Giuliani continues to drop in early GOP contests

November 28, 2007

It’s still early in the process, and a lot can happen in the next few weeks, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to see how Rudy Giuliani’s campaign survives a series of early (and humiliating) defeats.

In Iowa, Giuliani has gone from first to third, and he’s not done dropping yet. In New Hampshire, Giuliani is either a distant second possibly even third.

And then there’s South Carolina, where Giuliani was, up until fairly recently, hanging onto to a first-place lead. Not anymore.

On the heels of polls showing Rudy dropping fast in New Hampshire and out of contention in Iowa, a new poll finds him sinking fast in a third key state: South Carolina. The Clemson University poll finds Mitt Romney now taking the lead with 17%, followed by Fred Thompson at 15%, Mike Huckabee with 13%, John McCain at 11% — and Rudy at only 9%.

In September, Giuliani was leading the field. Now, he’s fifth? In a one of the three big early contests, and the South’s first primary?

What’s more, in each of these states, Mitt Romney is in first. In other words, in the first three contests, Romney is poised to go 3-for-3, and Giuliani will be lucky to come in second in maybe one of the races.

Tell me again why Giuliani is considered the frontrunner?

I realize the Giuliani campaign claims to have a plan.

I just got off a conference call with Giuliani campaign manager Mike DuHaime and strategist Brent Seaborn, the upshot of which (according to them) was that Giuliani could come out of the first 3-4 states without a single win and still have a relatively clear path to the nomination. The thinking hinges on the 57 winner-take-all votes available in Florida on January 29, where Giuliani has a comfortable lead, and the more than 200 winner-take-all votes available in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware on February 5. Much was also made of Giuliani’s commanding (nearly two-to-one) lead in the national polls.

All in all, it sounded like a concession that Giuliani is not going to do very well in the first few contests, an outcome the campaign was understandably at pains to minimize. Hence the promise of February 5. Though DuHaime said the campaign hadn’t reconciled itself to a “February 5th strategy,” as Joseph Curl of The Washington Times pointed out, it pretty much sounded like one in practice.

Anything’s possible, but I just don’t see it. To reiterate a point I raised a few weeks ago, the thing about losing repeatedly is that one starts to look like a loser. That’s particularly true if an assumed frontrunner can’t actually win when people start voting.

But, Giuliani staffers say, what about all the national polls that show the former mayor in the lead? Well, what about them? National polls can change on a dime, which is why they’re interesting for showing broader trends, but hold almost no predictive value. John Kerry was hurting badly in the national polls until Dems nationwide saw him on their front pages winning big in Iowa and New Hampshire. Wouldn’t you know it, his standing in the national polls quickly skyrocketed.

But how can Romney, with minimal national name recognition, catch up after Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina? It’s not that complicated.

If Romney wins three or more of the first four primary contests, it’s hard to see him losing in Florida, at which point the math starts to get tough for Giuliani. Sure, Rudy has a solid base in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, but that may be moot by that point, since national momentum will probably boost Romney in many of the non-Northeastern states the Giuliani camp currently points to, like California, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio.

Given this landscape, expect Giuliani to get increasingly aggressive (which, in his case, means more lying, smearing, and exaggerating). I don’t think he has any other choice.

Tell me again why Giuliani is considered the frontrunner?

Because he polls better than Romney against Hils.

  • Giuliani is the presumptive frontrunner because that’s where the media want him him to be – I think they’re foaming at the mouth to have a Giuliani-Clinton general election. If that comes to pass, we’re all going to need hazmat suits to protect us from the unending slime and filth that will characterize the campaigns. We can just put the talking heads on the sets of Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and Inside Edition, and no one will ever know the difference – except anyone looking for news of Britney, Lindsey or the dysfunctional diva of the day.

    The Giuliani strategists would have a chanvce of being right about the viability of their plan, if it weren’t for the fact that this is not a static event – when the Iowa caucuses are completed, the results there will have an effect on New Hampshire. When New Hampshire is in the books, those results are going to affect the next races, and so on down the line. By the time the February 5 primaries are history, it’s pretty close to being over.

    The one thing about these bunched-up primaries is that there isn’t a lot of time for the results to percolate and evolve – and it’s going to be hard for these campaigns to be in so many places in such a compressed time frame – so the wins and losses may not have as great an effect as they once did. but who really knows?

    But…throw in the media, which will be all too happy to tell us what the effects are, who will benefit and who will not, and what voters in the later primaries should do, and you could still see some kind of manipulation designed to get Rudy the de facto nomination.

    This is not going to be pretty – or much fun.

  • The best part of it all is that Ghouliani will play the nine-eleven card to such a nauseating degree that it’s going to turn the entire GOP into a political rendition of “the boy who cried wolf.” People will get tired of the false pander-scare, and they’ll just turn and walk away—in droves.

  • I’m actually pleased as punch that Rudy’s chances are getting less and less likely.

    He was the only GOP candidate I actually feared since so many folks are uninformed and would see him as “9/11 Guy,” thus ignoring his failings that made that day worse and his marriage issues. And the media loves the guy, so we know they’d never dig up all the dirt he’s got piled in his closets.

