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September 19, 2005--Senator John McCain leads Senator Hillary
Clinton by 8 percentage points in an early 2008 Presidential
Election poll. McCain attracts 47% of the vote while Clinton earns
39%.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
holds a 4-point edge over New York's Junior Senator, 47% to 43%.
Giuliani
is currently the top choice among Republicans for their party
nomination. McCain is second.
Some had anticipated that Giuliani would
get a "Katrina bounce" based upon his performance as Mayor of New
York on 9-11. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of American voters believe
Giuliani would be better than Clinton at handling a natural
disaster. Just 31% think Clinton would be better.
Giuliani is also seen better at handling
natural disasters than McCain. Fifty-nine percent (59%) say Giuliani
would be better while 22% give the edge to McCain.
However, in our
last survey before
Katrina, McCain held a 2-point edge over Clinton while Giuliani was
ahead of Clinton by 3 percentage points. It is not clear why McCain
gained ground and Giuliani did not.
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When it comes to handling the situation in Iraq,
49% of voters say Giuliani would be better than Clinton.
Thirty-eight percent (38%) say Clinton would be better.
Voters are evenly divided as to whether
Giuliani or Clinton would do a better job managing the economy. They
give a slight edge to the Republican on immigration issues.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) have a
favorable opinion of Giuliani while 26% have an unfavorable view.
For McCain, the numbers are 52% favorable and 28% unfavorable.
Clinton is far more polarizing--44%
favorable and 49% unfavorable in this survey. Rasmussen Reports has
been following public perceptions of Senator Clinton every other
week through the Hillary Meter.
Rasmussen Reports is an electronic publishing firm
specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of
public opinion polling information.
Rasmussen Reports was the nation's most accurate
polling firm during the Presidential election and the only one to
project both Bush and Kerry's vote total within half a percentage
point of the actual outcome.
During Election 2004, RasmussenReports.com was
also the top-ranked public opinion research site on the web. We had
twice as many visitors as our nearest competitor and nearly as many
as all competitors combined.
Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen
Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade.
To keep up with our latest releases, be
sure to visit the Rasmussen Reports Home Page.
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The telephone survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was
conducted by Rasmussen Reports September14, 2005. The margin of
sampling error for the survey is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95%
level of confidence. 37% of survey respondents were Republican, 37%
Democrat, and 26% unaffiliated (see Methodology)
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