Hillary and Giuliani, primary elections and the general election

Pew has an interesting poll out on the two front runners. Here's the most important numbers, besides Hillary's high negatives (which has gotten so much press coverage):

84% of Republicans view Giuliani favorably, with 21% viewing him very favorably.

88% of Democrats view Hillary favorably, with 38% viewing her very favorably.

65% of the general public views Giuliani favorably, with 14% viewing him very favorably.

55% of the general public views Hillary favorably, with 20% viewing her very favorably.

It's the "very favorably" within the parties which is the natural base of support for the candidates to lean on in the primaries--Hillary has a big base within the Democrats. Surprisingly, she also has a 6-point edge among the general public over Giuliani in the "very favorably" category, which is not perhaps what you would expect. The write up for the poll did not make a big deal about this, and it is probably not out of the margin of error.

What does this tell us? Giuliani's support is wide but not deep. Hillary's support is deep--some people really like her--but as we've heard constantly about her high negatives, not that wide. Her response in the Iowa debate was that any Democratic nominee was going to face a "Republican attack machine" which would result in high negatives. This is posturing but is almost certainly true.

And that gives Hillary an edge in the general election that gets lost in the talk about high negatives. All the dirt has been aired already. It's boring. Why dredge it up? Doing so is not salient for voters, just as attacking Clinton in 1998 was not salient. Tim Carney made that point on Washington Journal this week, and it's exactly right. Democrats concerned about the Clinton-family psychological drama do have something to worry about, but that worry should be concerned about what voters think about Bill roaming around the White House with nothing but time on his hands, and whether that is too weird or not. But not previous scandals. Hillary has done a brilliant job on a difficult high-wire act of neutralizing them, and they will be impossible to resuscitate.