Posted on 09/11/2007 10:19:24 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Republican Fred Thompson gained a bump in support after his long-delayed entry in the 2008 presidential race and nearly caught front-runner Rudy Giuliani in two opinion polls released on Tuesday.
Thompson, a Hollywood actor and former senator from Tennessee, closed to within a statistically insignificant one percentage point of Giuliani in a new CNN poll after trailing the former New York mayor by seven points in last month's poll.
A CBS/New York Times poll showed Thompson climbing to within five percentage points of Giuliani, wiping out much of his 20-point lead from a month ago.
Thompson formally entered the race last week with a 24-hour campaign blitz that included a national television ad, a web site video and a public announcement tour in the early voting state of Iowa.
The former star of NBC's "Law and Order" television series, who has cast himself as a social conservative in the mold of former President Ronald Reagan, hopes to capitalize on conservative dissatisfaction with a Republican field led for months by Giuliani.
Thompson formed a committee in his home state of Tennessee in early June to test the waters for a presidential bid and shot past other top contenders like Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in national polls even before he formally entered the race.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed Giuliani with a 29 percent to 28 percent lead over Thompson. McCain registered at 15 percent and Romney at 11 percent, near their measurements last month.
The CBS/New York Times poll had Giuliani leading Thompson by 27 percent to 22 percent. Giuliani dropped sharply from his 38 percent support among Republicans last month.
McCain, who has suffered from staff shake-ups and poor fundraising while defending President George W. Bush's policies on immigration and Iraq, saw a six-point rise from the last poll to 18 percent.
Romney saw little benefit from his win in last month's Iowa straw poll, earning the support of 14 percent -- one point above where he was last month.
The CNN poll and the CBS/New York Times poll both had margins of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Romney leads Republicans in state polls in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, which provide the first two big tests on the road to the November 2008 election. Political strategists caution national polls, particularly this early in a presidential cycle, are often a reflection of name recognition.
Thompson is well known from his days as an actor in Hollywood. He repeatedly delayed a formal entry to the race amid staff shake-ups and questions about his work as a lobbyist and his slow fundraising pace.
Run, FRed, Run!!
And the trend for Fred continues.
Rasmusen Poll: 9-11-2007: Fred 28%, Rooty 21%.
Go Fred go!
From your mouth to Gods ears.
I hope you write a post endorsing him, or anything talking about your views on who should be the nominee.
The only poll I will be interested in is the primary election results. All the others are meaningless.
According to your tagline you dislike all four Republican frontrunners. So what happens 8-10 weeks from now if all Republican candidates aside from those four are still polling in the single digits? Will you still be slagging FRed then?
Impressive. Now what was all that talk about entering the race too late? Maybe the fact is that everyone else entered the race too early and bored the voters into tuning them out.
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