The consensus has been that Democrats are thrilled with their stable of candidates for president but Republican activists are still looking for a candidate to really get behind. But a new survey from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake is questioning the conventional wisdom, finding support the top Democrat candidates is soft in swing districts.
A recent survey by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, however, showed Clinton and Obama trailing former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) in the 31 Democratic-held House districts regarded as most imperiled in 2008, and even potentially serving as a drag on those lawmakers' reelection chances.
Representatives from both campaigns predictably downplayed the results, saying that the poll used leading terms like 'liberal', which conservatives have been effective in turning into a term of attack against Democrats.
"Will it play in Peoria?" goes the perennial political question in the United, well one blogger from the city in the Midwest state of Illinois says:
This is bad news for Democrats, especially those backing Hillary Clinton -- or at least those who think her nomination is inevitible.
But the Peoria Pundit adds: "Still, in my opinion, Clinton's biggest weapon in the primary is the sense of inevitibility that surrounds her. Bad polls numbers that show her losing to someone who's probably not even the GOP front runner anymore have got to make those leaning her way think that Obama might be a better choice." Of course, Senator Obama is the junior senator from Illinois.
Democrats.com accused the pollsters of so-called 'push polling':
By definition a push poll is where you smear a named candidate and then ask what the voter thinks of that smeared candidate. Push polls are generally regarded with contempt by mainstream political analysts - unless, of course, the target of the push poll is a Democrat.
Well known left-leaning bloggers Atrios and Brad DeLong attacked the Washington Post for printing the story, while some Republican bloggers (scroll down past the quotes from Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner) wondered why the dreaded MSM didn't report the story until a month after the poll.
Whether support for the Democrat front runners is soft in swing districts is a qustion that remains to be answered. But one thing is certain. Support the media is soft in all districts of the blogosphere.
