Tuesday, May 23, 2006

More on the Democratic Race

According to a new Fox News poll, in a matchup between John McCain and Hillary Clinton, McCain wins out by a mere 4 points, a razor thin victory given the 3 point margin of error.

This tells us several important things:

1) It is never too early to start thinking about the next presidential election even though by this time in 1990, 1998, and 2002, few people would have predicted who would be the final candidates.

2) Contrary to conventional wisdom, Hillary comes close to the Presidency against a well-liked candidate with a “moderate” image.

3) Hillary is fully vetted already and is unlikely to move down much in the polls.

4) McCain is currently well regarded by many, particularly independents and is far more likely to go down in the polls rather than up as more of his positions become well known.


Side note: If McCain is up against Gore, then he wins by a safe margin of 12 points, indicating that far more people would support Hillary over Gore, a rather counter-intuitive result.

3 comments:

dcat said...

Good stuff. I think Gore's soft poll numbers are not too worrisome. He is not presumed to be in the race, and he has plenty of slack that he can presumably gather up. Hillary probably has less room to improve. Gore will have the chance to start making a case and looking presidential. I would also assume that he will garner quite a lot of support based on what people believe from 2000. We can talk until we are blue in the face about whether Gore had the election stolen from him, or merely whether he fell victim to an anachronistic system predicated wholly on protecting slave holding states from being overwhelmed by what the country actually cared about. But one can assume that Gore will be in a position to capture the imagination of many on the left while still cleaving somewhat to the DLC model of the mid 90s. In other words, he might give us the best of Kerry and Dean and some of Clinton as well.

dcat

dcat said...

Josh --
I do and I will.
I like dropping the Acie Earl reference -- the Celts fan's equivalent to Sons of Sam Horn.
Of courtse i'm not sure why this is in a conversation about democratic hopes in 2008, but then again, JQP probably knows his audience!

dcat

dcat said...

Cram --
We could wish that this were the most important concern, anyway! It's too early to tell which might make a better president, but right now I do think Gore has much promise.

dcat