The Gallup Poll has released their "Feeling Thermometer" rankings of candidates for President in 2008. It's actually an interesting way of ranking them.
PRINCETON, NJ — Using a "feeling thermometer" rating scale, Gallup recently tested the public images of several of the Republican and Democratic candidates running for president in their respective parties. Of these, only one — Barack Obama — stirs up warm feelings in a majority of Americans. However, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain are all close to Obama in favorability. Clinton's image is the most polarized of this group: nearly as many Americans say she leaves them cold as say they feel warmly toward her.
This feeling thermometer question, utilized regularly by the National Election Studies, gives respondents a 0 to 100 scale to rate the candidates, where 0 is the coldest score, 100 is the warmest, and 50 is neither warm nor cold. Thus, it not only shows whether a respondent views a candidate positively or negatively, but also the degree to which he or she does so.
The high negatives are Clinton's biggest weakness, I suspect. But farther down the in the analysis is the breakdown by party affiliation. That casts an interesting light on things. Clinton's got very strong positives in that ranking, more so than any of the Republicans have among their voters. But Gallup's analysis comes to this conclusion:
All this suggests that Obama, Edwards, Giuliani, and McCain are slightly better positioned than Clinton to win the fall election and to earn popular support from Americans should they be elected president. Thompson technically falls into this auspicious group given his warm mean thermometer score; however, he is not widely known enough to project these figures onto the public.
That is very interesting. It is still too far from the election to really pay a lot of attention to polls in general – and I have pointed out repeatedly that drawing absolute conclusions from one snapshot poll is really foolish. So take all of this with a grain of salt. But it does make for some interesting reading if you're so inclined. (Not everyone really cares about polls, believe it or not.)
