My Townhall.com Debut
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 19th, 2007 11:45 pmSaunter on over to Hugh’s place for more.
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Rudy Out to a Big Lead?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 9:32 pm CBS News is out with another poll on the Republican nomination that shows Rudy Giuliani, whose campaign is a client, solidly in front with a 50-2129% lead in a two man race with John McCain. [Corrected. The story says 21, but the PDF says 29. -ed.]
This is in line with other recent polling showing a significant shift towards the Mayor. USA Today / Gallup had it at 40-26 in a multicandidate field, Rasmussen 32-18, and Fox News at 56-31 for the two-man.
What to make of these numbers? I see several vectors converging on a single point: the low-key coverage of Giuliani over the past year, combined with the whisper campaign that he wouldn’t run, had artificially depressed his earlier numbers. The polls are now catching up with the reality that the Mayor is a fully-fledged candidate.
Consider:
- This tidbit reported on Race42008 earlier this month has turned out to be significant: “Likely Republican primary voters registered as Republicans in New Hampshire are less apt to say they would vote for Rudy Giuliani because he has not declared that he will be a candidate.”
- Why did McCain dominate in this “top-of-mind” survey last year (i.e. asking an open-ended question about who the next President should be) but narrowly lose in head-to-head matchups? Because overwhelmingly, Republicans thought of McCain as more of a candidate than Giuliani. That has now changed.
- I do think these data points from 2000 mean something. George W. Bush was always thought of as the frontrunner in 2000, but his lead increased significantly after he became a declared candidate and Americans saw him as such.
Gannett #quot;Mood of America#quot; Poll, January 1999
George W. Bush 39%
Elizabeth Dole 22%
Jack Kemp 8%
Dan Quayle 6%
Steve Forbes 5%Republican Leadership Poll, February 1999
George W. Bush 40%
Elizabeth Dole 27%
Dan Quayle 9%
Steve Forbes 6%
John McCain 3%*** March 1999: Bush forms exploratory committee.
Research 2000 Poll, May 1999
George W. Bush 41%
Elizabeth Dole 19%
John McCain 12%
Dan Quayle 9%
Pat Buchanan 4%Washington Post Poll, June 1999
George W. Bush 49%
Elizabeth Dole 20%
Pat Buchanan 5%
John McCain 5%
Dan Quayle 4%*** June 1999: Bush declares.
Gonzales/Arscott Research & Communications Poll, August 1999
George W. Bush 59%
Elizabeth Dole 12%
John McCain 6%
Steve Forbes 5%
Dan Quayle 4%
These 2000 numbers remind us that it’s still very early and that we’ll probably see 8 or 9 big momentum shifts before this is over. Unlike 2000, there are three well-established candidates who could raise $100 million or more. Few saw John McCain coming at this point in 2000 cycle; because of his maverick insurgency, he was able to move the numbers significantly.
All that said, the commentariat’s widespread belief that “it’s all downhill after Rudy announces” seems not to be operational.
Tagged: 2008 
john mccain polls rudy giuliani
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What Was Mitt Thinking?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 2:07 pmI don’t think this can be written off as simply unconvincing. It has to be chalked up as one of Mitt Romney’s first real gaffes of the campaign:
That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on “This Week,” that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
“In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary,” said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. “When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican.”
Romney’s opponents call him calculating and opportunistic. So what does he do? He freely admits to casting a calculating vote to cause mischief the other (?) party’s primary. That only serves to reinforce the prevailing anti-Mitt narrative that’s already traveling at light speed. This is the kind of thing a two-bit political operative like me would cop to, not a candidate for President.
It’s also very different from his past explanations of his vote. And it’s enough to cause Erick to pull his support.
I’m not a Mitt-hater. I’m doing some work for Rudy, but I’ll freely admit there’s a lot to like about the guy, particularly his precisely honed communications skills. The obvious move here would have been to admit he was wrong and move on. No one has a spotless voting record. Just move on.
Tagged: 2008 mitt romney
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JohnEdwards.com Is a Mess
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 10:19 amUpon close inspection it turns out that the Edwards’ campaign is maintaining a presence on an astounding 24 social news/networking sites. Wow.
Below is a list from Edwards’ site with links to all his accounts:
43Things, del.icio.us, essembly, facebook, flickr, gather, myspace, partybuilder, youtube, orkut, ning, metacafe, revver, yahoo! 360°, blip.tv, CHBN, vSocial, tagworld, collectivex, bebo, care2, hi5, xanga, livejournal
I get it. The Edwards campaign is really into the whole Web 2.0 thing. Message delivered. I understand the power of these networks. I do. But 24 accounts? This just strikes me as sort of ridiculous.
More importantly, I just don’t think it is good strategy.
I agree.
Like the rest of the site, the Edwards’ campaign latest foray into social networking is just a mess. Just take a look at this page. You’ve got 24 graphics that look almost exactly the same running down a page. After Marcotte/McEwan, the inclusion of Metacafe as a targeted site is just puzzling. See this bit from Wikipedia:
Metacafe has an anti-porn policy. However, it does allow rated-R content as defined by the Motion picture rating system. It has a family filter which is set to “on” by default.
Despite the family filter, many Metacafe users tend to add offensive comments to many videos. Sexual, racist or just plainly offensive comments tend not to be filtered out unless they receive a -3 rating by other users. These comments, however, do not appear if the Family Filter is turned on.
