Because the Dean campaign has put so much attention on next Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, I thought I’d mention the results from the latest statewide poll, conducted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Kerry — 45%
Clark — 13%
Dean — 12%
Edwards — 9%
No wonder Dean backed out of his do-or-die pledge in Wisconsin. He’s trailing Kerry by 33 points with a week to go.
The really interesting question, to me, was towards the bottom: Which candidate would you not like to see become the Democratic candidate? On this, the results weren’t even close.
Dean — 34%
Clark — 18%
Kerry — 7%
Edwards — 6%
Over one-third of Wisconsin’s Democrats, regardless of who their top choice is, don’t want Dean to be the nominee, almost twice as a high a number for any other candidate.
In fact, another statewide poll conducted by the American Research Group showed that Wisconsin Dems are already very familiar with Dean, but they don’t like him very much.
Of the four major candidates, Dean’s name recognition was tied with Kerry for the best (98%), but his unfavorable rating was significantly higher than that of his principle rivals.
Clark — 29% favorable, 14% unfavorable
Dean — 20% favorable, 37% unfavorable
Edwards — 21% favorable, 15% unfavorable
Kerry — 53% favorable, 21% unfavorable
In other words, Dean had the lowest favorable rating and the highest unfavorable rating. Looking beyond the top four candidates, Dean’s unfavorable rating was even higher than Kucinich’s (37% to 32%). Ouch.
There’s still time to turn this around, I guess, and Dean will probably be spending nearly every waking moment in Wisconsin for the next week, trying to convince the state’s Dems of the strength of his candidacy. But if these polls are even close to being right, Dean should probably worry more about falling to third place than whether he’ll beat Kerry for first.