Poll: Rudy Dropping In Multiple Voter Groups As Religion Shakes Up GOP Primary
New poll numbers are just out from The Washington Post and ABC News, and they offer some striking findings: Rudy is falling fast among multiple voter groups, especially conservatives, something that helps explain Mike Huckabee's extraordinary surge.
Check out this chart of Rudy's drop:
The chart shows that Rudy has suffered precipitous declines among all those groups since just last month. Meanwhile, look at this snapshot of the preferences of Republican voters right now -- it shows that Rudy has lost nine points since just last month, putting him at his lowest point this year. But Huckabee has more than doubled his support in the same period, lurching into second place. Also note that Mitt Romney seems to have made modest gains at Rudy's expense, too:
The pollsters say that Huckabee's surge is largely the product of dramatic gains among evangelical Protestants -- his support among them has jumped from 13% last month to 29% now, more than any other in the GOP field.
There's lots more in the full poll, which you can read right here.
Comments (39)
Jason wrote on December 11, 2007 5:49 PM:Great
because we need a
religious fundamentalist
Dick Cheney in office.
Which is what Huckabee is.
Greg wrote on December 11, 2007 5:53 PM:agreed -- he's pretty nuts. consolation is that I think that any one of the three leading Dems would maul him in a general.
humpty wrote on December 11, 2007 5:54 PM:The humpty dance is your chance to do the hump.
NCSteve wrote on December 11, 2007 5:56 PM:The ABC/WaPo numbers and, more importantly, trendlines are completely out of whack with most other national polls of likely voters. I don't know what these guys do, but either they're doing something wrong or everyone else is.
DemAC wrote on December 11, 2007 6:00 PM:Well, well, well, what a sight for sore eyes. Clinton up two and Oprah down one.
Nice going Mme President! :-)
And now of course: Obamarama proudly presents Hillary hating and ABC/WaPo whining gone wiiild!!!
Long view wrote on December 11, 2007 6:03 PM:It's changing so fast and is so volatile
under the republican big top right now that it hardly matters anyway.
Any one who doesn't have the "vision thing" going will be behind the eight ball in the long run if they focus on current polling at present.
But I do agree with the first thread
that a fundamentalist Cheney (Up Chuck Huck) in the race stirs things up.
It's as if the repuplican clowns instead of coming out from the big tent to greet America are instead all trying to crowd back into the fundamentalist volkswagon.
Pretty comical I think
lib4 wrote on December 11, 2007 6:08 PM:Hmmmm that's interesting....
I thought that Chuck Norris endorsement was the reason for Huckabee's poll increase as of late....at least that what Yahoo tells me:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/80798/chuck-norris-is-a-powerful-man?cmmnts=1
The actor who kicked copious butt on "Walker, Texas Ranger" is now attempting to bench press a presidential candidate from obscurity to front-runner with his endorsement of Mike Huckabee. Searches on Norris are up 10% over the past week, but more importantly, lookups on "mike huckabee chuck norris" are up a whopping 457%. ...... when it comes to political muscle thus far, no celeb endorsement can measure up to the power of Chuck. His backing of Huckabee helped lift the former governor of Arkansas past his more prominent rivals in buzz. Check our graph of candidate searches over the past month...
Right you are -
even after haveing seen said volkswagon
crash and burn repeatedly over the last
6 years with George and Dick pushing it over the cliff with Larry Craig and Ted Haggard in the back seat.
Well hell - if they all want to get in
who are we to stop them.
That's a very unconventional way of doing a bar chart. It's very rare for the bar on the right to represent the past; normally people read left to right, and expect time to move forward as they scan from left to right.
A casual glance at the bar chart appears to show Rudy's support going up.
Sorry, Huckabee ain't anything like Cheney. But Rudy is. Pray (literally, if necessary) that Rudy doesn't get the nomination. Because he could win - the general public still thinks of him as the crimefighting hero of 9/11, he's still the leader of national polls. But Rudy, as any sensible person who lived through his reign remembers, is a genuinely dangerous nightmare.
Huckabee, on the other hand, is a flat-out religious nut. And if he gets the nom he's going to be a LOT easier to beat. Swing state voters are not going to be too thrilled with his getting Dumond released, nor the dozens of other oddball decisions he made as gov. Let him knock off Rudy & Mitt and THEN blast him with his idiocy. But right now focus on getting Rudy out of the race. If he wins we're really screwed.
