The Candidates
Well, the short answer is still the Democrats, but the gap is closing. Take a gander at these numbers from Rasmussen:
Which party do you trust more on…?
- Health Care: 53-33 Dems (-20; -21 in May)
- Economy: 52-39 Dems (-13; -14 in May)
- Education: 49-37 Dems (-12; -15)
- Social Security: 49-37 Dems (-12; -13)
- Ethics/Corruption: 42-30 Dems (-12; -19)
- Iraq: 48-40 Dems (-8; -11)
- Taxes: 47-41 Dems (-7; -5)
- Immigration: 41-40 Dems (-1; -10)
- Abortion: 40-40 (Even; -7)
- National Security: 46-45 GOP (+1; -7)
As you can see, the gap narrowed on every category except taxes. The GOP has made big inroads on the issues of national security, abortion, and immigration, as well as ethics and corruption. We must, as a party, continue to rebrand and reimage our party.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Gotta run on that reform message, baby.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:03 am
Iraq: 48-40 Dems (-8; -11)
I can see why John McCain is stating, “I will never surrender”, even though thr MSM is saying that this is a winning issue for Dems.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 am
Grrrr MattC, I’ve been working on a post listing these numbers for the last half hour. You beat me to it! A few things though. First of all, John McCain, when tested against Barack Obama, outperforms the generic Republican on all five issues on which he was tested. He had a +22 on national security, +12 on Iraq, +6 on the economy, +6 on taxes, and -4 on government ethics. I think in the cases of national security and Iraq, that is because of McCain’s strength on these issues. In the case of the economy, it is probably an Obama weakness. He clearly doesn’t do as well as Hillary does with non-black, lower income voters. Finally, I wonder if Alex will point out that while Democrats are trusted more on 8 of 10 issues, one of the issues where they are not trusted any more than Republicans is on abortion. So much for the idea that social issues are really damaging to the Republicans.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
The difference is that they’re polarizing: it’s not just the gap, it’s the intensity of the passions of those that disagree. Culture wars are extremely divisive and often involve over-reliance on heated rhetoric.
We can have a calm, rationed debate about energy and taxes much better than we can about abortion or homosexuality.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 am
I think pro-lifers are generally more passionate than pro-choicers, so it is actually a net plus for Republicans. I agree that Republicans don’t need to emphasize abortion, but they don’t need to hide their position either.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
Alex, I bet you wish the poll showed Republicans with a net 20 point advantage on Iraq and just about everything else and that the Democrats had a net 20 point advantage on abortion. Looks like this poll didn’t come out the way you would like.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:32 am
I like the numbers, obviously, but the changes, with a couple of exceptions, appear to be with MoE.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 am
Something is wrong when Democrats have an edge on taxes though.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
Alex, I bet you wish the poll showed Republicans with a net 20 point advantage on Iraq and just about everything else and that the Democrats had a net 20 point advantage on abortion. Looks like this poll didn’t come out the way you would like.
Um. I’d like that, I suppose, but I also don’t try to read my own biases into the polls.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:42 am
#6,
I wish the GE 3D ultrasound commercial had been run a million times on TV.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Was there an option on the poll to opine that both parties pretty much suck across the board? I must admit that I’d have a hard time picking a winner when it comes to a lot of those issues, especially ethics, health care, Iraq…
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
Alex, you don’t try to, but you do.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 am
You read your own biases into things all the time. When Romney and Huckabee do better as VP than Pawlenty and Lieberman, it’s just name ID. When Rudy only gets one delegate, it’s that he had the wrong strategy. When I say that Ronald Reagan won as a conservative while moderates like Ford, Bush, and Dole lost, it’s that Reagan only won because Carter was bad. No matter what the empirical evidence shows, you just read it the way you want.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 am
13 - Reagan won for a number of reasons, but it’s positively silly to try to pretend that all of the circumstances were equal. They were manifestly not.
Rudy only won one delegate for a number of reasons. (One of them being that he only competed in six states.)
You’re a damned fool if you think that Romney doesn’t beat Pawlenty as VP because of name ID.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:13 am
#14, see what I mean, you just read whatever you want into numbers, you just reinforced my point, thank you for helping me make it.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:13 am
And if Romney were as unpopular as you say he is, unknowns like Pawlenty would be doing BETTER than him.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:19 am
No, Romney is not that hated, sheesh. He’s a liability, but he’s not the most hated man in America.
Do you have any rebuttals to what I say in 14? Or, like, are you just going to say that I’m biased and be done with it?
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
In the case of Reagan, I think he was a stronger candidate for Republicans in 1980 than a mushier candidate like a Howard Baker or a George Bush would have been. As far as Rudy goes, even in the six states he did compete in, he did poorly, never coming in above third.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
I don’t put a ton of trust in polls- namely huge sweeping ones like this or country wide GE polls. Data to illustrate my point: pro life went from being -7 in May to even with pro-abortion now. THis is an issue that EVERYONE has heard about over and over for the past 20+ years. How is it that suddenly so many people changed their position? I think it’s just that this poll is trying to sample way too many people at a time. Stick with state polls IMO.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
Yeah. He botched the strategy by becoming irrelevant for a month and then hoping to randomly pop back in six races in. It was stupid. He failed. It didn’t have to fail, but it did. But he would have gained some delegates had he marched forward. You can’t compare Romney’s total with Giuliani’s — even though Romney would have beaten him, anyway — because the situations aren’t comparable. Romney competed in four times as many states.
Reagan was, perhaps, the right candidate for the right time, simply due to his persona, but most conservative pols don’t have his persona. Reagan minus sunny optimism and tact leaves you with an obnoxious can’t-win-to-save-his-life candidate.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 am
Giuliani only got one delegate because of what many of us knew from the beginning: he was running only on name ID and was a poor fit for the GOP.
He couldn’t run well in Iowa because he wasn’t socially conservative, so he dropped out. His fiscal conservatism was shown up by Romney and McCain in New Hampshire, so he dropped out there. He couldn’t connect with voters even in a more moderate state like Michigan, so he dropped out there. He didn’t have any conservative/libertarian leanings, so he quit Nevada. He certainly couldn’t connect in South Carolina, where conservatives of all stripes were abundant, so he quit there.
He foolishly decided to make his last stand in Florida when Romney and McCain already had all the momentum. Foolishly, although he didn’t really have much of a choice because he never really fit in the GOP outside of New York.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:36 am
No, Giuliani only got one delegate because he ran a poor campaign. He had a bullet-point agenda, but no one ever knew what it was because he wouldn’t shut up about the damn George Will quote and the story about the Saudi prince.
He was a good fit for the GOP, overall — much better than McCain, really, outside of abortion and gun control — but he ran a miserable campaign.
He, like Hillary, misread the public mood and paid for it. In some ways, it’s perhaps good that Giuliani isn’t our candidate, because the sort of campaign that would have been run wouldn’t be very effective, given what we saw.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
New SurveyUSA results for Oregon with VP matchups…
http://www.surveyusa.com/index.php/2008/06/02/more-from-the-pacific-northwest-oregon-vp-matchups/
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am
Hmmm … Huckabee running the same or a few points ahead of Romney in the West. How could that be?
Only possible explanation is that it’s further evidence of SUSA’s role in the Great Anti-Mitt Conspiracy.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
#24, I think maybe the so-coms might be more important to McCain that the fis-cons?
I am shocked at the Oregon numbers. Poor Mitt.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I live in Oregon and haven’t met a Huckabee fan yet.
Like Clarence I am baffled that people trust democrats on taxes. I guess people are looking forward to a tax increase. They must believe their additional money to the government will be well spent in the democrats hands.