08 November 2011

GOP: Groping Employees No Big Deal

A new USA Today/Gallup survey shows Cain tied with Mitt Romney at 21% among a nationwide sample of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, an increase of 3% for Cain over the previous month's survey. It's also the sixth major public poll in a month showing Cain leading or statistically tied with Romney atop the GOP field.

From here.

The latest polls include questions about the sexual harassment charges lodged against Cain from his days leading the National Restaurant Association.

It also says a lot about just how weak the Republican Presidential primary field is these days.

Cain is a guy who gropes his employees and tells them they might lose their jobs if they don't go along. His signature proposal, the 9-9-9 plan is the biggest tax increase for working and middle class Americans ever proposed in living political history, almost entirely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans, from the political party that is supposed to be against tax increases. He has no experience in the political process except as a lobbyist. Nobody I know seriously believes that Herman Cain will be the GOP nominee, but I don't get out much and his polling is impressive.

Bachman is calling all of the other candidates in the GOP primary socialists. She's married to a guy who "deprograms" gay people for a living.

Romney can't command more than a fifth of the primary voters, or a decisively lead over anyone else, despite leading the insider nomination talley decisively and he shows up at events where keynote speakers have denounced him for not being a Christian. His signature legislative accomplishment was passing a health care reform program in his state almost identical to Obamacare, the legislation that Republicans love to hate, a few years before Congress did. He's flip flopped every which way on U.S. involvement in Libya.

Governor Rick Perry is in fourth place (with 11%) behind Newt Gingrich (12%), who resigned from his leadership post in Congress because of a sex scandal and was doing so poorly earlier this year in the primary race that his staff abandoned ship en masse. Perry can't debate to save his life, nearly flunked out of Texas A&M (and had to change his major from an agricultural one to manage it) and shares a background with GWB as a cheerleader in college.

Romney's absolutely horrendous campaign would have decisively ended any chance that he would be elected by now if it weren't for the utterly pathetic state of the bunch of idiots he's running against in the primary. The first primary votes are just two months away, so these polls aren't simply irrelevant either.

Nate Silver's silly model say the secret to Republican victory is to nominate Jon Huntsman, who is barely even in the running.

At the rate things are going, Obama's best strategy may be to quietly allow the Republicans to self destruct, although engineering an economic recovery without Congressional assistance would be an even better trick.

1 comment:

Meng Bomin said...

To be fair to poll respondents, this poll was conducted before the most recent allegations (which are also the most damning) came out. It's also worth noting that a month ago, Cain was still on the upward phase of his popularity curve and this poll is being taken shortly after what I believe is the peak of his popularity.

It will be worth watching the polling trends that emerge toward the end of December, right before the actual contests are held. My suspicion is that we may get some meteoric rises and precipitous falls as we have seen for Rick Perry and less so for Michelle Bachman and are in the process of seeing for Herman Cain, but in the end, the Republican electorate will, perhaps with some reluctance, settle around Mitt Romney.

As for Huntsman, if he had a chance of winning the nomination, it would be worth considering whether he would make a potent general election challenger. As a major component of anti-Romney sentiment in the Republican party is opposition to his Mormonism, it's hard to see Huntsman succeeding as an anti-Romney, so I agree that he's probably a non-issue.