Thursday night's televised debate from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton will mark the final Republican showdown before Tuesday's Florida primary, as a new Miami Herald poll shows John McCain and Mitt Romney jockeying for first place and eclipsing Rudy Giuliani in his must-win state.
The 9 p.m. broadcast on MSNBC will offer the candidates a high-stakes, national platform to show up and put down their rivals.
The faltering economy -- voters' top concern in the poll -- is likely to dominate the discussion, with the candidates arguing over their stimulus plans and tax-cutting records.
A preview came Thursday morning: Before Mike Huckabee took a jog on Fort Lauderdale beach, he trampled on Mitt Romney's record as a venture-capitalist turnaround guru.
"One needs to look exactly at what the business record is," said the former Arkansas governor. "If it's taking companies in serious trouble, buying them when they're in pain, selling off their assets and then making a huge profit off of it, that's not something a lot of Americans can relate to except those who lost their jobs because of those kinds of transactions. ''
Romney supporters and former workers at Bain Capital, the firm where he made his money, have called such attacks unfair and that the nature of business leads to tough choices. The Romney campaign began airing a new television ad in Florida Thursday that calls the candidate "the full-spectrum conservative . . . a supporter of free-market economics and limited government."
Giuliani also launched a new ad that claims the former New York City mayor "fixed a broken economy." Lately, he's been stressing his tax-cutting record over his signature issue, national security.
Despite lavishing attention and commercials on Florida voters for weeks, Giuliani is tied for third place among Republicans with the scarcely visible Mike Huckabee, The Miami Herald poll found.
The survey of 800 likely voters reflected an astonishing turnaround by McCain, who just months ago had to pull his campaign out of Florida when he ran low on money. He's even beating Giuliani by 10 percentage points in South Florida, home to so many of the former New York City mayor's constituents.
Among Democrats, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton maintained a substantial lead.
With his poll numbers slipping back home in the Northeast as well, Giuliani's campaign is likely to collapse if he can't turn it around in the five days left before Florida's Jan. 29 vote, the final gateway before a blitz of primaries around the nation that could sew up the race.
"He may be running for president, but with these numbers, he wouldn't be elected governor of Florida," said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose firm conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Schroth, Eldon & Associates. Alluding to the timeworn song, Conway added: "If he can't make it there in Florida, he can't make it anywhere."
McCain is narrowly leading the Republican field with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Romney with 23 percent. The gap is within the poll's margin of error, placing the Arizona senator and the former Massachusetts governor in a statistical tie. Giuliani and Huckabee each got 15 percent.
Giuliani's Hispanic support is also crumbling, according to the survey.
"Giuliani has gone from a prohibitive favorite to a second-tier candidate . . . and the drop is traceable to dramatic erosion in South Florida," said Tom Eldon, Schroth's polling partner.
Asked about the 13 percent of the voters who haven't made up their minds, pollster Rob Schroth said he didn't expect them to fuel a Giuliani comeback. "Giuliani for all intents and purposes has virtually no chance to win in Florida," he said.
Giuliani's campaign strongly disputed that claim, pointing to its promotion of absentee and early voting and the large crowds that greeted the mayor Wednesday in Southwest Florida.
"The reality is we are gaining support," Giuliani said in Estero before the poll numbers were released. "I think you're going to see that over the course of the next three or four days. Our campaign is now in high gear."
For McCain, Florida looms as a test of whether he can hold his own within the GOP, since the independents who helped him win New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries can't participate in the state's primary.
"We feel we have the momentum in Florida and we expect to do very well there," said McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker.
Among the Democratic candidates, Clinton's front-runner's perch is intact, according to the poll conducted for The Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9. With overwhelming support from women and older voters, she garnered 42 percent of the vote, compared to 23 percent for Barack Obama and 12 percent for John Edwards.
Democratic voters are starkly divided along racial and ethnic lines. White and Hispanic voters are solidly behind Clinton, while blacks favor Obama 48-27, the poll shows.
North Lauderdale resident Sara Srebnik said the New York senator and former first lady has the experience to improve the nation's public schools and healthcare system. "I feel like this country definitely needs a change," said Srebnik, 34, who teaches fourth grade. "I feel she can provide that. I feel like she is in touch with a lot of issues that are important to me."
Eighteen percent of the Democratic voters are undecided, leaving room for South Carolina's primary on Saturday to give the winner a burst of momentum.
But blunting the impact of Florida's Democratic vote is the fact that the ballots won't count toward delegates at the nominating convention. Clinton and Obama haven't stumped in Florida for months, having pledged to boycott the state for scheduling an early primary that violates national party rules.
The result: a strangely lopsided campaign in the nation's largest swing state, flush with Republican bus tours and television ads and nary a Clinton or Obama yard sign in sight.
Florida was supposed to be Giuliani's firewall. After retreating from New Hampshire weeks ago, his campaign decided to hunker down in Florida on the theory that the delegate-rich state would catapult him to the nomination. But his poll numbers have plunged as McCain and Romney picked off smaller states and returned to Florida with their trophies from New Hampshire and Michigan.
"This Giuliani campaign strategy of betting it all on Florida somehow miscalculated how Florida voters would disregard his performance in other states -- it does matter to them if somebody has been a loser," Conway said.
"Giuliani's decision to pull out of the early states is going to go down in history . . . as one of the worst political decisions," Eldon added.
Statewide, Giuliani received support from 15 percent of respondents, down from 36 percent in a Miami Herald poll in November. Huckabee also got 15 percent. The poll was conducted Jan. 20-22, after Fred Thompson came up short in the South Carolina primary but before he quit the race Tuesday afternoon. He got 4 percent of the vote, followed by Ron Paul with 3 percent.
Huckabee, a charismatic former Baptist minister, is popular among frequent churchgoers, young voters and residents of the conservative Panhandle, according to the poll. Romney was the second choice for born-again Christians, suggesting that his Mormon religion is not a political liability.
There have been signs of Romney's momentum, with overflow crowds at a Coral Springs chicken wing joint and a Sarasota college campus.
Said Romney's Florida director Mandy Fletcher: "We actually were all on the phone last night saying we needed to start booking larger venues."
Miami Herald staff writers Oscar Corral, Tere Figueras Negrete, Mary Ellen Klas and Casey Woods contributed to this report.
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