Election News Link-Dump

The Republican party primary in South Carolina is on Saturday, as are both party primaries in Nevada, and I don’t blog on the weekends, so here are a few news links to keep up with the goings-on.

The Republicans have practically ignored Nevada because South Carolina has a much higher profile in the party. It’s the place where the losers from New Hampshire go to save their campaign, and where the winners go to nail down the other guys’ coffins. Josh Marshall says the most recent poll from Clemson University has John McCain and Mike Huckabee neck-and-neck, with a slight edge beyond the margin of error to McCain. That poll puts Rudy Giuliani (pictured above) at 3%, and over at Crooks And Liars they’re pointing out that Giuliani’s early leads in all of these pre-MegaTuesday races turned into humiliating defeats, and it’s happening again in South Carolina.

Since nobody else has campaigned in Nevada on the GOP side, the RuPaul…I mean, RON Paul campaign is hoping that they might actually pick up a win, since he’s the only candidate who has run TV ads or even visited Nevada.

On the Democratic side, the three major candidates are also in a statistical dead heat. The story of the week there has been the battle between Dennis Kucinich and MSNBC about including him in the televised debate the other evening. The progressive website Democracy Now! went so far as to edit a videotape of the debate and add in Kucinich’s responses to the questions — you can watch, listen to, or read the transcript of the edited debate.

Meanwhile, this story posted at The Progressive Review says that Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy doesn’t look very hopeful. They quote a WABC news story that says that polling in New York City itself, where he is fairly popular as mayor, has him finishing very poorly against ALL of the currently active candidates. In national polling, his name recognition is only at 75% among voters, he only gets an 11% favorability rating, and he only pulls in 13% in a putative three-way November race.