This poll is definitely a watershed:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) tied with former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson (R) in an Election 2008 match-up. Both candidates attract support from 45% of voters. Given a Clinton-Thompson match-up, 5% of voters say they’d pull the lever for some other candidate and 4% are not sure.
Lower in the report, one reason why this is happening is that Clinton has more of the highest negatives than any other candidate. AND:
The survey also found Clinton holding a four-point advantage over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R), 46% to 42%. In that match-up, 9% would prefer some other candidate and 3% are not sure. The survey was conducted June 27-28, 2007, just before the July 4th holiday festivities began to unfold.
Compared to our previous survey of these matchups, conducted early in June, Clinton has lost a net five points against both Thompson and Romney. In May, Clinton led both of these GOP hopefuls by three points.Clinton has consistently been atop the national polls for the Democratic Presidential nomination. She also leads solidly in New Hampshire, attracting more support from women than all the other candidates combined.
Among those seeking the Republican Presidential nomination, Thompson has recently vaulted to the top of the polls and holds a narrow lead over former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R). Romney is currently in a battle for third place with Arizona Senator John McCain (R) in the national polls, but Romney has a nine-point edge in New Hampshire.
Some thoughts:
(1) Thompson is still at the stage where he’s supported because he hasn’t been in the race and is still a kind of blank slate on which people can draw what they believe him to be. The problem for Thompson is that his other Republican and Democratic rivals are very soon going to start drawing some things themselves on that slate to influence voters. And he’s also going to have to start participating in debates where not only his ideas will be on trial, but how he performs in a less-scripted atmosphere (even though “debates” are where candidates now regurgitate on cue the talking points prepared for them by their staffs, in most cases).
(2) Clinton remains a flawed candidate. When pundits say that, they’re immediately accused of hating Hillary Clinton — but she remains a flawed candidate. That’s a political reality that even her staff knows and is working on. She has high unfavorables and there are many lingering doubts about her. And she is going to have to beat back or neutralize them rather quickly with new, enduring positives. It’s kind of like the idea of hypnosis: hypnosis cannot undo the “negative tapes” in your mind, but it can insert new “positive tapes” in your mind that override the negative ones. Clinton also walks on the shakiest tightrope of all the candidates with the exception of Arizona Senator John McCain who has fallen off his political tightrope and is quickly tumbling towards political-sudden-death earth.
(3) Many Democrats remain over-confident. It is not going to be enough for the party to be the anti-Bush or a candidate to be the anti-Bush or anti-Republican. A Democratic candidate is going to have to have a solid, specific, uplifting and positive message that needs to be laid out for the nation — and backed by solid, nuts-and-bolts political machinery with a unified party focused on the need to win.
And even with all of this, you have to throw in the potential political wildcard of one or even two major independent party candidacies that will siphon some votes away from the major parties.
So, more and more, 2008 seems to be an upcoming election in which all of the smug, all-knowing assurance of experts need to be taken with a big grain of salt (except perhaps in the case of Larry Sabato — who MUST have a real crystal ball..)
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.