Allah reports on the folllowing Rassmussen poll:

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Rasmussen: Huckabee 29, Romney 24, Palin 18

He then notes:

Palin and Huckabee might be the most personally authentic, salt-of-the-earth candidates of the bunch, but does that necessarily mean they’re less likely to get rolled by Democrats if elected? Because that’s all I care about.

In the RasPoll, Palin has dropped from 24 to 18%, and Huckabee has increased from 22 to 29 percent. Romney is almost unchanged, 25-24%.

These are the three poles of the GOP: Huckabee represents the religious/socon wing: Romney fronts the establishment/RINO wing; and Palin bears the standard for the conservative/libertarian wing.

In an earlier post, I mentioned “crap croissant” GOP voters - these are the voters who will vote for anybody the GOP runs, no matter how bad they are as candidates. I suspect Romney is picking up most of these votes. The GOP’s socon/religious wing has traditionally numbered about a third of the GOP total vote. When it drops, these folks don’t vote for somebody else, they stay home. Huckabee, or any candidate with a strong tie to evangelical Christianity, will have their vote until or unless he goes away. Then part of it will go to whomever the GOP nominates, and the rest will vote “absent.” If the absentees are numerous enough, the GOP loses.

The third group - conservatives and libertarians - tends to be driven by concerns about personal liberty. They are the heirs of the original Republicans, the idealists who battled slavery and then, over the years until subsumed into the larger Statist Coalition after the loss of faith engendered by the Crash and Depression, and the FDR takeover, stood for individual liberty, small government, strong defense, and constitutional integrity. They are a minority within the GOP, but not as small a minority as indicated by the Palin drop.

But Palin has been the focus ever since the election of a concerted attack emanating not just from Democrats and their mainstream media minions, but also from her own party establishment elites, including even John McCain, her former running mate and the man who picked her for the Veep slot.

The heart of the campaign has been that she is too stupid and too conservative to win. I suspect that many Republican voters have become appalled and frightened by Obama’s moves to impose socialism on the nation via health care, and are looking for any way out - which means a leader they hope can defeat Obama. The timing fits: the single largest issue on the national table since the July poll has been socialized medicine, otherwise known as “health care reform.”

So, while Palin would normally have a solid claim to the socon/religious vote, Huckabee’s claim is even stronger, and social conservatives are, by their very nature, somewhat mistrustful of all this new-fangled feminist revolution they’ve been hearing so much about for the past forty or fifty years.

In times of trouble, they tend to move to the tried and true, and for them, you can’t get more tried and true than somebody like Huckabee, who runs explicitly as a Christian candidate.

The frosting on this particular short-term cake is that Sarah Palin has been pretty much hunkered down as regards the national scene. I am, frankly, glad to see it. When she returns to the national stage and raises that big megaphone that is hers to command, she has to do so with almost no missteps, so I’d much rather she takes her time and gets it right, then leaps prematurely and blows her own candidacy.

The big issue now is the elections in 2010. Sarah Palin won’t be running in them, although I expect her to influence some of them. The notion that her resignation from the Alaskan governorship has irreparably tarnished her is wishful thinking on the part of her opponents, I suspect. These sorts of issues don’t really have much staying power.

The upshot of all this is the poll that Allah ran at the end of his report. It was simple: Who do you want in 2012?

The results are as follows:

Sarah Palin - 63%
Liz Cheney - 13%
Mitt Romney - 12%
Mike Huckabee - 8%
Tim Pawlenty - 4%

Of course, Allah’s readership, like that of all the major online conservative sites, skews heavily Conservative/Libertarian. And those folks love Sarah. Which is why her numbers will rebound as socialized medicine/health care reform fails, the socon terror of Obama begins to fade somewhat, and most important, Palin rejoins the debate on the national stage in a big way.

UPDATE: I wonder what this is all about?

Sarah Palin has placed her resume on LinkedIn.

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