Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

In my previous post I asked, "Can Rudy Win?"

We won't know the answer to that for more than a year, of course, but he's in the lead right now, according to Pollster.com, a treasure trove of political poll results:

Former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani continues to hold a small but reliable lead over Arizona Senator John McCain. Of 39 polls with both names in the list of candidates, Giuliani leads McCain in 30 with four more ties. McCain leads in only 5 polls.

Pollster.com's Charles Frazier goes on to note that Giuliani's "small but reliable lead" over McCain "doesn't seem to me to be the message I've been getting from the media." So Frazier did some research on Lexis/Nexis, searching for for "McCain" and "frontrunner" in the same paragraph, but "Giuliani" NOT in the paragraph, and then the opposite, and then a third search for both mentioned in the same paragraph with the word "frontrunner".

The results don't seem to reflect the polls. Using "American Newspapers" as a broad sample of papers, and 5/1/2006-12/19/2006 as the date range, I found:

McCain, frontrunner, NOT Giuliani: 270 articles
Giuliani, frontrunner, NOT McCain: 28 articles
Both with frontrunner: 76 articles

So I was relieved to find that my impression of media coverage as MUCH more favorable to McCain was not just a delusion. It also appears at strong odds with the polling data. Giuliani leads McCain by an average of 3 points in the 39 polls. Not a huge lead, but a very consistent one.

Much of the reporting seems to downplay Giuliani's chances of winning the Republican nomination, but given the negative opinion of McCain among many conservative Republicans, I wouldn't assume McCain can win easily either.

Pollster.com says Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney "has shown slow but steady growth in support, though he remains far behind."