re: #586 tradewind

I wouldn’t use it as evidence, no. Just more examples of how irrelevant a poll of political preference is when there is no relevance… i.e., the election’s not happening.

I’ll concede this much, head-to-head match-ups this far removed from an election are next to worthless. What is not worthless - however - is polling that reflects an individual’s “negatives”. While it’s possible, even likely, to move a voter from undecided position to a positive supporting position, it’s much more difficult to mitigate the effects of a candidate’s individual “high negatives”. In short, it’s tough to change the mind of people who “hate” you.

One needs look no further than Hilary Clinton to prove the rule. She had extraordinarily high negatives going into the Dem primaries last year. Dem voters were looking for someone else to vote for because they just didn’t like Hilary - and, conveniently, along comes Obama. And, we now know how that turned out.

Palin suffers from negatives even higher than H. Clinton. While I’m not yet sure if that would be fatal to her in the GOP primary, it would certainly be an obstacle of enormous proportion in the general election. Even if things are horrible in the country in 2012, she’s the one GOP candidate that I can foresee losing to Obama, irrespective of what his personal job-approval numbers may or may not be at the time.