Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Republican voters nationwide say former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is their pick to represent the GOP in the 2012 Presidential campaign. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 24% prefer former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney while 18% would cast their vote for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gets 14% of the vote while Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty
gets 4%. Six percent (6%) of GOP voters prefer some other candidate while 7% remain undecided.
These numbers reflect an improvement for Huckabee since July when the three candidates were virtually even. Huckabee’s gain appears to be Palin’s loss as Romney’s support has barely changed.
The person Republicans would least like to see win the nomination is … Tim Pawlenty? I thought the rap on T-Paw, at least for the moment, is that he didn’t inspire strong feelings one way or another. As for Sarahcuda, on the same day that he took the July poll, Rasmussen ran another one asking if her decision to resign would help or hurt her presidential ambitions. The split was 24/40 — and yet she was still ahead of Huckabee at the time. If it’s not her resignation that’s hurting her now, as I speculated this morning, what is? Too much Levi Johnston freak show collateral damage, maybe? I don’t think most people even know who he is.
Bruce Drake at Politics Daily
With Obama’s poll numbers down and the hapless Democratic Congress thrashing about for traction on virtually every issue, you would think these would be the glory days for the GOP. But one look at the results of the new Rasmussen Poll, trumpeted as a “shock” on Drudge, leave little to be shocked, or even surprised, about. Despite Huckabee’s mild ascendance, there is not one new face here or one new idea. It’s the same old, same old. Indeed even Palin at this point represents pretty conventional conservative thinking.
Of course on the other side of the ledger it’s worse. Even (or especially) with Obama’s increasingly tedious exhortations for “hope” and “change,” the Democrats aren’t offering us anything the slightest bit original. It’s just recycled LBJ. You would think in our high tech era there would be some thing new, but no. All the creative intelligence in our culture seems to be being invested in iPhone apps these days.
We can’t entirely blame the politicians, however. It is in the nature of that political culture NOT to reward original thought. And the media makes it worse. They don’t seem to be interested in the slightest in the search for new ideas. Everything is a score card. Who’s up? Who’s down? And, of course, in preserving their own liberal status quo. Nothing new there.
Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right:
Palin’s pain has been Huckabee’s gain, it seems, as he appears to have picked up some of her support. Given the selection on offer, it’s probably not that surprising that Mitt Romney emerges as the preferred candidate of the wicked secular right (or at least among those Republicans “who attend church once a month or less”). Meanwhile, Pawlenty’s nod to the Intelligent Design crowd doesn’t (I’m delighted to say) seem to have done him much good so far. He’s the candidate that GOP voters would least like to see as the party’s pick, although I suspect that glorious distinction may in reality simply reflect the fact that Pawlenty is just not that well-known. Perhaps he should try coming out for UFOs next time.
We’re a long, long way from 2012, but there’s nothing in this poll that’s bad news for Obama. And that’s bad news.
Daniel Larison responds to Stuttaford:
Andrew Stuttaford cites a new Rasmussen poll of Republican presidential preferences showing some sizeable support for Huckabee, and he wonders if this means that the GOP will become the “party of Huckabee.” I think this is extremely unlikely. While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.
[…]
Even if it seems irrational, movement activists who are not primarily interested in social issues distrust Huckabee intensely, and they will work to block him and deny him funding just as they did last time. The anti-Huckabee sentiment among movement activists is a useful reminder that all the Republican culture war defenses of Palin during the general election were aimed at mobilizing all the people whose candidate, Huckabee, they had just spent the previous 18 months mocking and ridiculing with all of the same language used against Palin. For turnout purposes, the GOP still finds Huckabee’s people useful, but its leaders and activists will not tolerate Huckabee taking the lead in the party as the nominee.
The effect this will have, as Stuttaford’s post suggests, is that most Catholic, mainline Protestant and secular Republicans will rally to whichever anti-Huckabee candidate appears strongest. This will most likely mean a coalition of voters arrayed behind Romney, who will then be a far weaker draw in the general election than Huckabee would have been. At first, that sounds implausible. Surely the more “moderate,” less “sectarian” candidate should be able to win more support, right? No, not really, because the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics. Huckabee does not need to do as much of this because he would already have much of the right locked down. Like McCain, Romney will continually be trying to satisfy people on the right who cannot muster much enthusiasm for him, but who will wrongly conclude that he is more “electable.” That could involve another desperate VP nomination to generate interest or a campaign that actually moves right after the primaries are over. Fear of their own evangelicals could lead Republicans to embrace a technoratic wonk whom most voters will not be able to trust and whom most conservatives grudgingly accept because he is not Huckabee.
James Joyner, responding to Larison:
In fact, the 2008 Republican
Except that, technically, it wasn’t. Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain
The results, per CNN, are at right.
The fact of the matter was the Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse. Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates. As I wrote at the time:
“But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.
Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.”
I stand by that assessment.
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