Top American conservative blogger Ryan Streeter, quoting Peter Wehner and Kimberley Strassel, demands that Sarah Palin immediately announce that she will not be entering the primary race for the GOP nomination. She must do this, he says, so that an electable conservative can take on and beat Obama in 2012.
The election is only 17 months away and the polls are clear, according to Streeter. 37% of Republicans and GOP leaning independents go negative on Palin.
These 37% are not inside-the-beltway types but drawn from the voting populace across the country. And surely they get their Palin not through some lamestream media outlet, but most likely through Fox News and many of the same web sites as Palin’s supporters.
Jonathan Jones reaches a similar conclusion for his UK readers.
These people clearly have an inside track into the minds of US voters. They are also telling us that polls taken in the summer of the year before a presidential election are a foolproof predictor of the final outcome.
They are the experts, very close to the brightest and best of the political, academic and media elite, so they must be right.
After all, see what was happening in June 2007.
The 26 polls taken in May and June show yet a different picture. Giuliani still leads, but with only 26 percent; McCain, with 17 percent, is barely ahead of Thompson, at 15 percent, and trails Thompson in polls taken since Memorial Day. Romney stays at 10 percent
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Democrats are more confident this year, with some reason. Polls show that voters prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican by solid margins. And Democrats seem pretty settled in their preferences for candidates. Hillary Clinton averaged 34 percent in December-January polls, 36 percent in February, 34 percent in April and 35 percent in May-June.
Barack Obama, at 18 percent in December-January, rose to 23 percent in February-March, then flatlined — 25 percent in April, 24 percent in May-June. John Edwards was at 12 percent in December-January, 13 percent in February-March, 16 percent in April and 13 percent in May-June.
Whoops……
