Giuliani Is Finished

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.