    I’m not that concerned with Mitt since so many folks see Mormonism as a cult. (Note: My dad’s side of the family is RLDS and, quite frankly, some of the stuff they’ve told me make me agree … to a point. They just do some really, really odd stuff.)

    To be honest, I really, REALLY hope that Huckabee gets the nod — the guy let a rapist and murderer go free, thinks the Bible is a science textbook, and has the tendency to snap when challenged. It’d be a freakin’ shoe-in for the Dem candidate.

  • Anne says: “The one thing about these bunched-up primaries is that there isn’t a lot of time for the results to percolate and evolve – and it’s going to be hard for these campaigns to be in so many places in such a compressed time frame – so the wins and losses may not have as great an effect as they once did. but who really knows?

    But…throw in the media, which will be all too happy to tell us what the effects are, who will benefit and who will not, and what voters in the later primaries should do…”

    And the media REALLY like the bunched up primaries for one reason: “Retail politics” go out the window, and the only way to win is to buy lots and lots of commercials.

    One more thing: Is it even possible for Rudy to do “more lying, smearing, and exaggerating”? He pretty much does all three every time he opens his mouth already.

  • Giuliani and his staff seem to have overlooked the Republican hangup about winning. Of the R’s it can truly be said that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. If Republican voters perceive him as a loser they’ll flee to other candidates in droves.

    I think that his strength in New York is overstated and bound to decrease. There are still plenty of people in NYC with bad things to say, not to mention actual dirt, and they’re bound to be heard from when the campaigning reaches the state.

    Finally, people are ready for change. Rudy’s 9/11 Tourette’s is nearing joke status. Unless he states some sort of vision for America along with one or two major initiatives his campaign will die.

  • I think that his strength in New York is overstated

    To mention it at all is to overstate it. I saw a NY statewide poll over the summer when Bloomberg was being discussed. It polled a three-way, all NY race: Clinton, Giuliani and Bloomberg, and asked the state who knew them best who would be their choice. Giuliani came in third out of the three.

    I don’t worry about him at all. In some ways, Huckabee may be the hardest for the Dems to beat because he comes across as the least evil, the most personable, and because he has actually done some human things and things contrary to the party line (fought his weight, actually raised taxes to invest in the state) he comes across more sane than Giuliani or McCain, less programmed and Republidroid-ish than Romney, and more energetic than Like-Dead Fred. I tend to think Giuliani is actually the easiest for us to beat, and if we nominate Clinton he is the least able to really run dirty against her because too much of it sticks to him (marriage a little nontraditional? flip flop on issues?)

  • You’re right. As horrified as I am at the prospect of a Giuliani presidency, I’ve patted myself on the back for a long time because I said very early that he had a real shot, when everyone else said it was impossible. He did have a shot, but Romney’s clearly bested him.

  • Bigger point here, too, about polls in general. Will somebody please tell me why in the world anybody cared about what the polls were saying back in July or August, or why anyone was even doing polls back then in the first place? They were an utter waste of time and indicated nothing whatsoever about how the race was going to go. I realize it’s too much to hope for, but wouldn’t it be refreshing if the media simply covered the campaigns and didn’t bother with meaningless polls in the early going? These meaningless polls just make the torture of our endless campaign all that much more unbearable.

  • As for why “we” care for polls: “we” do not, but the money does. That is why early polls matter. To maiximize your ROI yhou want every dollar for each election cycle to go to one candidate to maximize your access. If you have to change horses mid-race, then your influence is diluted.

    The interesting Rudy dynamic is what the egomaniac would do when running in NY during the general. he ha NO chance of beating me in NY much less Hillary or any other Dem when it comes down to it. Yet, the chattering class would be aflutter if he spent no money there. But, to spend money there is to not spend it somewhere else and there is a limited amount of money in the bank (yes, even for Mitt).

    As for Huckabee, it is high-Broderism that frightens me most about him. Not his positions in the abstract, even if he is more sane on some issues and more insane on others, but the way he will appeal to Broder and Timmy who SO do not want to be seen as religious bigots (especially Timmy as the altar he so is).

    As for dearest Mitt. I do not know how his mormonism is really gonna play.

    That leaves McCain — another favorite of high-Broderism. And yet, where it not for Fred, McCain would be the least animate of the candidates.

    For all of my displeasure with the Rahm Emmanuel / Hillary Clinton / Diane Feinstein / Steny Hoyer wing of the party, I am so glad that I could have Clinton, Obama, Edwards, or …. Gore.

  • Very little as a Christmas present would beat seeing Guiliani go down in the flames of his own lies, and smear tactics. He is the Rethug most to be feared, and hoping for and predicting his demise feels a little like whistling past the graveyard on Halloween.

  • This is good. Giuliani always sounded good to many GOPers until they really started listening to what he was saying and who he really was. The GOP has built it’s base on “family values” moralizing, and pretty much this is all that is left of the hard-core GOP types. Giuliani is the embodiment of the candidate they rail against.

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