Giuliani Is Finished

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 1:02 PM on December 17, 2007.

At the start of this campaign cycle, many commenters online compared Clinton's national poll lead to Joe Lieberman's national poll advantage in 2003. I disagreed, arguing that Clinton had a much larger, much more stable national lead than Lieberman. I seem to have been proven correct during the campaign, as Clinton's national lead has held up straight through the start of the Iowa caucuses. However, like so many other things involving Lieberman, the appropriate analogy was actually to the Republican nomination, not the Democratic one. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain held national leads analogous to Lieberman's 2003 advantage. That is, those two candidates held early national leads based entirely on high name recognition and a thin, vague, positive, media fueled image of those two candidate's despite their lack of a real national base of support. McCain's national support collapsed during the first half of the year, and Giuliani's is now quickly following suit. From Pollster.com:

(click for larger version)

The collapsing purple and yellow lines represent the national trend in 2007 for Giuliani and McCain respectively. The surging brown and green lines and Romney and Huckabee, respectively. Giuliani had buoyancy for a while by feeding off defecting McCain supporters, but it now appears his collapse is at hand. His rapidly evaporating national lead coincides with pulling back his resources in New Hampshire. Earlier, he pulled back resources in Iowa, and has now effectively ceded fourth place in that state to Huckabee, Romney and Thompson.

This isn't party of some grand plan by Giuliani to never focus on the early states, and to always prepare his campaign for a Florida plus Super Tuesday strategy. Giuliani has held more campaign events in New Hampshire, 66, than he has in any other state. He even has more campaign events in Iowa, 41, than he has in any other state except New Hampshire. As far as Florida goes, the most recent poll out of that state showed Giuliani in third place, behind both Huckabee and Romney. Giuliani was never targeting Florida as much as he was targeting Iowa and New Hampshire. He targeted the early states heavily, and assumed he would stay in front in Florida and nationally. Now, he is pulling out of the early states, and both his Florida and national leads have disappeared. There isn't anywhere left for him to turn, and things will only get worse when he is swamped in both Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing fourth or lower in both states.

Giuliani is almost finished. For my part, I think that means it is time to find a new Googlebomb target. Also, it is useful to remember this rule of thumb: when making comparisons involving Lieberman, look for Republican analogies before you seek out Democratic ones.

Tagged as: election08, mccain, republican party, giuliani, romney, huckabee, thompson

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.