Rudy Giuliani Not Interested in Winning GOP Nomination After All

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Huh. And I thought that Rudy wouldn’t want to mess up his mojo. After all, he was doing pretty well in the early stages of the Republican primary elections. He’s polling well, and he’s doing a decent job of raising money. In addition, you may not have been aware of this, but he was also the mayor of New York City on 9/11. It’s true, you can look it up. Anyway, you wouldn’t think he would want to go out of his way to alienate his base on an emotional social issue.

Yet, that’s just what Giuliani’s decided to do.
After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.
[…]
Mr. Giuliani hinted at what aides said would be his uncompromising position on abortion rights yesterday in Huntsville, Ala., where he was besieged with questions about abortion and his donations to Planned Parenthood. “Ultimately, there has to be a right to chose,” he said.

Asked if Republicans would accept that, he said, “I guess we are going to find out.”

Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that his stance on abortion alone might disqualify him with some voters, but he said, “I am at peace with that.”
Well, that’s a principled stand, Rudy. Not necessarily principled enough to get me to forgive you for saying that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for terrorism, but it’s principled nonetheless. Especially after he fumbled the abortion question so badly in the recent candidate debate. Bottom line is that you have to give the guy credit for bucking the party line on something that he cares deeply about.

Or do you? After all, couldn’t there be a broader political reason for this disclosure at this time?

This is presidential politics, baby. Of course there could.
At the same time, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign — seeking to accomplish the unusual task of persuading Republicans to nominate an abortion rights supporter — is eyeing a path to the nomination that would try to de-emphasize the early states in which abortion opponents wield a great deal of influence. Instead they would focus on the so-called mega-primary of Feb. 5, in which voters in states like California, New York and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani’s social views than voters in Iowa and South Carolina.

That approach, they said, became more appealing after the Legislature in Florida, another state they said would be receptive to Mr. Giuliani, voted last week to move the primary forward to the end of January.
Ah ha! So it's not that he's trying to tank the primary, it's that he's trying to win it in a different way. Interesting.

See, normally, primaries are won by "centrist" candidates moving to position themselves as a solid partisan for the primary voters of more traditionally rural states where they are less likely inclined to support social liberalism. Here, Giuliani is trying to make himself out as a candidate with nuanced enough positions to appeal broadly to party moderates and swing voters in the larger more urbanite states. This shift is a result of the move by states like California and New York to bump up their primary date in an effort to gain a greater voice in the process. And while I could give two shits about Giuliani and think he’ll likely get pounded by any of the three major current Democratic candidates, I’m really quite excited that the Big State strategy seems to be working.

Gone are the days when a candidate looks to sew up his or her party’s nomination by trumpeting solutions to issues that Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are concerned with to the exclusion of anyone else. In the past, if a candidate didn’t do well in those states, their nomination was doomed. That system also meant we were often left with two candidates who had moved so far away from the center (usually to the right) to capture the nomination that when it came time to appeal to swing voters on the general there was no way to get back to them.

Now that the huge number of votes cast in California, New York and Florida will have a more direct impact on the nomination, candidates are now forced to appeal to those coastal voters. As a result, we may be entering an era where the race to the center is the only race throughout the campaign. Maybe it's because I'm a member of the snobbishly coastal intellectual elite, but I see an emphasis on more "big state values" as a good thing. It means issues like environmental protection and reproductive rights will not continuously get the short shrift.

This still leaves the question of whether this particular strategy will work for this particular candidate. Giuliani does still have to convince Republicans that he’s not just a New York RINO in chicken-hawk’s clothing. In addition to disapproval from his GOP rivals, Republican strategists are highly skeptical that this will work out for him.
The risks for Mr. Giuliani are clearly high. Polling continues to show abortion is a major concern of Republican primary voters. In a New York Times/CBS News poll in March, 41 percent of Republicans thought abortions should be prohibited, compared with 23 percent of Americans in general; in addition, 53 percent of Republicans said they wanted a Republican presidential nominee who would make abortions more difficult to get.
[…]
Some conservative Republicans said abortion alone was a major hurdle for Mr. Giuliani.

“I think it’s a big problem for him,” said Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime opponent of abortion. “The Republican Party has been pro-life in its platform ever since 1976, the first platform after Roe, and I think most of the Republicans understand they can’t afford to lose the pro-life constituency.”

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative magazine, said, “You can’t win as a pro-choicer who is going to deliberately set on challenging the party’s orthodoxy on the issue.”
I doubt I’ve ever agreed with Phyllis Schlafly, and I certainly am not going to start now. I think Giuliani’s move here is a rather shrewd one and could pay dividends once the big state “mega primary” takes place. And while I don’t believe the difference between Iowa Republicans and California Republicans is really that great, if there’s one issue that may separate them from each other, it could be this one. Especially once the public begins to understand the broad social ramifications of the Gonzales v. Carhart decision a few weeks ago. Hopefully then they'll see the dire need for a pro-choice president this next time around.

Subrosa thinks Giuliani is a twat and would never consider voting for him under any circumstances, but the political science geek in him is really quite charged up about all of this.

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