Rudy Giuliani has hit the skids in a Florida freefall that could shatter his presidential campaign and leave a two-man Republican contest in the state between John McCain and Mitt Romney, a Miami Herald poll shows.
Despite hovering over Florida voters for weeks, Giuliani is tied for third place with the scarcely visible Mike Huckabee in a statewide poll of 800 likely voters.
With his poll numbers slipping back home in the Northeast, Giuliani’s campaign will implode if he can’t turn it around in the six days left before Florida’s Jan. 29 vote, the final gateway before a blitz of primaries around the nation that could sew up the race.
”He may be running for president, but with these numbers he wouldn’t be elected governor of Florida,” said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose firm conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Schroth, Eldon & Associates for The Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9. Alluding to the timeworn song, Conway added: “If he can’t make it there in Florida, he can’t make it anywhere.”
No New York City mayor has ever risen to higher office–astonishing when you consider that it has often been considered “the second toughest job in the US.”
The one thing that may salvage a respectable showing for Rudy is that early and absentee voting has been occurring in Florida for a few weeks now, and he may be doing well among those votes already cast. The counterintuitive analysis is that this latest news could help Rudy if he ends up making a strong second showing, thereby beating current expectations. Regardless, no candidate again will follow Rudy’s strategy of ignoring the earlier primaries and caucuses to focus on Florida. Being out of the news for weeks, as Rudy has now been, risks political death for a candidate. He should have made an attempt to compete in either Iowa or New Hampshire.
Enough with the polls! Newscasters — let US decide who to vote for!
I voted 2 weeks ago in FL by Absentee ballot, and did not vote for Rudy even though he was then leading in the polls. I think his FL advertising blitz could actually hurt him. When I was in FL over Christmas the non-stop Rudy ads got old quickly… it was all Sept. 11th all the time. I and pretty much everyone I talked to about politics were VERY sick of his ads, and since he was the only one advertising (at least in the Palm Beach county TV market) I think it may have created a backlash against him.
He’s toast, I believe.
Romney, Romney, Romney. McCain is dashing all over the country trying to raise $$, whle Mitt is campaigning day after day after in FL.
#5–The problem is that Romney was campaigning in Florida (and everywhere else) when he was supposed to be the givernor of Massachusetts. He was so lousy a governor that theonly thing I’d ever consider voting for him to do is to oversee another olympics–(and even then, I wouldn’t bet much on his first two or three statements of what he believes since he’s also good at changing those!) As for Mayor Rudy–it appears his idea of focusing on the big delegate states beginning with FLA might have backfired. Actually, i’d like to see him fool everyone and win, just so we could see the pollsters and the networks revealed once again for the fools they are.