Just so you know, even as the Republican Party wrestles with a collection of embarrassing corruption cases and the Democrats continue to wander, lonely, in the ideological deserts looking for definition, here’s where the presidential race stood in August.
Gallup asked 406 Republicans and GOP leaners whom they would most likely support for the nomination in 2008.
The biggest slab of Republicans, 27 percent, went for former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Arizona Sen. John McCain was second with 24 percent. Then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with 19 percent and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee with 9 percent. A collection of also-rans filled out the list.
Gallup asked the same question of 424 likely and leaning Democrats, whose prospects seem to be warming up as life grows more complicated for the GOP (although it’s a long, long way to New Hampshire, as they say on the campaign trail).
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton got 40 percent of the response, with the Democratic loser last time around, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, picking up just 16 percent. His running mate from 2004, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, had 15 percent. Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden got 9 percent and former Gen. Wesley Clark got 5 percent. The rest was scattered among a collection of names familiar only to people who eat, drink and breathe politics.
It’s not time yet to think of this contest as being over, which is what broadcasters and columnists like to say right up until the votes are counted. In this case, that certainly is true.
If you put the front-runners on each side into a race now, you should be banned from journalism because it’s just too early to even think about it.
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Charles M. Madigan is the Tribune’s Perspective editor, an op-ed columnist and writer of The Rambling Gleaner at chicagotribune.com.
