Sarah Palin, 30-to-1 odds against (3.2 percent chance of winning nomination)
Ms. Palin’s numbers aren’t bad — she generally polls somewhere in the teens when she is included in a survey, and she led one poll as recently as two weeks ago. The numbers are down from where they had been before her comments about the shootings in Tucson in which Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, was wounded, but are not off appreciably from a couple of months ago, and may even have improved by a percentage point or two.
Still, I consider Ms. Palin to be a long shot to win the nomination for three reasons.
First, we don’t have any real idea as to whether she is going to run.
Second, if she does run, it’s not clear how much effort she’ll be willing to put into her candidacy. Her fly-by-night approach — most recently evidenced by her unwillingness to stick to a schedule on her “One Nation” bus tour — is not compatible with the attitude that winning campaigns have taken.
Nor is it clear that Ms. Palin can count on running a “viral” campaign, with the media hanging on her every tweet. The share of media bandwidth that she earns has declined significantly, and although there would surely be an uptick if she were actually to start a campaign, she’ll have to compete against other candidates who draw their fair share of attention, from Ms. Bachmann to Newt Gingrich, as well as those with more traditional credentials. (The downside to the so-called 24/7 media cycle is that you can become old news in a hurry.)
And third, even if Ms. Palin’s campaign goes relatively well, there are a lot of Republicans who will want to see to it that she isn’t their nominee. She currently runs almost 20 percentage points behind President Obama. This cannot be attributed to a lack of name recognition since she might be the best-known politician in America aside from Mr. Obama himself; instead, it’s because almost 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of her.
There have been some “extreme” nominees before, like George McGovern and Barry Goldwater; that precedent is why I think that Ms. Bachmann is a plausible candidate. But no candidate has been nominated with unfavorable numbers as high as Ms. Palin’s. If someone like Ms. Bachmann is on the verge of winning the nomination, I expect you’ll see some efforts to prevent that — but these would be constrained at some point by fears about inflicting collateral damage upon the party (like harming turnout among base voters who will be critical to Republican efforts to win control of Congress). Ms. Palin, however, may be regarded as such an unmitigated disaster that you could see a floor fight at the convention, or threats by either Ms. Palin or a moderate candidate to run as an independent.
The upshot is that Ms. Palin will have a high bar to clear. It probably will not suffice for her to win a narrow plurality of delegates (as someone like Mitt Romney could get away with), or even necessarily a clear plurality (the threshold that I suspect that Ms. Bachmann would need to reach) — rather, she might need an outright majority. That could require her to run a nose-to-the-grindstone, 50-state campaign — exactly the kind that Ms. Palin seems the least interested in.
I am actually in the "Palin won't run" camp right now (Though, like Palin, I reserve the right to change my mind if her Bi-polar disorder changes up and she becomes optimistic about her chances.), so I am only interested in these numbers as a reinforcement of my belief that Palin is really NO political threat to the President, or even to the ultimate GOP front runner.
She is simply a shiny distraction from a field of less than compelling Republican candidates, that the media likes to focus on occasionally to keep from nodding off before the 2012 election.
I still think she is a potentially dangerous individual when it comes to agitating the most unhinged members of the right wing radical fundamentalists, so she bears watching for that reason, but she will never be a serious political candidate for anything ever again in my opinion.
I mean really, a 3.2 chance of winning? I think refrigerator mold has a better shot at the nomination than that.
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