Eric Kleefeld at TPM Cafe looks at some recent poll results, which show Rudy Giuliani losing to all the top Democrats in New York State, and writes:

A new poll just out from Siena College undermines one of the Rudy Giuliani campaign's key talking points to Republican audiences: That he'd be a fearsome adversary in a general election because he'd put blue, east-coast states like New York in play....

The poll finds that in New York, Giuliani certainly does better than the other Republican candidates. Nonetheless, he still loses to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama by wide margins...

But even if Giuliani doesn't put New York in play, he does put the rest of the region in play -- recent Quinnipiac polls show him beating all the leading Democrats in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Is there any surprise there? Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, but he always acted as if he found the place repulsive and believed he was the only good thing about it. If you were watching him from an hour or so away, safely suburban but within the gravitational field of the city (which you found scary), maybe his tough-guy act seemed just the ticket. But New York State is full of people who live a world away from the city (upstate residents) or actually are city residents, most of whom can't stand Rudy anymore. So he loses his own state -- but we really shouldn't discount his potential appeal in heavily suburbanized states like Connecticut and New Jersey (and possibly elsewhere -- say, California).