If you can't make it there, you can't make it anywhere
As the Republican presidential candidates played "Quien es mas Reagan?" Thursday night, Rudy Giuliani staked his claim to the Gipper legacy by claiming -- among many, many other things -- that he could run a "50-state campaign" just like Reagan did.
"If we want to be a party that can run and win in states that Ronald Reagan won -- New York, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, states we haven't won in a long, long time, and states in which we don't even campaign any longer -- we're going to have to take a really good look at what made up the Reagan coalition," Giuliani said. "It was a broad outreach, an inclusive one, not one that kept people away."
Which is all well and good, except for this: In a new SurveyUSA poll, Giuliani has fallen into a statistical tie with John McCain in New York. Giuliani polls at 32 percent, McCain polls at 29 percent, and the margin of error is nearly 5 percent.
Ah, yes, you may be saying, but Giuliani was talking about the general election, not the Republican primary. Yes, he was. And a Rasmussen Reports poll of hypothetical general election matchups taken in November had Giuliani losing to Hillary Clinton in New York by 9 percentage points.
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