And what’s more, everywhere I go, all I see is:
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
The number one mistake a web person can make is to craft pages as though the average person will read every word of it. That’s the critical mistake the Edwards people make on their homepage — wasting valuable real estate on paragraphs of copy I must have seen a dozen times but haven’t gotten around to reading yet. A homepage should be made for scanning, so a big graphic with your message of the day, with icons and 5-6 word descriptions of your key features is what works best. And for those like David, who say less text hurts SEO, that’s what ALT tags are for.
Not everything about JohnEdwards.com is terrible. Their splash page is very nicely done and the blog is one of the more innovative ones I’ve seen. (What’s more is that it’s sticky — Alexa suggests 37% of traffic is coming to the blog.) Both features pre-date their Presidential iterations, when they were matched with a smartly done (if still a bit busy) main PAC site.
Since this ties into the poll on your favorite Dem website I’ve been running on the side for a while, I thought I’d break down the results.
Prior to Hillary announcing on January 20th, Edwards was the clear winner: 48% to Obama’s 24% and Hillary’s 12%.
When both Hillary and Edwards were up with their full sites, Hillary moved into second: Breck 32%, Hillary 28%, Obama 20%.
But now that Obama is up, he blows them all away: Obama 49%, Edwards 21%, Hillary 17%. That seems about right.
Tagged: 2008 john edwards online politics
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Ironman Calls It: GigaTuesday
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 9:36 amRegular reader Ironman emails in to christen February 5th, 2008, the CaliforniaNewYorkTexasFloridaNewJerseyIllinois Primary, as GigaTuesday.
I have a felling this will stick.
Paging Marc Ambinder, Jonathan Martin, and Mark Halperin…
Tagged: 2008 gigatuesday
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Eric Cantor vs. Slow-Bleed
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 16th, 2007 10:36 pm
Tagged: congress eric cantor iraq video
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Nancy’s Cuecards
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 15th, 2007 10:48 amThis is Nancy Pelosi’s first “blog.” See if you notice anything strange about the way her eyes move…
Tagged: nancy pelosi
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Is It Silly Season Already?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 14th, 2007 10:59 pmIt sure feels like it. And the flap about my candidate Rudy Giuliani and global warming is a great example of it.
I’ve seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. And I came to a very similar conclusion. For all Gore does to describe a problem, there’s very little talk about concrete solutions. What’s the shame in pointing that out? Is that “outflanking Gore on the left?” Hardly. Here’s where Rudy stands on some of these issues:
In Santa Clara, Giuliani said the country must “do something” about global warming. But he showed little inclination to break with Bush or his Republican congressional allies, who have resisted new pollution restraints on industry. Asked about California’s landmark law mandating carbon emission cuts to combat global warming, Giuliani said he was unfamiliar with it. He called for more nuclear power, expanded ethanol production and cleaner coal mining.
“There is a special interest to stop every one of those new technologies — either special conflicting economic interest, or a special interest that has exaggerated things beyond proportion, like the fear of nuclear power,” he said. “We’ve had nuclear power in this country for a long time. We’ve never had a fatality.”
Nuclear power. Clean coal. Biofuels. If I recall correctly, these are all things that have been actively pursued by the Bush Administration, many if not all of them dating back to Dick Cheney’s energy task force (cue scream). Nuclear energy has been a particular target of the SUV-driving Hollywood left, despite its very low emissions.
Calling out the left on its hypocrisy is not outflanking them. And this seems to be part of a broader theme with the Mayor, one noticed by Lawhawk:
Rudy Giuliani is coming under fire for giving the hint that he’s bought into the global warming hysteria. I think he’s got a plan up his sleeve. He’s going to force the global warming environuts to come up with more than just doom and gloom hysteria.
Solutions. He wants to see solutions. Simply braying that the sky is falling is insufficient. What tangible things are they calling for that will supposedly solve the problem of global warming? Are they feasible? Can they be achieved without bankrupting countries (namely the US)?
Isn’t this very similar to what Rudy has been doing on the nonbinding resolution? He’s seeing the Democrats bet and then raising it. Demanding concrete results. Politics on the Left glorifies the cult of victimhood, with its love of meaningless gestures and complaints. From the environment to Iraq, we have a candidate who can go directly at the Left with a dogged and persuasive insistence on results.
Tagged: 2008 al gore energy rudy giuliani
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The Feb. 5th National Primary
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 13th, 2007 9:42 amNow New York is thinking about moving up to February 5. So, California, New York, Florida, and New Jersey could all be on the same day. Don’t be surprised to see more states bandwagoning towards the first Tuesday in February.
One of the proposals regularly bandied about by primary reformers is a national primary. It sounds like they might actually get that this time. In fact, this is a very compressed version of the schedule the Democrats had in 2000, with only Iowa and New Hampshire preceding Super Tuesday.
This is a double-edged sword for Iowa and New Hampshire. A truly remarkable result in either of these states could jumble the playing field for February 5th. The catch is that the result would truly have to be a surprise. Someone doing slightly better or worse than expectations won’t be enough to create a big enough earned media wave to fundamentally change the outcome on February 5th, where candidates with the ability to organize and buy TV time in the big states are naturally favored.
Tagged: 2008 primary schedule
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February Straw Poll — Vote Rudy!
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 12th, 2007 11:46 pmMatt Margolis has been providing regular 2008 straw polling over at GOP Bloggers. It’s good stuff. This month’s poll is now up.
I’m posting the poll below even though I suspect, based on previous polling, it will have the effect of narrowing my guy Rudy’s lead. I want to know how much work I still have to do on you guys.
Tagged: 2008 mitt romney newt gingrich rudy giuliani straw poll
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