Zogby on Palin and 2012:
Among Republicans, she gets the support of 30% of Born-Again Christians, 32% of weekly churchgoers, 34% of National Rifle Association members, 28% of current gun owners and 29% of self-identified conservatives. More GOP support comes from 32% of blue collar workers, 30% who shop weekly at Wal-Mart, 28% of NASCAR fans and 25% of both those with children under 17 and those with family members in the military…
Palin looks to be stealing Huckabee’s thunder among Republican religious conservatives and working class voters. Huckabee is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and his highest GOP totals still come from Born-Again Christians (15%) and weekly churchgoers (18%), but those numbers are about half of those drawn by Palin. Despite his populist economic message, he wins only 10% of blue collar Republicans.
These kind of numbers so soon after the massive smear job the left and the MSM did on her. Pretty damn good.
Looking at those numbers you can understand why Huck is a bit perturbed:
I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.
While they most certainly have many of the same qualities and policy beliefs, I think the main difference was the genuineness. Huck always came off as ingenuine while Sarah came off as the every woman….well if that woman could hunt, fish and bake. But you get my drift. Can you imagine Sarah saying something like this?
I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody about it.
Nope. She is conservative and proud of it. We don’t need another wishy-washy candidate in 2012, whether it is Sarah or someone else…I don’t care. But enough with the RINO’s.
Rush had a great segment recently explaining the Sarah phenomenon, why the left and some Republicans hate her so, and how we can get back to our roots:
CALLER: …But my question to you is: Why are all these Republicans out there, why don’t they like her?
RUSH: A-ha. A-ha. Okay, I want you to listen very carefully to this. It’s a long answer that I’m going to try to make very brief. In the first place, when you say, “Why don’t Republicans like her?” there’s a whole bunch of different kinds of Republicans now. Like there’s you and me, and we’re conservative Republicans. But we also have to deal with liberal and moderate or Rockefeller Republicans in our party. So the party has lost its primary identity: strong national defense, tax cuts, smaller government. It’s lost its identity. It doesn’t believe smaller government is possible. The Republican Party has too many people who want the government to grow. Just spend the money on different groups of people in different ways in order to get votes. It’s called liberalism lite. They’re calling it redefine conservatism. Sarah Palin makes them nervous because of precisely what you cited. She inspired and revved up a Republican Party. But there are people in the Republican Party who don’t want it to stand for the things that she stands for. I think her effectiveness is making her a target.
The Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are also not fond of her, and they’re doing everything they can to make her appear to be the face of the Republican Party, because they think most of the country despises her, too, based on exit polls. You know, Barbara Walters in the interview I did with her last week asked, “You like Palin?”
I said, “I absolutely do.” I said, “I think she was great.” I said, “Why don’t you like her?”
“She was uninformed,” Barbara Walters said, and a light went off in my head, because there is the template. The one interview she did with Katie Couric and they’ve all decided she’s an idiot and she’s uninformed. They do not know that there were people in the McCain campaign trying to sabotage her and that she was under tight controls, and she finally wanted to bust out and be who she is. Those of us that pay attention saw enough of who she is to realize that she is incredibly valuable to the conservative cause and the Republican Party going forward. But to those that don’t like her it’s simply because of that, Tim, she’s effective and she threatens the old boy network. It’s not a gender thing. She threatens the old boy network, but I’m telling you this is a fundamental thing to understand.
We can talk about Obama all we want here, and we can try to educate people as to what’s coming down the pike. But one of the larger battles we have before we even talk about trying to defeat Obama again is defining who we are as a political party, because there is a huge battle going on. There are so many factions of the Republican Party now, and many of them are gutless. Many of them, when they get to Washington, after being elected, go wobbly, they turn moderate because they think that’s what you have to be to get along. We just ran a presidential campaign based on being moderate and reaching out to all these liberal Democrat voters, thinking that’s the only way we can win, ignoring the blueprint for landslide victory. We got people who think we need to rerun this campaign over and over again. We gotta get rid of our conservative ideology. Arnold Schwarzenegger says we’ve gotta drop conservatism from the Republican Party. We’ve got our conservative intelligentsia wise men, these people in the media who also think that the worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party is to listen to me. So Tim, I’m telling you, we have a huge battle to define — and the Republican Party is it because that’s the only party that’s going to oppose Democrats, and there’s going to be a big battle for control of it. In many ways it’s subtly already started, and it’s going to intensify once next year gets going and Obama’s actually inaugurated.
We need to remember that Bush won twice when he energized the base. McCain lost when he tried to hard too appeal to the left.
Never again.
Rush is right. We have a huge battle in the next four years. To define this party and win back the White House in 2012.
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