Fred Rules

So says a poll of center-to-right leaning bloggers. (h/t Podium contributor Paul Cave)

Basically, they asked bloggers to give their top 5 and bottom 5 candidates for the GOP nomination. After subtracting the "bottom 5" scores from the "top 5" scores, your overall field looks like this.

1 - Fred Thompson (+72.0)
2 - Duncan Hunter (+37.5)
3 - Rudy Guiliani (+33.0)
4 - Mitt Romney (+25.0)
5 - Mike Huckabee (+24.5)
6 - John McCain (-13.0)
7 - Tom Tancredo (-15.5)
8 - John Cox (-38.0)
9 - Alan Keyes (-41.5)
10 - Ron Paul (-65.5)

A few things to take away from this poll...

- The GOP netroots are still wildly in favor of Fred Thompson. Duncan Hunter isn't surprising, as he has a good netroots organization going, as well. Huckabee is about even with Romney, which actually follows national trends.

- Despite the incredible activism by Ron Paul supporters on the net, they've probably turned off a lot of the netroots supporters that were previously undecided. John Cox is so unknown that nobody thought to really mark him down further.

- This race continues to be a 5-man horse race. However, it's also showing that the "D" in Dark Horse doesn't always apply to "D"emocrats. Mike Huckabee is turning into the dark horse candidate in the GOP.

UPDATE - It appears Kilo has carried this story, as well.