The fine folks over at Pollster.com are much better stats wonks than I am. Plus, they make pretty charts! I encourage you to keep an eye on their site in coming months, as their coverage of the 2006 election was excellent.
One of my favorite things to do is look at the trends they estimate for various polls. The set of these that excite me most are the aggregated poll results for the upcoming Democratic and Republican Presidential nominations.
On the Republican side, the big story of the last six months is a man who isn’t even in the race (yet). At the first of the year, Fred Thompson was polling right around zero. His rise since then has been meteoric, and has been accompanied by losses for Giuliani, McCain and Gingrich.
Here are the scores for the first of the year (approximate) and the current trend for the five major Republican candidates:
Six Months Ago Today
Giuliani: 32% 27%
McCain: 24% 17%
Gingrich: 10% 7.3%
Romney: 7% 9.9%
Thompson, F.: 1% 16.3%
Fred Thompson is rapidly approaching the level of political rockstar, which is interesting for three reasons. First, he hasn’t discussed seriously his positions on any of the key issues. Second, he has spent most of the last decade in Hollywood, where he hasn’t been speaking publicly (until recently) or, again, publicly taking any positions on any of the issues this Republic faces. Third, the only paper record we have of Thompson’s behavior in government, from his time in Congress, seems to indicate that he was a knee-jerk conservative and a lousy statesman. Of course, George Bush had had less success in his life when he was nominated and elected, so who really knows what this all means?
Here’s my prediction: Thompson will waste no time in embarrassing himself through some series of gaffs or through a total lack of Presidential aptitude. As Thompson’s campaign fades, so to will McCain’s: his conservative bona fides are all there but there’s only so far anti-war Republicans will follow John “the War Candidate” McCain. I see a Giuliani/Romney horserace coming to a crescendo right around next February, with Romney ultimately getting to nod. Mitt’s got the looks and the bearing, and as long as he can stop alienating working class Republicans he should secure the nomination.
I’ll get the companion piece to this entry, complete with some predictions about the Democratic nomination, in the next couple of days.