Who ever would dare say former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is not a uniter, not a divider? It’s becoming evident that she’s already creating a consensus among voters — that they do not want her in the White House. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll indicates 59 percent of the voters would rule out voting for Palin:
….59 percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll flatly rule out voting for Palin for president — substantially more than say there’s no way they’d vote for Obama, or, for that matter, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. And Obama leads Palin by a wide margin in current vote preferences, factoring Bloomberg in or out.
It’s too early in the 2012 presidential election cycle to make too much of the horse-race results in this poll, produced by Langer Research Associates for ABC News. But the numbers of Americans who say they wouldn’t even consider voting for Palin — and the even larger number who see her as unqualified for the presidency (67 percent in an ABC/Post poll in October) — indicate serious obstacles in her path, even if not of the antlered variety.
I’ve said it many times before: Sarah Palin is an acquired taste.
Those who adore her think her comments are plain talking; those who don’t think she is without heft. Those who adore her send emails with an assumption that you love Palin and see things her way; those who don’t delete these emails as soon as it seems as its another email promoting Palin who is not as respected among these voters as a Mitt Romney or even a Mike Huckabee. The key divide is that Palin has become the quintessential incarnation of the talk radio political culture: talking in sound bytes and often name calling. Her habit of calling reporters and even now Republican critics “limp” or “importent” is just what her supporters want to hear and is a turn off to many voters who may feel the news media is obnoxious or that other Republicans are craven politicos with their fingers in the wind.
But those who think she can’t be nominated are deluding themselves. Anything can happen in primaries. And there could be a configuration of events where even a general election win is not impossible. Nothing is impossible until the final votes are tallied (or retallied: look at 2000). More from ABC:
The trends, moreover, are not in Palin’s favor. Just over a year ago 53 percent said they wouldn’t consider her for president. That’s risen, as noted, to 59 percent now, and includes significant chunks of the GOP base, such as 27 percent of John McCain voters, nearly three in 10 Republicans, four in 10 conservatives and four in 10 evangelical white Protestants. About equal numbers of men (58 percent) and women (60 percent) rule Palin out.
Just eight percent of Americans say they’d “definitely” vote for Palin were she to run for president; an additional 31 percent say they’d consider it. But that adds up to just 39 percent who’d even give her a look (41 percent if you count the undecideds) — well short of what it customarily takes to win the White House, absent an unusually strong third-party candidate.
And Obama? ABC finds Obama is damaged goods, too, but not as damaged as Palin:
In contrast to Palin, 26 percent say they’d definitely vote for Obama for a second term, and an additional 30 percent would consider him — an available pool of 56 percent (58 percent, with the undecideds thrown in). Despite recent criticisms from his party and its liberal branch, 54 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of liberals — and 65 percent of liberal Democrats — say they’d definitely vote to re-elect Obama, along with nonwhites, his most committed groups by far.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.