Some new polls have bring good news and bad news for Fred Thompson, the former Senator turned TV actor who could well give the Republicans their first REAL “Law and Order” Presidential candidate.
The GOOD NEWS is that his stock is quickly rising among Republican voters. The person who should be most concerned should be former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose support is sagging. On the other hand, Arizona Senator John McCain should not feel terrific, either: he has been trying mightily to woo over GOPers who sandbagged his 2000 Presidential bid and Thompson seems to be hurting him as well.
The BAD NEWS is that many voters don’t know who Thompson is, even though he’s on a hit TV show (but, then, he is not the star on it but rather a solid character actor).
First, here’s some of the details on the GOOD NEWS, as supplied by Rasmussen Reports:
The addition of former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson (R) to the list of candidates shakes up the race for the GOP Presidential nomination.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) remains on top, but his support dips below the 30% mark for the first time in seven weeks. With Thompson in the mix, Giuliani’s support tumbles to 26%, down nine points from a week ago. That’s the lowest level of support measured for Giuliani in any Rasmussen Reports poll this year.
Support for Arizona Senator John McCain remains steady at 16%, but McCain’s hold on second place is threatened by Thompson. The movie star turned Senator turned TV star weighs in with 14% support among those likely to vote in a GOP primary. Among Very Conservative voters, Giuliani attracts 20% support followed closely by Thompson at 19%, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 18% and McCain at 14%.
But if Thompson feel he’s destined to win something more tasty than an Emmy, he and his operatives
might seriously ponder this:
A new Gallup poll reveals that former Sen. Fred Thompson would face an uphill battle in a race for president. Right now, according to Gallup, 58% of adults know nothing about him.
In a way, that could be a positive: voters may feel they know all too much about some of the other candidates. E&P’s story goes on to say:
Four percent correctly identified him with the TV show “Law and Order”– the same number who expressed a wish that he run for president. Another 11% identified him, correctly, as an “actor.” Just 1% said he was a “conservative/true conservative” and another 1% know that he was or is a “politician.”
Frank Newport, director of the Gallup Poll, notes today that Thompson nevertheless came in third behind Sen. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in a recent Gallup survey on GOP favorites. But in the new poll, Gallup asked a random sample, “What comes to your mind when you think about former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson?”
The results, Newport writes, “show that a large number of Republicans don’t know much at all about Thompson. A small percentage of those who do know him say he would be a good president, but others either talk about his acting career or offer vague generalities such as ‘I like him’ or ‘Nice guy.’
“What is most interesting about these data is the fact that two-thirds of Americans say that nothing at all comes to mind… In other words, despite his acting career, Thompson is not among the ranks of well-known politicians at this point….
So if you put it together, Thompson is viable because among Republicans support for Giuliani and McCain is wobbly. But, among general voters, Thompson will have a LOT of defining to do. The trick for him is that, if he’s a front-runner, he’s going to have to try and define himself for the country’s voters before his Republican opponents and the Democrats do. A clean slate is only clean until it’s covered with chalk…
UPDATE: But Thompson is getting good press. From the Washington correspondent of Great Britain’s The Independent:
A generation after one actor-politician transformed their party’s fortunes, could today’s battered and demoralised Republicans look to another one to carry their banner in next year’s presidential election?
A few months ago, even a few weeks ago, the question would have been fanciful. But no longer, after Fred Thompson – one time performer in The Hunt for Red October and Die Hard 2, former senator for Tennessee and now to be seen in Law and Order – let slip recently he might enter an already crowded field of White House contenders.
The buzz began last month when the 64-year-old Mr Thompson remarked during an appearance on Fox News that he was “giving some thought” to running – even though he has not even the framework of a formal organisation in place, and has done no campaigning.
But those words alone were enough to stir the Republican presidential pot. A poll of likely party voters a few days later put him in third place with 12 per cent. Another poll showed him beating Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic frontrunner, by 44-43 per cent in a general election match-up.
The result amounts to a statistical dead heat but is, nonetheless, a remarkable feat for a man long out of the political limelight.
The reason, however, is evident. Mr Thompson not only possesses that elusive political star quality. He also is tailor-made to fill the opening for a viable, high-profile standard bearer of Republican conservatives – the party’s ideological driving force since that earlier actor-politician Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980.
On the other hand, John McCain was a SCREAM several years ago when he did his John Ashcroft imitation on Saturday Night Live :
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.