Speaking of Republicans and polls, I guess it’s time to comment on the early raft of opinion surveys about the identity of George W. Bush’s successor as GOP presidential nominee in 2008.As the latest Gallup Poll illustrates, every poll of Republican voters and leaners shows Rudy Guiliani and John McCain stomping the field (Gallup has Rudy at 33% and McCain at 30%, with Jeb Bush being the only other name that attracts double-digit support at 12%).Let me be among the first to say: it ain’t going to happen. The Republican Party is not going to nominate a pro-choice, pro-gay rights candidate like Rudy, and it’s not going to nominate a Scourge of the Conservative Movement like McCain, a man who has so consistently defied the Norquistian gospel that tax cuts trump every other national priority. If either of these gents runs for president and gains steam, the Right will unite behind someone else, either a safe ideological bet like Frist or Allen or Brownback (I don’t think Santorum is going to be in the Senate after 2006), or someone a bit less conventional like Hagel or Pawlenty or even Condi Rice, if she’s willing to take all sorts of oaths on cultural issues and taxes. Why? Because candidates like Guiliani and McCain would unravel the whole coalition of the cultural Right and the Mammon-worshippers on which today’s GOP has been so painstakingly constructed. And that coalition certainly has enough power to take down anyone it chooses in a Republican nominating contest.There’s another poll out there (reported via Jerome at Mydd) that’s a bit closer to the underlying reality of where the GOP will go in 2008: a “straw poll” taken at the recent Conservative Political Action Committee conference, which asked respondents who they thought would become the eventual nominee (NOT which candidate they personally favored). In this one Guiliani is basically tied with Rice in the high teens, and McCain’s down there tied with Frist and Allen at 11%.And that’s nearly four years out, before the Right has had the chance to mull over its options and road-test a new champion.Sure, GOPers are more than happy to let Guiliani and McCain get a lot of early attention, using them to give the party a more moderate image. But when the deal goes down, these guys will be discarded like an old Lincoln Day speech, and we’ll find out for real where the Right wants to take its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 11: If Biden “Steps Aside” and Harris Steps Up, There Should Be No Falloff in Support
At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:
One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:
“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”
The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.
For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.
On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).
After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.
Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.
Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).
There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.
The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.