Posted on 11/30/2008 2:59:10 PM PST by lewisglad
The Battle for the GOP Is On - Palin, Romney or JindalNovember 30th, 2008 By: Michael van der Galien | Tags: Leave a comment | Trackback The latest polls of Republican and all voters indicate that the conservative Republican base favors candidates voters in general do not think too highly of.
For instance, 24.4% Republican voters want Governor Sarah Palin to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Only 13.4% of all voters agree.
At the same time, Governor Mitt Romney ranks second among all voters, six points behind Palin, but leads among all voters (be it barely).
Among conservatives, both represent an entirely different faction: Palin is the Christian conservative while Romney is the darling of (elite and well educated) fiscal conservatives. These two battled it out earlier this year with fiscal conservatives favoring Romney, Christian conservatives supporting Governor Mike Huckabee, and the party ending up with Senator John McCain as the compromise candidate.
A compromise figure not able to make life truly difficult for now president-elect Barack Obama.
Most remarkable about the figures, however, is that there is a third candidate who does relatively better (meaning: smaller gap) among all voters than among Republicans: Governor Bobby Jindal. Jindal has quite a low profile nationally, yet he already ranks third in both categories. When all voters are included, the gap between him and Romney is only 1.2%, which is remarkable.
Huckabee fares less well; he is fourth with only 9.7% among Republicans and 8.0% among all voters.
This while Huckabee was the favorite of the Christian conservative base.
So what happened to Huckabee? Palin. Although Huckabee could count on the support of Christian conservatives during the primaries, they all flocked to Palin during the general election campaign. Palin became their candidate, their darling even. The defeat made her more not less popular among this group of conservative voters for they consider her a martyr.
The above means that the Republican Party could very well nominate a person who is deemed anti-intellectual, simple, naive and overly socially conservative in 2012 or that the war between the fiscal conservative and social conservative base will continue with at least one side staying home on election day, thereby ensuring Obama a second term.
That is, unless Palin can improve her image, studies hard and convince libertarian and fiscal conservatives that she is more than just a socon (unlikely). Or if Romney will succeed in courting Evangelicals and convincing them that either his Mormon faith should not be a problem to them (unlikely) or that his faith and their faith teach the same basic principles and values (less unlikely, but not altogether likely).
Of course there is a third option, an option I consider most likely and, especially, most in the interest of the Republican Party: that conservative voters will agree on a compromise candidate who endorses conservative views in most ways. In other words, a person who is a convinced social conservative (yet not overly so, for it would make it easy to destroy a candidate who is as socially conservative and as vocal about it as Palin and Huckabee are), who also has a track record of fiscal conservatism and who sympathizes with many libertarian policies.
At this moment, it seems to me that neither Huckabee nor Palin nor Romney fit the bill (although Romney would certainly be a better choice than the other two). Jindal, however, does.
For Jindal, 2008 and especially 2009 offer a tremendous opportunity to raise his profile nationally, to court conservatives of all stripes and to implement policies rooted in conservatism. He will have to use his time in Louisiana in order to show voters that conservative policies work and improve their daily lives. He he has already done so to a tremendous degree, but the most difficult times are ahead of him. The recession is likely to worsen in the coming months with Americans in all states suffering financially. Jindal will have to control the damage and improve his state at the same time.
Hear, hear! I’d take her in place of my Governator Ahnuld - the RINO idiot.
Palin and Jendal are the new Reagan.
We should have a candidate who is conservative,qualified
name Recognition and can go toe to toe with the
opposition and can speak articulately.
Also we don’t need a person whose adult kids are at home
while others are serving their country at war.
Sanford or Palin would be fine by me.
What good is being on a team full of people that are no better than the opponents?
I’m an independent, I like her.
It will be interesting to see what the rest of the independents think of her after she runs in a primary on her own and spends 150 million dollars selling her own image.
