New York Post, July 24, 2006

By Ryan Sager

It’s early in the game yet, but it’s becoming undeniable: Rudy Giuliani will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 — as the clear frontrunner.

For months, the media have treated their favored candidate, maverick Sen. John McCain, as the man to beat. But that’s not been based on polls, but on the now-clearly mistaken assumption that Rudy won’t run and on a willful adherence to a false storyline that social conservatives could never accept a Giuliani candidacy.

Yet the polls show that Rudy is the favorite not just of Republicans, but of conservatives. And my recent conversations — on and off the record — with state-level GOP activists shows that these folks range from enthusiastic to at least open to America’s Mayor making a run for the Oval Office.

Start with the polls:

* Just last week, Gallup released a poll showing that four out of 10 Republicans consider “frontrunner” McCain to be an “unacceptable” candidate. And he does worst with self-described conservatives, half of whom deem him unacceptable. Meanwhile, 73 percent of Republicans call Rudy “acceptable.”

Meanwhile, another recent Gallup poll found 29 percent of registered Republicans prefer Rudy for the ’08 nomination, versus 24 percent who prefer McCain.

* But Rudy’s got a problem in the South, right? Wrong. At least not in Georgia or Florida, according to work by Strategic Vision, a GOP polling firm not affiliated with any ’08 campaign. In Florida, Rudy led McCain 39 percent to 28 percent in a June poll. In Georgia, Rudy leads 27 percent to 22 percent.

* But McCain would trounce Rudy in those states if people knew about his positions on abortion and gay rights (and his marital history), right? Wrong again. Strategic Vision CEO David Johnson told me of some “push polling” in Florida and Georgia — where his firm told voters about Rudy’s positions and marital problems and about McCain’s support for campaign-finance reform and working with Democrats against president Bush.

The effect on Rudy’s numbers, Johnson said, “underwhelmed” his expectations significantly, merely putting the two candidates into a statistical dead heat — not launching the more conventionally conservative (at least on issues like abortion) McCain into the lead. “Some people who identify themselves as strong conservatives, even when we did do the push-poll questions in Georgia and Florida, were still more willing to go with Giuliani,” Johnson said. “Strong, Christian conservatives.”

* Same story nationwide: In the Quinnipiac thermometer poll released last month, which asked registered voters to rate their feelings about politicians on a scale of 0-100, Rudy came out as the most popular politician in America among Evangelicals — with a rating of 66, against McCain’s 57 and George W. Bush’s 60.

* What about McCain’s “crossover appeal”? Isn’t he a better shot against Hillary? Nope. Pretty much every poll taken on the matter shows Rudy beating Sen. Clinton by a much bigger margin than McCain would. In May, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll showed Rudy with a nationwide nine-point lead over her; McCain, only a statistically insignificant 4 points. (And, in “blue” New York, where both Rudy and Hillary are known best, McCain loses to Hillary, as expected, while Rudy beats her in one of the most liberal states in the country — a state with 31 electoral votes.)

OK, maybe the polling’s all meaningless. Maybe conservatives voter will just recoil once they get to know Rudy, and scamper back to the comforting bosom of John McCain. But that’s not how state-level activists — particularly in the South — seem to see it.

“A lot of people don’t particularly like McCain,” Dr. Eddie Floyd, finance co-chairman of Bush’s 2000 and ’04 campaigns in South Carolina, told me the other day. He and other South Carolina GOP activists met with Giuliani recently. “We were very, very impressed with the mayor,” he said. “When he explained his positions, they were not as far off as you would think.”

McCain is “probably the favorite right now, nationally,” Floyd said. “But I think if [Giuliani] comes and visits South Carolina, takes some time in South Carolina, I think that that would change.”

What the Republican base seems to want is someone to get excited about. And McCain isn’t that person. “People are looking for somebody who might have solutions and be willing to fight to solve some problems and not just talk them to death,” Barry Wynn, the former chairman of the South Carolina state GOP, told me. “If you’re a sitting member of the U.S. Senate, it’s going to serve as a disadvantage.”

Rudy, on the other hand, has a reputation as a problem-solver. “The true positive that Giuliani has coming into any state is his record of accomplishment,” says Wynn. “Purity of thought might not be as important this time around.” Plus: “He’s certainly got star quality.”

Columnist and talk-radio host Tom Roeser, known as Illinois’ Mr. Conservative, seems to concur. He goes so far as to compare Giuliani to Eisenhower — a national hero the country is eager to draft into service. Roeser is a conservative Catholic, but he thinks McCain is untrustworthy, a divorce or two is no big deal and ’08 is going to be all about national security. Echoing a sentiment I’ve heard from many social conservatives nervous about Rudy, but willing to go along if he can moderate his social positions just enough, he says: “Suppose he gives us anything, he would be the guy.”

Yes, other factors work against Rudy. The Republican Party has a predilection to go with “the guy whose turn it is” — George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996 — and McCain’s that guy this time around. And the senator’s been doing a heckuva job locking up key staff and financial backers from the Bush campaigns. If Rudy wants to have a chance, he’s got to get the lead out. And some third candidate — such as Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Virginia Sen. George Allen or Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — could swoop in and become the social-conservative standard-bearer.

Still, the pundits might want to start inspecting the Republican grassroots a bit more closely. “My friends have said, don’t write this guy off,” one South Carolina player (who’s leaning toward McCain, but hasn’t yet met with Giuliani) told me. “They tell me, this guy’s got something.”

Ryan Sager’s book, “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party” hits stores Sept. 1. Email: editor@rhsager.com.