No, this is not coming from Rasmussen or an internal GOP poll, but from the normally Democrat-sympathetic Public Policy Polling. PPP pitted Barack Obama against five potential Republican challengers for the 2012 presidential campaign, and the only one Obama beat was … Jan Brewer. Even that, PPP admitted, resulted from Brewer’s lack of name recognition. The headline, though, is Sarah Palin’s dead heat with the President:
With his approval numbers hitting new lows it’s no surprise that Barack Obama’s numbers in our monthly look ahead to the 2012 Presidential race are their worst ever this month. He trails Mitt Romney 46-43, Mike Huckabee 47-45, Newt Gingrich 46-45, and is even tied with Sarah Palin at 46. The only person tested he leads is Jan Brewer, who doesn’t have particularly high name recognition on the national level at this point.
There are two things driving these strong poll numbers for the Republican candidates. The first is a lead with independents in every match up. Romney leads 48-35 with them, Gingrich is up 50-39, Huckabee has a 46-40 advantage, Palin’s up 47-42, and even Brewer has a 38-37 edge.
In case one wonders whether PPP’s sample is to blame, the partisan split favors Democrats by five points, 39/34. That’s probably overstating the actual size of the gap and the percentage of Democrats in the general population, which means that the independents got short shrift as well. Also note that this poll surveyed registered voters, not likely voters — a sampling technique that would tend to favor Democrats and Obama a little more.
The news is almost uniformly bad for Obama in the poll. His approval rating is now seriously underwater at 45/52. That gets even worse among independents, 40/56. He doesn’t get above 46% in any matchup with Republicans, not even Jan Brewer, whom he beats 44/36, with 20% undecided.
For Palin, the numbers show she can play against Obama. She pulls 8% of those who voted for Obama in 2008 and 35% of those who “don’t remember” (?!?), which puts her on par for outreach with Gingrich (9%, 40%), Romney (9%, 32%), and slightly better than Huckabee (6%, 32%). t’s not vindication for those who argued that Palin couldn’t do as well with unaffiliated voters, it’s cetainly something close to it.