A new Gallup Poll measures Republican voters’ views on several potential Presidential candidates for 2012:
PRINCETON, NJ — Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are most interested in seeing Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Those three received the highest scores among the 10 possible candidates evaluated in a recent Gallup Panel survey.
The Nov. 5-16 survey asked a nationally representative sample of Gallup panelists who identify themselves as Republicans or are political independents but “lean” to the Republican Party to say whether they “would or would not like to see” each of 10 Republicans “run for president in 2012.”
Palin, Romney, and Huckabee — all of whom raised their national profiles during the 2008 campaign — top the list. Romney and Huckabee unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination versus John McCain, and McCain tapped Palin as his vice-presidential running mate.
But not all 2008 GOP national candidates rated as highly in the survey. Republicans are evenly divided as to whether Rudy Giuliani should make another attempt at the White House. Giuliani was the early front-runner for the 2008 nomination, but performed poorly in the early primaries and caucuses before dropping out of the race.
The only other person evaluated who received a more positive than negative review is Gen. David Petraeus, head of the United States Central Command. It is unclear whether Petraeus would enter politics, but his growing acclaim owing to U.S. progress in Iraq could make him somewhat of a “dream” candidate for the GOP, similar to ruminations about Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 (who ran) and Gen. Colin Powell in 1996 (who did not).
Not surprisingly, there is a somewhat of a difference between the desired candidates of self-identified conservative Republicans:
And self-identified moderate Republicans:
So much of this is preliminary that it’s value is, at best, limited. It’s not surprising that names like Palin, Romney, and Huckabee will be at the top of the list — they are the people whose names have been before the public the most over the past year. Most Republicans know very little about a guy like Bobby Jindal, or about someone like Mark Sanford, who wasn’t even included in the poll.
The other thing to remember about polls like these is that, one year ago, Rudy Giuliani was the prohibitive leader on the GOP side and Hillary Clinton seemed like the inevitable Democratic nominee. History turned out quite differently.
So, you know, take this poll for what it’s worth, which isn’t much.
November 23rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
[...] Voters Starting To Look At 2012 Field Posted in November 23rd, 2008 by in 58774 GOP Voters Starting To Look At 2012 Field GOP Voters Starting To Look At 2012 Field A new Gallup Poll measures Republican voters’ views [...]
November 24th, 2008 at 10:52 am
According to that poll, the only person who actually has room to grow is Bobby Jindal.
Everyone else is a known commodity or has too high negatives.