Tamifah wrote on December 11, 2007 6:38 PM:Jason:
Huckabee != Cheney.
When is the last time Cheney commuted anyone's sentence?
Heck, he even shoots his lawyers in the face!
Well I think Up Chuck Huck is more frightning - he hides it behind his fundamental slick shtick - which is what scares me.
At least we can see on the face of it what a godamn kook Guliani is.
Remember our Dick helped commute Scooter even before he served a day in the jail.
Tamifah
Up Chuck Huck commuted a rapists sentence who raped and murdered again.
How would you have liked to have been
raped and see the rapist go to jail
and then personnally plead with Huck to not let the rapist free.
And Huck frees him and he rapes and murders again and again.
How would you feel then ?
Miles Webster wrote on December 11, 2007 7:12 PM:I have a question for anyone who would care to respond. I have asked Rudy's campaign to explain a comment he made at one of his debates. I did not get a response. I have asked TPM a couple of times if they had any ideas and have not gotten a response either.
I was reading about the GOP You Tube debate and noticed a comment from Rudy Giuliani which raised a serious concern to me. At Salon.com, the link in particular being http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/29/gopdebate/, beginning at the 35 minute mark.
35 minutes. On a question about reducing the national debt, Giuliani says that President Bush should cut the budget of all civilian agencies by 5 to 10 percent. "We should commit not to rehire half of the civilian employees that will retire in the next 10 years," he says. So much for getting passports renewed, court cases heard or children's toys inspected.
The comment in question is "We should commit not to rehire half of the civilian employees that will retire in the next 10 years." What exactly does he mean by this? Is he suggesting that those due to retire in the next 10 years should not be employed for some reason? If so what are the consequences?
Many people believe the money they pay in for social security accumulates throughout their employment history. The truth of the matter is only the average value during the last 10 years of employment count towards your social security benefits. As I have witnessed, if a person does not work for the last 10 years they will not qualify for social security. They will have to file for SSI which has many restrictions and they may find they can't get this either.
If that is what he meant, which I am certainly unclear about, then this is a big deal and a serious issue! Can anyone fill me on what this is supposed to mean? Or is the quote taken completely out of context?
Sincerely,
Miles Webster
12quarts wrote on December 11, 2007 7:14 PM:Guess I'd feel that he should be a prexy candidate supported by millions of Americans. Hey, everybody makes mistakes, right? Any evangelical can tell you the devil takes special pains to suborn the True Christians among us.
The real question is why anyone but a fanatic would want to be president for the next four years. Bush's cronies can likely hold off the collapse of Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, social unrest, etc. well enough for the next year that the next guy (or gal) is very likely to be blamed for most of the fallout.
DanF wrote on December 11, 2007 7:15 PM:I find the McCain number interesting too. I wonder how much of the disparity between Nov. and now is due to people trying out the GOP flavor of the moment. Once folks tire of Huckabee's negatives, will those folks go back to McCain? McCain, despite his negatives, seems like the fall back guy.
eatbees wrote on December 11, 2007 7:38 PM:Miles,
When he said "rehire" he didn't mean that the people retiring from the federal government shouldn't be rehired for other jobs. He meant that the vacated positions shouldn't be refilled by other people, thereby reducing the size of the bureaucracy by attrition.
I'm surprised no one has answered you, but perhaps no one understood your question. TPM actually did a few blurbs on this very quote, speculating on what it might mean in terms of policy. I don't have the links for you, but you can probably find them using TPM's search engine.
partisan wrote on December 11, 2007 8:05 PM:Am I missing something? How can Giulliani fall 9 points overall and fall more than nine in four out of five categories and nine in the fifth?
NH Dem wrote on December 11, 2007 8:16 PM:Dear ABC/WaPo,
I hate to nitpick....okay, I don't hate to nitpick at all....but do you think you could maybe put the "before" bars on the graph, oh, I don't know, maybe BEFORE the "after" bars??
Would that maybe just kinda make a little sense???
What, did you put out a classified ad saying, "Lost your job at FEMA? Come write front-page Obama stories and make graphs for us!"?
Sheesh.
Jordan wrote on December 11, 2007 8:30 PM:Is anyone else completely creeped out by the ever-increasing dominance of religion in the GOP Presidential race?
