It's Giuliani Time

News reports say that Rudy Giuliani is a contender for secretary of state.

Though he backed Trump in the campaign, the position would be an odd fit.  Trump falsely claimed that he opposed the Iraq War from the start.  Giuliani was a Bush cheerleader.

Giuliani's speech at the Republican National Convention, August 30, 2008:

It was here in 2001 in lower Manhattan that President George W. Bush stood amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center and said to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us, "They will hear from us."

They have heard from us!

They heard from us in Afghanistan and we removed the Taliban.

They heard from us in Iraq and we ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror.

They heard from us in Libya and without firing a shot Qadhafi abandoned weapons of mass destruction.

...

At the time, we believed we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Spontaneously, I grabbed the arm of then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said to Bernie, "Thank God George Bush is our President."

And I say it again tonight, "Thank God George Bush is our President."

Senator Rand Paul says that he would oppose a Giuliani nomination.  Perhaps one reason is that Giuliani clashed with his father during the 2008 primaries.



Giuliani has a lot of baggage.

• See a vulnerability study for his 1993 mayoral race.
• See charges of police brutality during his tenure.
• See the many potential conflicts stemming from his work for foreign interests

Josh Rogin reports at The Washington Post:

For years, Giuliani has been one of the most prominent American officials to advocate on behalf of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), a Marxist Iranian opposition group that claims to be the legitimate government of Iran and resembles a cult. A Treasury Department investigation in 2012 examined whether speaking fees paid by several MEK front groups to a long list of U.S. politicians, including Giuliani, violated laws on Americans receiving money from designated terrorist organizations.

The State Department added the MEK to the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 1997 due to its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The group, which has about 3,000 members living in exile in Iraq, has not conducted a confirmed act of terrorism in more than a decade. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States mostly disarmed the MEK and provided its members with protection at their Iraqi base, Camp Ashraf.

Religion and the Obama-Romney Contest

Gallup reports:

Mormon registered voters overwhelmingly support the candidacy of the first major-party presidential candidate of the Mormon faith, with 84% saying they would vote for Mitt Romney, compared with 13% who prefer Barack Obama. Obama, meanwhile, enjoys solid support from Jewish voters, 64% to 29%.

Gallup previously analyzed the preferences of the major religious groups in the United States. Currently, Protestants favor Romney by 52% to 40%, nonreligious voters favor Obama by 65% to 25%, and Catholics are evenly divided between the two (46% Obama, 45% Romney).

Roughly 2% of Americans identify their religious faith as Mormon, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Two percent also identify their religion as Jewish. Though relatively small in number, Jews and Mormons represent the next-largest religious faiths in the United States after Protestants (including those who identify simply as Christian) and Catholics.

...
In 2008, Mormons preferred McCain to Obama by 75% to 19%. Romney's current 84% share of the Mormon vote is thus nine points better than McCain's, and five points better than the average shift from McCain to Romney among all registered voters.

Among Jews, Obama's current 64% to 29% advantage compares with a 74% to 23% advantage before the election in 2008. Thus, he is running 10 points lower among Jewish registered voters than in 2008, which is five points worse than his decline among all registered voters compared with 2008.

From the Jewish Virtual Library:




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Approval in the States

Gallup has state-by-state presidental job approval data. President Obama is above 50 percent in 16 states and the District of Columbia. But his disapproval rating exceeds his approval rating in 29 states, including 8 that he carried in 2008:

• Virginia
• New Mexico
• Ohio
• Nevada
• Colorado
• Oregon
• Indiana
• New Hampshire

The 2012 Campaign is Starting Later than 2008

As of now, only one significant would-be presidential candidate has formed an exploratory committee: pizza magnate Herman Cain, a long shot for the GOP nomination. By this point in the 2008 campaign, by contrast, most of the serious or semi-serious candidates had already started their exploratory committees. Here are the candidates and the dates on which they filed their first statements of organization with the Federal Election Commission:

John H. Cox (R)	2/13/2006
Mike Gravel (D)	4/21/2006
Thomas Vilsack (D)	11/9/2006
John McCain (R)	11/16/2006
Rudolph Giuliani (R)	11/20/2006
Samuel Brownback (R)	12/4/2006
Evan Bayh (D)	12/5/2006
Tommy Thompson (R)	12/13/2006
Dennis Kucinich (D)	12/19/2006
Mitt Romney (R)	1/3/2007
John Edwards (D)	1/5/2007
James Gilmore III (R)	1/9/2007
Christopher J. Dodd (D)	1/11/2007
Duncan Hunter (R)	01/12/2007
Barack Obama (D)	1/16/2007
Hillary R. Clinton (D)	1/22/2007
Bill Richardson (D)	1/22/2007
Tom Tancredo (R)	1/22/2007
Mike Huckabee (R)	1/29/2007
Joseph Biden (D)	1/31/2007
Ron Paul (R)	3/12/2007
Fred Thompson (R)	9/7/2007

Religion and the Vote

The Pew Forum has an important new study of religion and the 2008 election:

An analysis of newly released exit poll data by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Obama succeeded in attracting a larger share of the vote from some religious groups than the 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry, had received. Among white evangelical Protestants, for example, Obama picked up 5 percentage points more support than Kerry (26% vs. 21%). And Obama’s gains were particularly large among white evangelical Protestants under the age of 40. He received 33% of their votes, compared with 12% for Kerry four years earlier.

In general, however, the contours of religion and politics were the same in 2008 as in 2004. Religion remained a very strong predictor of voters’ choices, and the large gaps in the electorate that had developed along religious lines in earlier elections persisted in 2008. Some of Obama’s largest gains, in fact, were among religious groups that already leaned Democratic, such as black Protestants and religiously unaffiliated voters (those who answer “none” when asked about their religious affiliation in exit polls).

Cell Phones and Polls

In our chapter on public opinion and political participation, we discuss a problem facing pollsters. They hesitate to call respondents on cell phones because the law forbids them to use automatic dialers for such calls. But if they take polls only via landlines, they will miss many people. A new article in Public Opinion Quarterly confirms this point:

We first look at the basic incidence of cell-phone-only voters in the exit poll sample in 2008 compared to 2004. The proportion of Election Day voters who live in cell-only households nearly tripled over four years, to 19.9 percent in 2008. This is similar to the finding of the general population National Health Interview Survey, which found 20.2 percent of households had no landline but at least one wireless telephone in the second half of 2008. Another 4.1 percent of Election Day voters reported in the exit poll that their household had no telephone service at all, indicating that pre-election polls using only landline samples failed to cover about 24 percent of the Election Day electorate.