Townhall.com has sponsored one of those irritating pop-up polls that haunt the Internet. I normally ignore such things. My pop-up blocker catches most of them, but this one slipped through. (Okay, I confess! I asked for it. Townhall sneakily embedded it in a Facebook ad and I clicked on it.)
The question was very simple and probably easy to answer for 99% of the population. It asked the weighty question, “Should Sarah Palin run for Senate? She's considering it.” Since “Hell, no!” and “Only for the entertainment value” were not provided as response choices, I settled for “No, her time has passed.” The alternative was “Yes would love to see her back in elected office,” which seemed too subtle in its irony.
After voting, I got to see the results. Over two-thirds of the respondents wanted Sarah to run (but there was no way to determine how many of those respondents were mentally appending “and lose” to their answers). This is not a surprising result from a crowd of people willing to follow a link provided by Townhall.com. (Of course, Sarah might lose interest if she discovers that a Senate term is six years long.)
The responses were broken down by state. I looked at them one by one. Idaho was the most eager to see Palin on the Alaska ballot for U.S. Senate. No big surprise. I moused around until I found the state most opposed to a Palin candidacy. (You're ahead of me, right?)
It was Alaska. The state that knows Palin best expressed itself with 55% in her favor and a record 43% opposed. No other state broke out of the thirties in its opposition to the half-term governor. And don't forget that this is a Townhall crowd. I was not surprised. You weren't either, were you?
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6 comments:
"Over two-thirds of the respondents wanted Sarah to run [...] The responses were broken down by state."
Sounds to me more as though they were broken down by the ravages of advanced syphilis.
Perhaps Alaskans can't envision someone who only lasted 2½ as Governor (including time off to campaign for VP) making it through a 6-year Senatorial term.
Plus, Palin and Murkowski are political enemies (I believe this grudge dates back to Frank M.), so those who supported Lisa's successful write-in election against Palin's hand-picked GOP candidate (a particularly extreme tea-partier, of the Santorum stripe) would likely find a strong GOP primary opponent to run against Palin.
Addendum: 2½ YEARS.
On the bright side, "Alaska Senate Race 2014: Dems May Benefit From GOP Woes":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/alaska-senate-race-2014_n_3550217.html
"...it seems highly unlikely that the state's most high-profile Republican, 2008 vice presidential candidate and former Gov. Sarah Palin, who resigned during her first term, will acquiesce to the demands of a NATIONAL [my emphasis] conservative group that wants her to run. She recently returned to Fox News as a paid commentator."
"The business of being Sarah Palin — and why she isn’t running for Senate," by Chris Cillizza:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/10/the-business-of-being-sarah-palin-and-why-she-isnt-running-for-senate
"...Then there is the fact that while Palin is a hero to some conservatives nationally, her numbers in Alaska aren’t all that stellar. A poll conducted by Harper Polling, a GOP-aligned auto-dial operation, showed Palin in a statistical dead heat with Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell in a hypothetical Republican Senate primary in 2014. Then there is a survey from PPP, a Democratic auto-dial pollster, that showed Alaskans with a less than favorable view of their former governor. [...] Palin knows that the worst thing for that brand would be to return to the political arena as a candidate and lose. To run would be to risk the cachet and marketability she has built up in conservative circles."
Hey, Kathie, why don't you let us know how you feel about Palin? :-)
Seriously, my first thought was "could she stay engaged that long?" and my second was "could she even win the primary?" It wasn't till my third that I figured the last thing she wants to do is run for something - and lose, again.
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