One month before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the ground is suddenly shifting beneath the feet of the front-runners, with the contests in both parties now wide open.
Hillary Clinton, who had led all polls in Iowa for months, has slipped into second place behind Democratic rival Barack Obama. And while she continues to lead in national polls, that lead has dwindled to the single digits.
Obama’s campaign strategist, David Axelrod, attributes the shift in part to concerns about Clinton’s electability.
“The reality is that every poll suggests she’d go into this general election with the highest negatives of any nominee we’ve ever had,” Axelrod told CNN Sunday. “And this is an election in which I think we can bring in independents and disaffected Republicans.”
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson countered that women will push his boss to victory.
“Poll after poll consistently shows in the national level that we are doing extremely well with women,” he said. “They are the basis of our support.”
The race is evenmore fluid on the Republican side, with dark horse Mike Huckabee taking the lead for the first time in Iowa, where he was running a distant fifth place a mere 100 days ago. Huckabee’s surge is actually good news for national front-runner Rudy Giuliani because it weakens Giuliani’s main GOP rival, Mitt Romney.
“Both parties’ front-runners are in trouble,” former White House political strategist Karl Rove told “Fox News Sunday.” “Because if they lost, then that would give whoever beat them a chance to get some momentum.”
The question is whether the tight primary schedule provides enough time for the winning glow from early contests to shine on other states.
“It’s unclear what kind of bounce people will get in this compressed schedule,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Giuliani is gambling that even if he loses Iowa and then New Hampshire in early January, he will win California and other large states in early February, vaulting ahead of Romney. But that strategy could be threatened by mounting questions about Giuliani’s personal background.
The former New York mayor’s campaign is still reeling from recent revelations in Politico.com that Giuliani visited his mistress on Long Island in 1999 and billed the security expenses to obscure city agencies. Giuliani has strongly denied any accounting irregularities.
“I think that the Giuliani campaign has a good explanation for this,” said Mara Liasson of National Public Radio. “But … any time it reminds people of his kind of checkered personal past, it’s not good for him.”
Meanwhile, Republicans John McCain and Fred Thompson are still in the hunt.
“We are now in the extraordinary situation where you could make a plausible argument for any of five candidates in the Republican race winning this thing,” said analyst Jeffrey Toobin on CNN. “Five candidates. I mean, that’s just extraordinary, given how close we are to the vote.”
