I Found The Buried Poll
There was a lot of harping on some of the lefty blogs about how Newsweek was hiding this poll, but I didn’t have any trouble finding it. There are some very interesting results, but the headline is that it shows Hillary beating both McCain and Rudy(!), while Obama beats neither.
The poll is bad news all around for Mitt Romney; not only is he trounced by both Democratic frontrunners, but the public, while open to a black and a woman president, is not ready for a Mormon. I’ve gone on record as saying the Mormon issue is overblown, but the level of antipathy is perhaps a little surprising…
For those who remember the “Paul is dead” thesis: read the title of this post three times fast — then play the end of “I am the walrus” –
Ironic. The issue of the National Review I got today had a write-up by Jonathan Martin about how McCain and Romney will be the ones duking it out and that Rudy has gotten started too late(???) to get a good grassroots effort going in either Iowa or New Hampshire.
I really don’t believe this poll is accurate, considering basically every other poll shows McCain and Rudy defeating any Democratic challenger by sizable margins even if all the undecided went Democrat.
And aren’t Newsweek polls notoriously inaccurate anyway?
Patrick, the poll is definitely an outlier – you’re right to view it with suspicion…
[...] I joined D’08 reader Patrick in skepticism over the Newsweek poll that showed Hillary over both McCain and Rudy and trouncing Romney – but the result has been confirmed by a second poll by CNN: 47 percent of the 1,019 people surveyed said they would vote for Clinton, D-New York, — and also for McCain, R-Arizona. Forty-eight percent said they would choose Clinton over Giuliani’s 46 percent. But matched up against Romney, 57 percent of survey respondents said they would choose Clinton, compared to 34 percent for Romney. [...]
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about that poll is that vast majorities say they’d personally be willing to vote for a woman or a nonwhite person, and a substantial majority say they’d be willing to vote for a Mormon, but the numbers drop significantly when asked if “America is ready” to elect such people.
In other words, a substantial number of voters think pretty highly of themselves, but poorly of their countrymen. Ah, nothing like politics as one giant egostroke…
I ran into some interesting statistics about potential election matchups based upon mid-term elections and how skewed they were compared to what really happened: things like in early 95 Dole leading Clinton by 6 points after the big GOP victory in 94; Gary Hart leading Bush Sr. in 87 by something like nine points, and on. I think that McCain and the other Republicans are suffering from that a great deal. And consider this: if past performance is in indicator (which, admittedly, it isn’t always) then the Republicans should be down substantially right now: yet McCain and Guiliani are statistically tied with Hillary. Romney is way down, which I think is evidence that at this stage of the game, he will not be able to win the general election.
But for McCain and Rudy to still be as high as they are, all things considered, when compared to the best the Democrats have to offer, speaks to their electibility.