In the first major poll released since Wednesday’s GOP debate, Republican and Republican-leaning voters leave no doubt as to who the national front-runner is today in the GOP nomination race:
Hours before the start of the first-ever CNN/Tea Party Republican debate, a new national survey indicates that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is maintaining his lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. And according to a CNN/ORC International Poll, what appears to be Perry’s greatest strength – the perception among Republicans that he is the candidate with the best chance to beat President Barack Obama in 2012 – seems to be exactly what the GOP rank and file are looking for.
The survey, released Monday morning, indicates that 30 percent of Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP support Perry for their party’s nomination, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 18 percent. Romney, who’s making his second bid for the White House, had been leading the list of Republican candidates in the national polls, but since Perry launched his campaign a month ago he’s jumped ahead of Romney to capture the top spot.
Here, however, is the most surprising—and most important—stat:
Perry’s biggest strength may be the electability factor, with 42 percent saying he has the best chance of beating Obama next year. Some 26 percent say Romney has the best chance of defeating the president.
According to CNN, this survey was conducted from the 9th to the 11th, which means that these voters came to the above determination after Perry doubled-down on his social-security-as-ponzi-scheme mantra and after Romney co. spent the ensuing four days relentlessly hammering him as consequently unelectable.
It’s early yet, and the poll only garnered 446 respondents (though that’s hardly going to lead to a margin-of-error encompassing the 16 point gap between the two Governors on this score); but if this holds, the GOP nomination race may be much shorter than many had anticipated.
And perhaps even more interesting, it would appear that those who asked whether the Republican primary was radical enough to choose a true believer rather than the man most able to defeat the President had it all wrong. As is often the case when it comes to conflicts between our desires and our faculties of reason, the Republican voters have managed—somehow, someway—to rationalize themselves into conflation of the two.
Somewhere, David Plouffe is smiling.