I mean, what is this, the Middle Ages? Full-grown adults are standing up there in debates discussing Jesus, prayer, the Devil etc. with a straight face (as if it's a bucolicm tranquil period in our history with nothing of note going on domestically or internationally).
I hope the Democratic candidates don't fall into the same pre-Enlightenment mode once the general election starts, but I'm not very optimistic. I can anticipate all kinds of "gotcha" debate questions about faith, the bible, prayer, etc. (like we don't have anything else to worry about).
ArtinRI wrote on December 11, 2007 8:34 PM:If Giuliani is Bush on steroids, Huckabee is Bush on acid.
lestatdelc wrote on December 11, 2007 8:38 PM:NCSteve wrote on December 11, 2007 5:56 PM:The ABC/WaPo numbers and, more importantly, trendlines are completely out of whack with most other national polls of likely voters.
No they're not. Check out pollster.com which does polling average regression of all the polling made public, and the results above are very much in line with the trends seen at pollster.
On a side-note, as a yellow-dog Dem. I am gleeful at the prospect of Huckabee getting the GOP nod, and said on these boards and various others months ago to watch for Huckabee to break out with the GOP base.
For what it's worth, Huckabee is nothing like Cheney. Cheney is no theocrat. They are both dangerious whack-jobs, but of vastly different sorts.
suzy wrote on December 11, 2007 8:48 PM:At the next you tube deabate I hope they ask Huckabee if Dick's daughter is a sinner.
Peter Principle wrote on December 11, 2007 8:48 PM:Huckabee has more than doubled his support in the same period, lurching into second place. Also note that Mitt Romney seems to have made modest gains at Rudy's expense, too
The problem -- and I say this as someone who thinks "President Guiliani" may be the most terrifying two words in the English language -- is that Huckabee and Romney appear to be splitting the anti Il Duce vote.
If they both stay in the race past the early primaries (Huckabee because he wins Iowa, Romney because he wins New Hampshire) they could negate each other, allowing Guiliani to win the larger, later states even with his sharply reduced pluralities. But Huckabee won't get out because he's getting the fundies behind him (plus he think he has the momentum) while Romney won't need to get out because he's got an unlimited war chest.
It's nice to think Rudi will completely collapse as the hits keep coming, but I don't think it's gonna happen. He's got the pro-war cultists and the Arab haters firmly in his camp, and that's at least 30% of the GOP primary electorate, apparently.
Someone convince me I'm wrong about this, because I'm damned scared I'm going to wake up on Jan 21, 2009 and find out that Norman Podhoretz is the Secretary of Defense.
northlite wrote on December 11, 2007 9:11 PM:The charts are funny. Rudy's little Judi shtup/Bernie/etc. stuff have killed him. The mass of righties were already uncomfortable with him--Now he's headed down. I think Rudy is done. Fred's line on the charts looks like a belly flop. McCain isn't going anywhere but gradually down. Huck is on the rise, but ain't got no dough and he's just not the kind of guy the R establishment can get behind. Romney is the Man. Clean as a whistle. Right pander on Jesus and gays. Very attractive to the business types. This afternoon endorsed by National Review, the flagship conservative rag. He can be a strong sell to moderates and independents. And he has oodles of dough--he can spend $75 million out of his own pocket and, you'll see, more will start coming to him. He's the man. Start thinking about how to stop him!
pol wrote on December 11, 2007 9:15 PM:I know Democratic leaders who fear Huckabee as the nominee because of moderate Christian Republicans. These people are feeling alienated by the Republican Party since the extreme right has the power. Huckabee is viewed by Christian moderates as religious, but not extreme, and still a Republican. It gives them someone to vote for, rather than sitting out the election, or voting Democratic.
phil james wrote on December 11, 2007 11:41 PM:Doesn't matter how the thug party nomination shakes out. In fact the bigger the nutbag, the better for the Dems. And if you want to know which Dem polls the best head-to-head against every one of the lunatic thugs, who basically stomps them...it's not Clinton...it's not Obama...it's John Edwards. Here's hoping the Dem primary voters have sense enough to nominate him.
slb wrote on December 12, 2007 12:02 AM:As I have witnessed, if a person does not work for the last 10 years they will not qualify for social security.
I believe you have misunderstood how this works. In general, you need 40 quarters (~10 years) of Social Security credits to be able to collect the minimum Social Security benefit, but you don't need to have 40 quarters in the last 10 years before you retire.
