I missed this on Friday, but there's been another poll out affecting the Washington Governor's race, and it's not good news for Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire.

Readers will recall that Republican Dino Rossi won the 2004 gubernatorial election according to two counts of ballots, but on the third count, Gregoire won by 133 votes (and note that the third count was allegedly plagued by massive electoral fraud).

Now, she's had 3 years to persuade those who didn't support her that she's the right person for the job and guess what? It looks like she's failed. The survey conducted last week by Moore Information found that 47% of the voters surveyed back Gregoire, 43% back Rossi, and 10% are undecided-- and with a margin of error of 4%, that makes this a statistical dead heat. Which is really, really bad news for Gregoire.

As the Seattle P-I commented:

"the fact that Rossi has managed to hang around close to Gregoire should worry Dems. Rossi hasn't had much a public platform these past three years and the news for Gregoire has been mostly good (good economy combined with bad atmosphere for Republicans nationally)."

Quite.

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Yesterday, I had coffee with a friend who was asking me my views on the presidential race. It occurred to me that while I write pretty regularly about whatever bit of dodgy-ness, whatever fiasco, or whatever bit of idiocy is on that given day coming out of the Romney camp, and that I also write fairly regularly on news affecting the Giuliani camp, I don't write much about the state of the race overall, and how I see it panning out. I certainly haven't done so in the interim since the evident demise of camp McCain.

As the title of this post suggests, the more time passes, the more I think we're headed into a Rudy-Romney race-- something that I absolutely would not have imagined this time last year, or even two months ago. But, here's what makes me say this.

First, there was the demise of the McCain campaign-- on the cards for awhile now, for anyone who has been paying close attention-- that has occurred in recent weeks. While McCain still seems to be retaining a reasonably solid number of grassroots supporters (depending on the state and the poll, between 10% and 20%), his fundraising is obviously in deep, deep trouble (Ron Paul is de facto in a better financial position than McCain these days), and he's lost some very good staff-- without whom it's tough to imagine him being capable of winning, particularly in the big states, and without money (it's not impossible, but it would be very tough).

Second, for all the hype about Fred Thompson, and as much as I like the man and feel that I could vote for him (something that I can say with far less ease about Romney, for example), I don't think he's going to get far, at least not based on the present circumstances.

While Thompson seems to be doing just fine in many polls, he's delayed several times on making an announcement o...

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Apparently, several Tory MPs are calling for a no confidence vote vis a vis David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK. I guess there are concerns that the Tories aren't doing too well even under popular Cameron's leadership, and the traditional base of the party is not happy.

I normally despise Ann Widdecombe, but she's got a point when she says that Cameron needs to give greater prominence to policies in areas like health (to be fair, she also said he needs to focus more on immigration and crime-- the former of which I absolutely do not agree with, unsurprisingly). One of the things that has most irked me about Cameron-- and don't forget, I voted for him-- has been his unwillingness to stick to the traditional Thatcherite line that more private health care is a good thing, and that we should be using the tax system to encourage that. Cameron made comments fairly soon after his election that he supported widespread use of the National Health Service and that Thatcherite policies on health (like giving tax benefits in respect of private health insurance) should be abandoned-- something with which I wholeheartedly disagree, since I don't think it's in taxpayers' interests to have as many people as possible relying on the public health service and it's definitely not in patients' interests to be relying on a system of care that frankly is, on the whole, abysmal.

I wouldn't go so far at this point as to say that David Cameron should be removed as leader (which is what a vote of no confidence is aimed at). But he hasn't been all I'd hoped for when I voted for him two years ago.

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