Poll: Obama looking good, relatively
The good news for Republicans – Barack Obama is testing weak in the national polls.
The good news for Barack Obama – Republicans are testing even weaker.
“Obama’s numbers continue to tell the same story. Voters aren’t all that enamored with him right now, but when they look at him, and then they look at the Republican alternatives, he comes out looking pretty good,” said said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, which in its latest nationwide polling has voters evenly divided on Obama’s job performance (47 percent thinking he’s doing a good job, 47 percent unhappy with his performance, but has the top GOP presidential contenders faring worse.
The best of the crop, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, has a net favorability rating of -7 (35 percent favorable/42 percent unfavorable). Everybody else is in double-digit net unfavorable territory, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the worst shape of the field at -31 (26 percent favorable/57 percent unfavorable).
In head-to-head matchups, Obama leads Huckabee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by five points each (48-43 over Huckabee, 47-42 over Romney). Obama leads Gingrich by 11 points at 50-39, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty by 14 at 47-33, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin by 15 at 53-38.
Obama sitting pretty in Virginia for ’12?
Polling done last week in Virginia suggests that Barack Obama would do well in what has become a key swing state in the 2012 presidential election.
Obama, who in 2008 became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia since the 1960s, leads his closest potential Republican challenger in the state by six points, according to polling done Feb. 24-27 by Public Policy Polling.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is the candidate trailing Obama by six in Virginia, 48 percent to 42 percent in the PPP poll. Obama leads former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee 51 percent to 43 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich 51 percent to 39 percent, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin 54 percent to 39 percent.
“Virginia is just as strong for Barack Obama right now, if not stronger, than it was in 2008,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling. “That’s very good news for his reelection prospects because it’s hard to imagine him taking Virginia without winning overall.”
Good news for Obama, bad news for the GOP field – all of which tested negatively in Virginia, from Huckabee (40 percent favorable, 41 percent unfavorable) down to Palin (30 percent favorable, 63 percent unfavorable). Obama’s favorable/unfavorable rating is 48 percent/45 percent.
The big leads for Obama despite the low net favorability rating for him in the Virginia numbers is more a sign of the weakness of the GOP field than Obama’s relative electoral strength, according to Debnam.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Palin: The road back to nowhere
Rampant speculation continues over what Sarah Palin’s plans regarding 2012 might be. The conventional wisdom: She’s running, no question about it, yep, she is, damn the torpedoes, or she’s not, because she’d rather be a conservative celebrity, because being a conservative celebrity pays more than being a presidential candidate.
I’d like to throw in a third rail to the Palin question. Run or not, she’s on the road back to nowhere sometime in 2012.
And I think she’ll ultimately decide to run, mainly because she has to, if she wants to scratch and claw a few extra minutes to add to her 15 minutes and counting. Whatever value Palin has is to the 35-40 percent of the voting electorate that considers her the hero of the far, far right, and her value to them is in her Facebook posts blasting socialist ObamaCare death panels and similar noisy claptrap.
More columns from Chris Graham at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
That group sees Palin standing up to the big bad Democrats who are trying to turn America into Europe. A decision by Palin not to run would be akin to joining the hate-America lamestream libs.
So she runs. She doesn’t come close to winning the Republican nomination, and the reason has nothing to do with lamestream media socialist anti-American libs. It won’t take much for the likes of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee to paint a picture of Palin as the modern-day GOP version of George McGovern, the darling of the liberal left who swept to the Democratic nomination in 1972 to face the hated oppressor right-wing nut Richard Nixon, who promptly wiped the floor with McGovern in a landslide to end all landslides.
If Palin lasts into February 2012 with a fighting chance, I’d be surprised. More likely she’s 2012′s Rudy Giuliani, the 9/11 hero who blundered his way into an ignominious early exit in the 2008 GOP nomination contest and now is a C- or D-lister in the GOP celebrity pantheon.
Based on those presumptions, I wouldn’t expect Palin to formally enter the race until sometime in the third quarter of 2011, so that she can have enough time to maximize the cash out on her fleeting celebrity. A half-hearted effort at the nomination will follow, an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle, as it were, with desperate grabs at whatever embers fall her way in the spring and into the summer and fall, which will be highlighted by a primetime early-week speech at the Republican convention that will represent her swan song from the American political scene.
All things considered, four years in the political limelight isn’t bad considering how little Palin had to offer outside of the occasional incendiary Facebook post and two glorious years running a state with a budget smaller than your average county government.
Column by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
The World According To ChrisGraham.com: What the mosque issue is really all about
Chris Graham breaks down the controversy over a proposed Muslim community center in New York in terms of the burgeoning divide that marks American politics and American civil society.
Link to the column on TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
Poll: Romney leads GOP field
Edited by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
A new Public Policy Polling survey released on Monday has former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading the potential 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination field. Read more
Poll: Obama’s numbers up against GOP field
Posted by afp on January 20, 2011 · 2 Comments
Obama would beat Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee by five-point margins, around the same margin that Obama outpolled Republican nominee John McCain by in the 2008 election. PPP measured Obama’s standing against Newt Gingrich at a 12-point lead, and its poll has Obama leading Sarah Palin by 17 points.
Two keys in the internals: “Democrats have really rallied around him since the party’s defeat in November, and he continues to benefit from a pretty weak field of potential opponents,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling.
A third factor emerges from a look inside the internals. Obama is picking up support among Republican voters. Obama’s numbers among GOP voters has improved around 10 percent against each of the potential GOP candidates tested in the PPP polling.
Filed under Blogs · Tagged with barack obama, mike huckabee, mitt romney, newt gingrich, public policy polling, sarah palin