WASHINGTON — Frederick Cole wants the Democratic Party to take back the White House in 2008. "Look what a mess we're in," said Cole, a nurse in Louisville, Ky. "It's time for some fresh, new-thinker ideas."
Yet if his party nominates Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for president, the 52-year-old Democrat plans to vote for her Republican opponent.
"It's a personal thing," Cole said. "I don't like her. I think she's condescending and arrogant, even worse than Al Gore, who has no personality."
It is a paradox of the 2008 presidential race. By a wide margin, several polls show, voters want a Democrat to win -- yet when offered head-to-head contests of leading announced candidates, many switch allegiance to the Republican.
In a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll conducted this month, this dynamic was most clearly evident with Clinton.
When registered voters were asked which party they would like to win the White House, they preferred a Democrat over a Republican by 8 percentage points. But in a race pitting Clinton against former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican was favored by 10 percentage points.
Clinton's showing against Giuliani was the starkest example of how the general Democratic edge sometimes narrows or vanishes when voters are given specific candidates to choose between.
The poll also showed Clinton trailing when matched against two other Republicans, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The deficits, however, were within the survey's margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
These results, as well as follow-up interviews of poll respondents, reflect the array of difficulties that Clinton could face as the Democratic nominee.
Plenty of time remains for Clinton to temper resistance to her candidacy. But for now, her failure to match her party's generic advantage underscores the primacy of personal appeal in a presidential race, regardless of political context.
"You give someone a name, and they automatically associate it with a specific set of pros and cons," said Dean Spiliotes, a political science professor at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. "With a candidate as well-known as Hillary Clinton, that's going to cause some problems."
Conversations with a dozen Times/Bloomberg poll respondents, including Cole, exposed a number of those problems, above all a sour aftertaste from controversies of her White House years with President Clinton.
