Here is a story that should shed more light on the wisdom of the 50-state strategy.
Some Virginia newpapers have just released a state-wide poll they commissioned from the Mason-Dixon group. The bottom line: Bush is tanking in Virginia.
The ...poll ... shows that only 42 percent of likely voters in November now rate Bush's performance as "excellent" or "good," down 16 percentage points since he was re-elected last year.
The president's handling of the hurricane disaster and the war in Iraq appear most responsible for the sharp decline, said J. Bradford Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc., which conducted the survey Tuesday night through Thursday. The poll was conducted among 625 randomly selected likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
"At least half of that 16 point drop from nearly a year ago, if not more, was related to the hurricane, Coker said.
By contrast, last October the approval rating was 58 percent. The article goes on to note that apart from Bush, VA opinions are still solidly conservative; most notably, 59 percent support the Roberts nomination, with 16 percent opposing (a pretty solid margin there!). It's just Bush who is the problem.
The word 'albatross' figures prominently in the analysis. In particular, the article notes that Bush is going to be zero help for Jerry Kilgore in the governor's race this November. In Larry Sabato's words:
"For the first time since 1973, a Republican president is an albatross for a Republican candidate for governor," said Sabato, recalling how President Nixon during the Watergate scandal was a drag on GOP gubernatorial candidate Mills E. Godwin Jr.
Savor any sentence that talks about Bush and begins with any form of "For the first time since Richard Nixon..."
Note that this is all before we have had any Plame indictments. The upshot is that even in hardcore Republican territory, partisanship is not insurmountable; competence and basic human decency do count – at least a little.