican; this notion derives almost entirely from his nominal pro-choice stance and his failure to be as full-throatedly anti-gay as his GOP rivals. He has worked hard to overcome this disadvantage among primary voters, running as perhaps the most savagely partisan Republican in the race. So far this strategy has helped him keep his edge in the fight for the nomination, but it’s undermining his general election chances — hardly a surprise, given the pervasive anti-GOP sentiment in the nation at large.
The fact is that while Rudy may be a “moderate” on abortion, he is an extremist conservative on other very important issues. He is a vocal Iran war hawk; his foreign policy team is full of unreconstructed neocons — most notorious is Norman Podhoretz, but the others are just as bad — and he plainly offers nothing but a hyper-aggressive form of Bushism abroad. His judicial advisors are right-wing extremists; his economic advisors have him wandering the country making ludicrous claims derived from the crackpot theories of the voodoo economists; and he’s deeply out of touch on health care, babbling about “socialized medicine” when most Americans want to see a plan for government-backed universal health insurance. Giuliani is in many ways the most right-wing of the Republican candidates. He is simply not in the American mainstream. If independents are sensing this, it’s hardly a surprise that he’s losing them.
1 Response to “Giuliani’s Partisan Problem”
Something to say?
I wonder if there are crosstabs breaking down independent and evangelical support. Many more purely religious voters don’t necessarily identify as members of the Republican party, even though they will most often vote as such.
As the NYT caucus blog reported today, Guiliani is the most actively resisted by hardline christian conservatives, followed closely by Mitt Romney. The political calculus for Rudy starts to look even worse. He tacks hard right to appeal to GOP primary voters, alienating the rest of the country, and may still face a third party challenge from serious social conservatives who simply don’t care enough about bombing Iran to get over his philandering and 21st-century outlook on homosexuality.
Left by Josh Koenig
September 30, 2007 at 7:24pm