Romney, Giuliani Top Conservative Straw Poll

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, is the first choice of conservatives' hearts, and the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, is the most broadly supported candidate by conservatives. Those were the results today of the annual CPAC Straw Poll, measuring the presidential preference of attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

With a total of 1,705 ballots cast by registered conference attendees, this year's marks the largest ever CPAC Straw Poll, a 36% increase over the number of ballots cast last year (when the former senator from Virginia, George Allen, won the poll).

Asked "who would be your first choice to be the Republican nominee for president," CPAC attendees responded as follows: Romney 21%, Giuliani 17%, Sen. Brownback of Kansas 15%, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich 14%, and Sen. McCain of Arizona 12%.

Mr. Romney ran an intensive ground operation at CPAC, flooding the convention with college-aged campaign workers — paying many of their registration fees and even busing some of them in and paying for their hotel rooms, according to a report in The New York Times — wearing blue Romney shirts, carrying posters for their candidate, and voting in the straw poll. He also spoke yesterday afternoon to rousing applause and hosted a reception for conference attendees yesterday evening.

Mr. Giuliani, by contrast, spoke to the conference yesterday but otherwise took a hands-off approach, with no booth in the exhibit hall and little staff presence on the ground — emblematic of his campaign's so-far lackadaisical approach to grassroots organizing.

Mr. McCain skipped the conference altogether, angering many here. (His showing at even 12% is surprisingly high given the boos his name has been greeted with at every mention these past three days.)

On a ballot combining CPAC attendees' first and second choices for the Republican nomination in 2008, Mr. Giuliani came out on top. The results were: Giuliani 34%, Romney 30%, Gingrich 30%, Brownback 24%, and McCain 20%. At a conference where conservative columnist Ann Coulter railed against Mr. Giuliani by name for being "very liberal" and compared him to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the former mayor received a much warmer reception than many pundits had expected.

That Mr. Giuliani is also a highly acceptable second choice for those currently in other camps also cuts against the conventional wisdom that most hard-core conservatives would find a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights nominee utterly unacceptable.

Fabrizio & McLaughlin, the Republican polling firm that conducts the CPAC Straw Poll, also broke down its results by what kind of conservative attendees identified themselves as being. Conservatives who identified themselves as concerned primarily with reducing the size of government supported Messrs. Romney and Giuliani essentially equally — they received 21% and 20% of these attendees' votes respectively. Conservatives concerned with "traditional values" chose Mr. Brownback as their nominee with 29% of their vote, followed by Mr. Romney at 22%. Messrs. Giuliani and McCain were tied among these voters at a paltry 8%. Mr. Giuliani led among national-security conservatives with 25% of their vote, followed by Mr. Romney with 21%, and Mr. McCain at 18%.

CPAC attendees were also asked why they thought the Republican Party lost both houses of Congress last year. The plurality, 30%, said it was because of the Iraq war. The respective performances of the Republican Congress and President Bush ranked second and third in conservatives' blame hierarchy. Only 3% of poll participants believed that "voters reject[ed] conservative principles."

The CPAC Straw Poll is dominated by the conference's younger attendees. Sixty-two percent of the participants were between 18 and 25 years old.

Mr. Sager is the online editor of The New York Sun. He can be reached at rsager@nysun.com.