Even now, I expect some knucklehead to drag up that long-refuted load of garbage from the Club for Growth, accusing Huckabee (the only major Republican who stood up on day one to denounce the $700 billion bailout and who continues to rail against the government takeover of Wall Street) of being a big government socialist, which he is anything but, and post it here for the 7,345,912th time.
Go ahead and flame away, but bear in mind that I was there during the 2008 campaign, and I know the real story from the original sources.
wow thats to bad cause Sarah has my vote, guess we are still divided and were not gonna win for years to come.....bet you were one those lesser than two evil types huh. John McClaim was why we lost!!!!!!!
Steele.....I wish!
I am with you 100% on closed primaries! I am also against a few so called “key” early primary States deciding who the candidate will be for the rest of us.
“Otherwise, she will remain the political equivalent of Minnie Pearl.”
She is also known as the most popular Governor in America, with ratings hitting 93% among her constituency.
Even John McCain, who has the most liberal record of any candidate to run in recent memory, would have supported conservative ideas at least 2 to 1 over Obama, and I am certain McCain, Palin, Romney and Jindal would all be more loyal supporters of our troops and of our country than anyone on the other team.
Right now Team GOP is the team for conservatives. If you think you can find a better team then you should go. But if you are going to be on this team you would be wise to offer positive suggestions rather than stand in the huddle whining.
So you bought the “she is so stupid” stuff, huh?
You forget the PUMA's. They were supposed to come out in battalions on Election Day for McCain/Palin. They voted for The One (piss be upon him) anyway.
And your previous post was right. Reagan is dead, and conservatism died with him. All we're seeing is a circular firing squad.
[A]s I've previously noted, independent voters are not "centrist" or "moderate" in an ideological sense. Independents are actually "low-information" voters whose political ideas are an ill-informed hodge-podge that conforms to no ideological template. There is no coherent middle-of-the-road agenda to which they subscribe.The moderate argument that Republicans lose independents because of specific conservative policy stances -- on immigration, abortion, gay rights, etc. -- simply does not fit the reality of who these voters are. (And there is plenty of evidence that independents tend to be conservative on social issues.)Low-information voters often can't name their representatives or senators, but they usually know who the president is and which party he belongs to, and if they don't like the president (Bush is at 26% approval), his party will pay the price. The Republican Party's electoral problems, then, are more simple than some would have us believe. The simplicity of the problem doesn't mean the solution will be easy, but "moderation" -- chasing a centrist will-o'-th'-wisp -- is unlikely to be part of the solution.
These supposedly "moderate" voters are, as RSM points out, just "low information" voters. I've met these people all over the place. They don't really follow politics. They are socially conservative. That's why they vote against things like gay marriage. Ironically, one of the best summations of how these socially conservative low information swing voters vote was made by Chris Matthews in an old interview where he was asked about the Reagan Democrats. He said that in times of economic hardship these voters typically vote Democrat because they fear that they will be the next one out of a job and they will then need big government's help. In times of economic prosperity, they vote Republican because they see themselves as being the next one to get rich in an entrepreneurial boom. Reagan surprised this dynamic by convincing these voters in a time of great economic turmoil that it was in their best interests to vote for him instead of the big government liberal Carter.
My point in writing this is that "swing voters" are not turned off by the sorts of things the MSM tell us they don't like. They weren't turned off by Palin. They were turned off by the economic meltdown and McCain's inability to articulate a clear position on it. We should also not overlook the fact that these low information voters were inundated by ads from Obama because Obama had a $600 million campaign war chest compared to McCain's $90 million. McCain couldn't counter Obama's ad blitz, and so Obama was able to speak to these low info voters without any McCain follow up.
palin 2012.
Even if was posted on the Internet!!
Leaving out the right wing line, I think, they have a point.
Comparing any potential candidate to Reagan is as dumb as comparing Obama to Lincoln or FDR, IMO.
There are many on FR who have a goal to split the GOP.
They are Third Party loons and DU Trolls.
They speak of 100% pure candidates which would be nice but not reality.
Even their Third Party candidates are liberal in many areas, anti war, legalize drugs, some for global warming, gay marriage and amnesty.
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