Reply #4: Giuliani and Thompson have the most "good vibes"

[dmallind]

amongst the electorate of the Rep field but that should be pretty easy to reduce once we get into a head to head competition on specifics and policy. Rudy is surprising me a bit by continuing to do so well with evangelicals but he hasn't been the target of much "values" attacks either, so I suspect that's mostly due to the R after his name and the tiresome image of him as a valuable post 9/11 leader. One would suspect few of them have yet seen pictures of him in drag or heard too much about his shifting pro choice stance. Rest assured they will.

Thompson has the opposite problem - his good vibe comes from his imposing presence and image as a fair and competent leader in his L&O role. He's wowing a lot of moderates with this. When they hear that he's both a policy lightweight and a socially extreme conservative, the currently barely-engaged moderates will desert him in droves.

Long term neither candidate scares me much in a general, and I think neither will get far beyond the automatic (R) voters. There are of course about 40% of them, so any inroads into moderate territory they can make will help enormously, but I honestly can't see either of them getting closer than 5-6% to any Dem candidate other than the extremely unlikely Kucinich/Gravel options.

Which of course would be great if we elected presidents on popular votes. However absent some wild news from CA about their vote split idea, we should carry enough swing states to be good. Everything subject to change of course. If Obama gets caught with gay porn on his laptop, Edwards confesses to using illegals as slave labor to run his estate and Hillary shows up with a $50 million dollar account in the Caymans with one deposit from Jack Abramoff then sure problems might start happening.