Posted on 04/17/2010 11:37:12 AM PDT by Brices Crossroads
In surfing the blogosphere, a person can encounter a divergence of opinion on Sarah Palin's viablity as a GOP candidate. Most of the polls at this stage match her against Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Many of them, including the Democrat poll, PPP, include Romney and Huckabee and fairly consistently place Romney in the lead in a three way race. Polls this early, even by reputable pollsters, are notoriously unreliable. I suggest that there is empirical data available at this point that strongly suggests that Palin could not be defeated either by Romney or Huckabee or anyone else in the prospective filed. I base this on an analysis of Palin's popularity based upon two indicia-her facebook following and the size of the crowds she generates-as compared to the electoral strength that her two prospective rivals showed in the 2008 GOP primaries.
I. FACEBOOK'S ROLE IN THE 2008/2012 ELECTIONS
2008 has been dubbed the Facebook election. Barack Obama effectively utilized Facebook to win both the nomination and the election. At the end of the 2008 campaign, in November 2008, after he had won both the nomination and the Presidency, Obama had slightly more than 2 million friends on Facebook. (McCain by contrast had about 600,000).
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2008/11/19/barack-obama-and-the-facebook-election.html?PageNr=2
As I write this, Sarah Palin-who has not even declared her candidacy-has 1,531,000 friends on facebook, 22 months before the election. Romney has 283,000 and Huckabee has 213,000. In the 2008 GOP primaries, the top three votegetters (McCain, Romney and Huckabee) garnered 95% of the vote and their collective total was a little over 18.5 million (McCain: 9.8 million; Romney: 4.5 million; Huckabee: 4.2 million). The number of friends Sarah Palin has attracted on Facebook represents about 8.3% of the total votes FOR ALL THREE OF THE MAJOR 2008 CONTENDERS COMBINED. Romney's facebook following is about 1.5% of the total and Huck's is about 1.2%.
Sarah Palin's Facebook following is approximately as large as the total vote received by all the GOP candidates (including Thompson, Giuliani and Paul) in the first four contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan (which totaled 1.6 million votes). McCain, the eventual winner, did not even collect 1.5 million VOTES until the California primary on Super Tuesday, two weeks after he had effectively clinched the nomination in South Carolina and Florida.
While Facebook is not an infallible predictor of future political success, it is certainly both an organizational tool and a barometer of the intensity of support for a candidate. Sarah Palin's success in driving the policy debate via Facebook and twitter presages her future use of these media both to raise money and to get out the vote. If she has over 1.5 million Facebook followers now, 22 months before the first GOP contest and prior to having declared her intentions, it seems probable that those numbers will at least double after she announces her candidacy and as the primary season approaches. This is the superstructure of a very formidable, unprecedented grassroots campaign that no one in the GOP is currently poised to match.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Results_of_the_2008_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries
II. CROWD SIZE
Crowd size, like Facebook following, is not per se a linear predictor of electoral success. However, it too is an indicator of support and, more importantly, the INTENSITY of the support (intensity being the coin of the realm as far as party primaries are concerned), since it is often "broken glass" voters who determine the party's nominee. The intensity factor is much more significant, if there is a viable candidate who appeals to the party's base (as Obama did in 2008 as a true blue liberal; as Palin will do in 2012 as a true blue conservative). Obama actually received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but the commitment of his fervent supporters generated overwhelming dominance in the caucus states particularly, where intensity is even more crucial. This turned out to be the difference.
Palin's crowds have been nothing short of staggering, unprecedented for a former Vice Presidential candidate and exponentially greater than any generated by her potential rivals. The stories of hundreds and thousands of people in Michigan and Iowa camped out overnight in freezing weather to get her book signed should send shivers down the spines of Romney, Huck, et. al. as they contemplate those same people dragging their relatives out on cold evenings for caucuses and primaries. Her recent crowds have been estimated at:
Searchlight, NV: 9-14,000(press estimate); 30,000 (security estimate)
Boston, MA: 13-16,000 (for a midday rally on a workday)
Louisville, KY: 16,000 (on Friday night)
Minneapolis, MN: 11,000
Everyone remembers the crowd of more than 60,000 that waited in the hot sun to hear Governor Palin at the Villages in Florida in 2008. (The crowd at that single rally represented more than 10% of Romney's entire vote total for the WHOLE STATE in the Florida Primary in 2008 and about 8% of the total for McCain, who won the primary)
III. CONCLUSION
Party Primaries are about intensity and organization. Money, while not totally unimportant, is much less so. McCain was broke in 2007 and early 2008 and still won the nomination. Reagan was broke in 1980 after losing Iowa, just before he fired John Sears, and he went on to win easily. Romney (in 2008) and Bush (in 1980) were flush with cash, and they both still lost badly.