The amount of your benefits are figured based on your lifetime earnings (or more precisely, your lifetime earnings subject to Social Security tax). From the MetLife web site:
Many people wonder how their benefit is figured. Social Security benefits are based on your lifetime earnings. Your actual earnings are adjusted or "indexed" to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received. Then Social Security calculates your average indexed monthly earnings during the 35 years in which you earned the most. We apply a formula to these earnings and arrive at your basic benefit, or "primary insurance amount" (PIA). This is how much you would receive at your full retirement age—65 or older, depending on your date of birth.Finn wrote on December 12, 2007 1:56 AM:
Huck is a formidable candidate, with the right VP candidate he could win.
The fact is that Huckabee is an authentic radical Christian. What people see is what they get. The evangelicals know that. Therefore, Huckster's support is not likely to melt away (and it would have been present sooner except that he lacked visibility). With the rest of the field so divided the evangelicals will win him the nomination.
Then there's the general election. Dems need to take him seriously. The things he says sound crazy to the people who read this website, but they resonate with a lot of Americans.
Moreover, keep in mind that, in addition to being something like Bush on religion (though the Huckster hasn't embraced religion as a political opportunist), unlike Bush, Huck is actually likeable and down to earth (things Bush could never pull off despite his relentless and interminable ad campaign based presidency).
r€nato wrote on December 12, 2007 2:31 AM:what Jordan wrote up-thread. This 'who loves Baby Jesus the most' garbage makes me ill. It's all a bunch of transparent, phony pandering. We might as well ask our presidential candidates how much they love their mothers.
Linus wrote on December 12, 2007 3:15 AM:Giuliani is much scarier than Huckabee. Huckabee doesn't have to do bat-insane things to prove he's a conservative. Giuliani will have to slaughter tens of thousands of people to prove his credibility.
By and large the only people who care about the Dumond thing are people who aren't going to vote Republican no matter what anyway.
eli wrote on December 12, 2007 5:20 AM:What Jordan and Renato said.
During the 2000 GOP debate where they asked "Who's your favorite political philosopher?", and Bush gave us that shit-eating smirk of his and said "Jesus", and then the rest of those clowns rushed to join in, "Me too! I love Jesus too!", I couldn't stop laughing. I couldn't imagine any of those pandering fools winning the election. I guess there were more religious idiots voting than I'd thought. Almost enough for Bush to win legitimately. There are plenty of GOP primary voters who care about religion. A lot of them won't ever vote for Willard. A lot of them won't ever vote for Huck.
Rudy and Fred will probably drop out after IA/NH/SC, leaving a clearer field for the survivors to compete in. Willard and Huck will both make it to the 2nd round, but each has too many negatives with too many GOPs (religion and impure political history) to suck all the oxygen out of the room. There'll be room for one or two other "serious" candidates. I expect McCain will be one of them. Don't count him out yet. He's survived worse times.
As a native NYer, what has me really mystified is how Rudy's gotten this far. I can't understand how anyone could ever take his candidacy seriously.
Every time Rudy opens his mouth, he's asking for another smackdown. He always behaves like the edgy, drunken uncle at the family picnic. Ready to pick a fight at a moment's notice just to entertain himself. How he got this far in the polls is anybody's guess. I'm waiting for him punch out a grandma at a rally or twist some little kid's arm for having a potty-mouth. He's cruisin' for a bruisin'.
woody, tokin librul wrote on December 12, 2007 10:06 AM:Huckleberry's the perfect candidate for the folks who own and manage the Bush Inc. franchise: He's dumber than Bush, less curious than Bush, more 'saved' than Bush, more malleable than Bush. Mebbe they put Jeb in the mix as VP?
Stanley wrote on December 12, 2007 8:14 PM:Huckabee should be required to answer the following question - and no, I am not kidding:
"Governor Huckabee, do you believe in Armageddon and the Rapture, and, if so, in what way will that affect your policies - particularly with regard to working toward the establishment of a greater Israel including what is now the Palestinian areas?"
It is a question that we should know the answer to
Eatbees:
I greatly appreciate your taking the time to answer me. The limited inforation I found regarding the quote certainly had me wondering.
Thanks again!
jd wrote on December 13, 2007 9:30 AM:Obama the dealer, I now know why he reminds me of Richard Pryor...
