Not to be outdone by their Republican counterparts, the Democratic National Committee has its own new video ripping GOP presidential nominee John McCain for his ties to lobbyists, in the hopes of playing the hypocricy card. Take a look.
Day after day, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has suffered the low-level indignity of registering a bum performance as John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate, at the hands of the SurveyUSA polling firm. The folks at SurveyUSA have run several hypothetical matchups of McCain vs. Obama, grafting onto them a variety of potential veeps.
Pawlenty’s problem is that among the Republican aspirants, his performance has lagged, sometimes turning in the worst performance for the GOP of the bunch. Not in Minnesota, though. Here, he adds some rocket fuel to the ticket.
SurveyUSA’s analysis (the results are here):
“Republican governor Tim Pawlenty is the sole Republican tested this cycle who gives McCain a win by more than the margin of sampling error. With no running mates, Obama defeats McCain by 5 points; with running mates added, results range from a 8 point McCain win (McCain/Pawlenty vs. Obama/Rendell) to a 15 point Obama win (McCain/Lieberman vs. Obama/Edwards).
The presidential matchups continue and Gov. Tim Pawlenty continues to be a drag on the Republican ticket. The SurveyUSA polling firm continues its state-by-state march across America, this time focusing the relative strenghs of John McCain and Barack Obama when matched with a variety of running mates.
In the absolute battleground of Ohio, Pawlenty’s presence on the ticket results in a GOP loss of between 5 and 18 percentage points. And in Iowa, a state nearly as important in November, the governor of a next-door state (ouch) fares as poorly as 26 percentage pointsbehind Obama and John Edwards.
On the bright side for Pawlentyites, New York Times columnists had some ear-burningly nice things to say about their guy today, calling him in passing a “shining star:”
McCain will need somebody who radiates calm. He’ll need somebody who can provide structure and organization. He’ll need somebody who enjoys working with budgets…
Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, is one of the G.O.P.’s leading and most likable modernizers. The son of a truck driver (his mother died when he was 16), he is the godfather of Sam’s Club conservatism, the effort to reconnect the party to the needs of the working class. Pawlenty could help McCain play the Theodore Roosevelt-style role — reforming the nation’s institutions to fit a new century and epoch.
The folks at SurveyUSA continue to roll out state-by-state test heats, with possible vice-presidential running mates grafted onto John McCain and Barack Obama (see the 5/20 post below for a longer expplanation).
For champions of a Tim Pawlenty pick by McCain, the short version is this: Bad news, governor.
In Virginia, where Obama runs 7 percentage points ahead of McCain without running mates, Pawlenty drags the GOP ticket to within a single point. In Ohio, his strongest showing is a 5-point loss — and he turns out the worst performance by far, with McCain-Pawlenty losing to Obama and John Edwards by 18 percentage points.
The New York Times just put a John McCain scoop online, reporting that he’ll be meeting with vice presidential short-listers Charlie Crist, Bobby Jindahl and Mitt Romney at his home in Arizona.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty also is mentioned, briefly: “Another governor who has been prominently mentioned as a strong contender to run with Mr. McCain, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, is not going to Arizona; his associates said he had a wedding on Saturday.”
Here’s the whole thing.
Today’s Tim Pawlenty vice-presidential update:
One of the more creative stabs at vice-presidential progosticating has been running this month on the website of CQ (formerly known as Congressional Quarterly). The magazine set up the potential Republican vice-presidential field much like the NCAA sets its basketball tournament every year.
Pawlenty, invariably mentioned as being on John McCain’s short list, was one of the 32 candidates at the starting gate at the beginning of May. Based on readers’ votes, he handily whomped former Sen. Phil Gramm before handily dispatching former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Sen. Kay Baily Hutchison. Alas, he was upended in the voting that ended Monday by onetime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, 55 percent to 44 percent.
The final showdown will pit Huckabee against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a GOP up-and-comer with virtually no national profile.
There’s still time to vote at the CQ page, which shows the entire tournament.
Another day, another dribble of idle speculation about Tim Pawlenty’s political future. (OK, the Strib’s a guilty as anyone, including questions about his vice-presidential prospects in the most recent Minnesota Poll.)
Anyway, the polling firm SurveyUSA has cooked up a statistical parlor game by running nationwide test heats between John McCain and Barack Obama, while grafting hypothetical running mates onto their backs.
This week, the company released its poll of Pennsylvanians (residents of a potential battleground state in November). The results were all over the map, with Obama winning 13 of the matchups (including the one that didn’t include running mates), McCain winning four.
For Pawlenty-watchers, the most notable takeaway was the fact that he didn’t exactly set the GOP ticket on fire. McCain-Pawlenty lost all four of its matchups against Obama and a running mate. Their best performance came against Obama and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, losing by 3 percentage points. Their worst: Obama and former Sen. John Edwards thumped them by an eye-popping 17 points (and that was by far the worst Republican performance in any of the test heats).
Of course, it’s not likely McCain and his brain trust are relying on such polls to make their veep pick, but if you’re a Pawlenty partisan, that has to sting a bit.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Republican Party, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s diatribes are back at center stage in an ad that (coincidentally?) is running in the run-up to the North Carolina primary on May 6.
Barack Obama’s supporters are, not surprisingly, crying foul. John McCain has denounced it, washing his hands of any responsibility for it. But it’s safe to say this won’t be the last time Obama and Wright are lashed together.
Take a look.
That darned phone in the White House keeps ringing off the hook.
Hillary Rodham Clinton released a new ad Wednesday that reprises her middle-of-the-night-phone-call-threatening-Armageddon, casting the crisis in economic terms. Unlike the original, which took pains to paint a bullseye on Barack Obama for his lack of experience, this one takes aim at John McCain as someone who do nothing to help struggling American families.
Fair enough. But McCain’s folks were quick enough on their feet to one-up Clinton within a few hours, cribbing her own video with an Internet ad (cheap, but guaranteed free media coverage) that blasted both her and Obama as typical Democrats who only want to raise taxes to fight crises.
Nothing — not yet, at least — from Obama on 3 a.m. phone calls.
Sure the election is still a political light-year away, but the polling firm SurveyUSA has just taken a stab at gaming the Electoral College results, by way of a poll of 30,000 registered voters in all 50 states.
The result: With 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Barack Obama beats John McCain, 280-258; Hillary Rodham Clinton beats McCain, 276-262.
In the matchup, Obama would carry 24 states and the District of Columbia; Clinton would carry 20. He would run more strongly in the Midwest, South West and West Coast. While Obama outperforms Clinton in 33 states, the opposite is true in 15 states.
Closer to home, SurveyUSA found that Clinton would win Minnesota by 4 percentage points, while Obama would take the state by 7.
The firm added a boatload of caveats to its polling: “There are specific limitations to this exercise. The winner’s margin in each state is not always outside of the survey’s margin of sampling error. Rather than show states where the results are inside of the margin of sampling error as “leaning” or “toss-ups,” SurveyUSA for this illustration assigned Electoral Votes to the candidate with the larger share of the vote, no matter how small the winner’s margin. The Democratic nominee is not yet known. Running mates on neither side are known. These are not surveys of likely voters, these are surveys of registered voters. Those caveats stated, the exercise is a remarkable foreshadowing of how contested, and how fiercely fought, the general election in November may be, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.”
For the full results, with maps and methodology, click here.