Here’s a pretty good argument for why Sarah Palin won’t run for president in 2012

6 comments October 21st, 2009

 

 Tom Schaller marshals a lot of facts and theories to support his wager that Sarah Palin won’t seek the GOP presidential nomination next time around.

 An excerpt:

 I realize that polls more than two years out from the Iowa caucuses may well be meaningless, but what’s most interesting about the head-to-head matchups between Palin and both Huckabee and Romney is that she is losing to two candidates from very different parts of the GOP coalition. Romney is a very recently converted social conservative who is probably at heart more liberal on social issues than he sold himself in 2008. He’s a northerner-midwesterner from the business wing of the party who is expected to struggle with the hardcore, evangelical conservative base, given his social issue flip-flopping and his Mormonism. Yet Palin trails him because, presumably, he outflanks her to the center-right side of the party.

 Huckabee? Just the reverse: a southern man of faith with broad appeal to social conservatives who is probably viewed with some wariness by the GOP’s business elements. Yet he also leads her, presumably because he has a stronger appeal among the base than does Palin and thus outflanks her from the right. My point is this: Palin’s ideological appeal is easily dominated because it is wide but not deep on the far right and neither wide nor deep among the party’s institutional and more mainstream elements.

 There’s more to Schaller’s argument. Read the whole thing HERE.

Why is the South so different from the rest of America when it comes to politics?

26 comments October 21st, 2009

 

 As we see HERE, attitudes about President Obama, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, respectively, are far different in the Northeast, Midwest and West from those in the South.

 Among Southerners, for example, Obama is viewed favorably by only 27 percent, while 68 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. But among Americans in the rest of the country, the numbers are almost exactly the opposite — 67 percent favorable and 24 percent unfavorable.

 The regional differences are a little less dramatic with respect to feelings about the Democratic and Republican parties, but they’re still significant.

 Why is this? What is it about Southerners that places them so far outside the American mainstream?  Is it a matter of persistent Confederate sympathies? Is it plain and simple racism?

 And what does the future hold for a Republican Party that has its only regional stronghold in the South?