Sarah Palin will, I believe, be financially competitive in 2012 with Romney, although I expect the GOP Establishment to pour money into his (or whoever emerges as the RINO alternate) coffers. In virtue of her ability to raise money on Facebook and with small donations, she will not be outspent by Romney the way Huckabee was in 2008.
However, it is the intensity of her support, which is currently only discernible empirically by factors such as Facebook and crowd size, that I believe will clearly vanquish any potential opponent.
Ping!
There’s LIES, DAMN LIES, STATISTICS, and now POLLS.
LOL.
IMO, she is going for the sidelines.
NO!
Great post.
Here they go again, the lame stream media trying to pick the GOP candidate, by defining the field for lame brains to pick from.
Time to think for ourselves.
I’m a true believer.
If she was going for the sidelines, she would be accepting every speaking fee, which she is not by a long shot. If she wanted to make money, she could have had her own television show like Huckabee and could have made ten times as much money as she has made.
Palin’s choice will be as, it always has been: Country first.
Interesting post. Well done.
Or if things are headed the way they look to be headed she will be offered her blindfold and cigarette along with the rest of us.
h/t to Lurker. (:
This tells you more about the polls and pollsters than it does about reality.
Here is a dose of reality. Romney will never be president, and neither will Huckabee. If either one ever was, they'd enact half of Obama's agenda and call it conservatism, but we're safe, because neither one will ever be president.
Now lets take it one step further while we're at it. If the GOP were to nominate another McCain in the person of Huck or Romney, it would fracture the GOP perhaps for good. The Left wants this, of course, and Romney is so convinced that its his turn that he won't see it coming and won't care anyway.
The problem with those polls is that they do not comport with reality. The Lamestream media is in deep denial about her intentions, but they absolutely know that she is formidable. Their objective is to try to demoralize her supporters with phony polls. What I intend to do is to give the lie to their phony information and point to incontrovertible facts, both current and historical.
Agree, cash is not all.
remember John Connally, 1980 GOP candidate
what was it? $12 million for a single delegate?
SP should get the nomination easily against the expected field if she wants it and of course works hard and debates well.
“Here is a dose of reality. Romney will never be president, and neither will Huckabee. If either one ever was, they’d enact half of Obama’s agenda and call it conservatism, but we’re safe, because neither one will ever be president.
Now lets take it one step further while we’re at it. If the GOP were to nominate another McCain in the person of Huck or Romney, it would fracture the GOP perhaps for good.”
Agreed. If Huck or Romney were nominated, it would be a win/win for the left. They would probably lose, as you say, but if they did not, they would be people the left could “work with.” After they enacted the half of Obama’s agenda, they would be swept out in favor of another Obama, who would finish the country off.
The computer gave me about 7 republican choices and obama to pick from, Palin was NOT mentioned, so I answered "I prefer another person".
The computer thanked me and hung up.
I don't know who the polling service was but it was apparent they have decided who they want and it was not Palin.
The idea, that you either run for president or you make millions on the sidelines is a false one.
Former presidents and former presidential candidates make millions, too.
Not that she probably ever considered it, she could be a movie star making millions. At this point, she could become a Libturd hero if she would just give up politics. But it is country first. Of course no one knows if she is running, but from her resignation speech in July and her remembrance of visiting soldiers who sacrifice so much for this country, I read into this a commitment on her part to do all she could for them and the rest of us, respecting their sacrifices by offering up herself.
“The computer gave me about 7 republican choices and obama to pick from, Palin was NOT mentioned,”
Talk about ignoring the obvious. The poor fools in the lamestream media actually think people pay attention to them. They tried hard to marginalize Reagan in the late 1970s without success. Now you have talk radio and cable TV and the internet. Their feeble push polls are like spittin’ in the ocean. But they can’t help themselves. They have to try.
How do you like your crow served? I want to jot it down for future reference. Say, about November 5th, 2012.
(((( Sarah ping list ping! and a few others )))))
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