Polls: Why Republicans Can't Decide on a Presidential Nominee

The Republican presidential nomination race has been much more competitive than the Democratic race thus far, and will most likely continue to be, for a variety of reasons indicated by election Gallup polls conducted throughout this year.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has had a significant lead in every national Gallup poll since February, including holding 12 point lead over former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson for each of the past three months. Arizona Senator John McCain is currently placing third, only just a few points behind Thompson, while former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has not had much support in the national polls. In a recent Gallup Poll, just 10 percent of Republican survey responders said they would choose Romney to be the Republican presidential nominee. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has been gaining steam a bit in recent months, but his numbers are still in single digits. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback left the race just this past weekend, but it probably won't change much at the polls as he has been receiving just 1 or 2 percent of the vote.

Despite Romney's poor performance in national polls, he has had success in important early caucus and primary states. He currently leads all polls in the primary states of New Hampshire and Iowa. Huckabee is another candidate performing better in Iowa than in the national polls. He is currently in a race for second, competing with Giuliani and Thompson.

In a national poll, 51 percent of Republicans said they would vote enthusiastically for Giuliani should he be the Republican nominee in 2008, while McCain, Thompson, and Romney received considerably less support. Giuliani himself doesn't do so well with this measure when compared to the level of Democrats' enthusiasm for leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Giuliani consistently rates more positively than his closest competitors when it comes to favorability, but not by a large margin. 67 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners have a favorable opinion of Giuliani, while 61 percent feel this way about McCain, 53 percent for Thompson, and 41 percent for Romney. Contributing to Romney and Thompson's lower ratings is the fact that they are not as well-known as Giuliani and McCain. About one in three Republicans do not have any opinion of Thompson or Romney. The favorable/unfavorable ratio for Giuliani (67 percent favorable to 27 percent unfavorable) is almost the same as the lesser-known Thompson's (53 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable). Also, Giuliani's favorable rating with Republicans is declining; in August his rating was at 74 percent, and it has, at times, been around 80% .

Religious Republicans have been dubious about Giuliani's stances on some issues, and he does not receive as much support from religious Republicans as he does among less religious Republicans, although he still leads both groups. Romney being Mormon has also been a problem for some Republican supporters, especially the key Republican constituency of churchgoing Protestants, who are as likely to rate him unfavorably as they are favorably.

The significant gap between Clinton's lead and Giuliani's is one indicator that the Republican nominee is more up in the air than the Democratic nomination, but another, as indicated in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, is that a majority of Republicans might change their minds about voting for the candidate they now prefer, while a majority of Democrats say the opposite. In general, Republicans have consistently been less satisfied with their party's presidential candidates than Democrat voters have.

Historically, Republican presidential nominees usually lead challengers by 20 or more points at some time during the year before the election, and all but two since 1972 reached 50 percent support on Gallup's national ballot the year before the election. Giuliani has not yet reached 50 percent, though he did hit a high of 49 percent in March, and he also had a lead of more than 20 points in March and April of this year.

There have been just three elections (in 1960, 1988, and 2000) since World War II that replaced a president who had served two four-year terms, and each time the party out of power at the time led the polls for much of the time prior to the elections. Two of those three times the candidate from the party previously not in power won the presidential election.

Source: "Gallup Election Review: October 2007", Gallup