Presidential snippets: Democrats breath a huge sigh of relief in California, and lead comfortably in Minnesota

Republican groups in California have been mounting an effort to pass an initiative that would allocate the state's electoral votes by district. This would have shifted about 20 safe Democratic electoral votes to the Republicans -- and made it very difficult for Democrats to win the White House. Polls had shown that the measure was unlikely to pass, but it would still have forced the Democrats to play defense in a state they can ill afford to waste time on.

But before the initiative got on the ballot, the groups pushing the effort had to collect enough signatures in a compressed time frame -- which requires a lot of money. And the LA Times just reported that they decided to pull the plug on the entire scheme, mostly because they did not have enough funding to push this to completion. They had actually gotten pretty far, as the Secretary of State had already approved the wording of the initiative, so it is rather surprising that they renounced this now. I would have expected some Republican donors to be interested in heavily funding this. All in all, great news for Democrats who have nothing more to fear in California! They can rest knowing they have 55 electoral votes safely in the bank.

In other presidential news, SurveyUSA released a general election poll from the very important state of Minnesota today. MN gave Kerry a lot of headaches in 2004, and only narrowly went to the Democrat. Republicans had a much harder time in 2006, going down big in the open Senate seat and keeping the governorship extremely narrowly. And Democrats are keeping that edge going into 2008. They win all 9 matchups:

• Clinton leads against Giuliani by the biggest margin, 52% to 41%. She also demolishes Thompson 52-39 and Romney 56-33.
• Obama leads across the board as well, albeit by smaller margins, especially against Giuliani where he remains within the margin of error (47-43). His lead is bigger against Thompson (49-41) and Romney (53-33).
• Edwards does on par with Clinton: 48-40 against Giuliani, 51-35 against Thompson and 55-28 against Romney.
  

Interesting that Clinton is the only one to cross 50% against Giuliani, and is also the Democrat who reaches the highest percentage (56% against Romney) in any matchup. Not what we expect from Clinton "the polarizer." Apart from that, it looks good for Democrats. Obama's narrow margin against Giuliani appears to come from lower recognition -- as Obama does not do worse against Romney than the two other Dems.