Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Montana draws each party's high negative presidential candidate

The latest Rasmussen polling has some interesting data, with some of the most interesting bits being the negatives of certain candidates.

In other words, which candidates do voters say that they would definitely not vote for? Granted, this is an inexact science, since sometimes a candidate's negatives will change significantly -- if it were exact and people didn't change their minds, then a given candidate's negatives could only get worse. And yet, they sometimes improve.

We have noted before that to know Mitt Romney is not necessarily to love him. His poor national polling numbers have been explained by supporters as being due to people just not being familiar with him. And yet, as his recognition with voters has gone up, his negatives have risen accordingly.

This has been borne out again in these latest numbers, with Romney having the dubious distinction of now having had the highest negatives of any declared candidate in the race of either party -- a position long held by the much-demonized and exceedingly well-known Hillary Clinton.

Yes, that's right, according to this latest round of polling, a wopping 44% of likely general election voters say that they would definitely not vote for Romney -- beating out Clinton's previous record of 43%.

Interestingly, the data shows that the Republican with highest negatives with Republicans is Mitt Romney -- and the Democrat with the highest negatives with Democrats is John Edwards.

We already know that Mitt Romney is the only GOP candidate to have visited Montana, and now, it appears that John Edwards is going to be the first Dem candidate to visit our fair state.

So, perhaps Montana is a sort of bellwether state: if a candidate visits us, it means that his own party is really, really, down on him.

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