The Daily Background

From the new Fox News/ODC poll:

By 67 percent to 22 percent, American voters think the Democrats are going to win the 2008 presidential election. Fully 90 percent of Democrats think their party is going to be victorious and 60 percent of independents agree. Among Republicans, 44 percent think Democrats will win the White House and 45 percent think their party will hold on to the presidency.

It’s worth looking at some electoral history here. Here’s the lede of a piece I wrote for Truthout.org last month:

The odds of history are against them. Only once in the past 50 years has a new president been elected after a member of his own party occupies the White House for two full terms. The only exception was when a still-popular Ronald Reagan left the oval office to Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1989.

It will be exactly twenty years later when Bush’s son leaves office to the forty-fourth president of the United States on January 20, 2009. If history (and poll numbers) are any indication, it seems doubtful that the next commander in chief will be another Republican.

In short, it’s not impossible that the next President will be a Republican, but it’s extremely unlikely, and it would pretty much defy normal electoral patterns of the past 50 years. For instance, to say that the two frontrunners (Clinton and Giuliani, who have similar poll numbers right now) have the same likelihood of becoming the next President would be stupid– and people who say that sort of thing are not serious analysts.

Just taking this example (and I’m rooting for neither one), Hillary clearly has the upper-hand, despite having slightly lower poll numbers. The “real” Giuliani is largely unknown, especially among the Republican electorate that decides GOP primaries. All they know about him is what they think they know about 9/11, and that’s not enough to elect a President on. His support, while wide at the moment, is really really soft. He hasn’t started campaigning in a meaningful way, and most of the people who support him for President at the moment merely like the idea of him becoming President.

In the same way that Giuliani is a big unknown to most people, Clinton is exactly the opposite. Like Giliani, everyone knows who she is. But unlike Giuliani, everybody knows more or less what her politics are (although conservatives seem bent on pushing the myth that she is some sort of diehard liberal).

With Giuliani on the other hand, most Republicans who support him don’t know that he’s pro-abortion (the GOP has never nominated an openly pro-abortion candidate who wasn’t already Vice President). They also don’t know that he’s supportive of equal rights for gay people (again, the GOP has never nominated a candidate like him in this regard), and so forth.

I think we’re going to see a point where Giuliani’s support starts to slide and the GOP field starts to level out again, and I think we’re seeing signs already that this isn’t too far off.

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog