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February 14, 2012 3:40 PM Mitt Losing “Electability’ Too?

By Ed Kilgore

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The Public Policy Polling outfit has been offering Mitt Romney a bottomless cup o’ misery this last week. It was the first to show Rick Santorum passing Mitt like a stalled Beamer nationally, and the first to show him ahead in Michigan, too. Now comes a PPP general election survey indicating the mightiest pillar of Romney’s candidacy, his “electability,” is looking shaky.

Tom Jensen spells it out:

PPP’s newest national poll finds Romney trailing Obama by 7 points at 49-42, while Santorum trails by only 5 points at 49-44.
This is a new development in the flavor of the month game. Over the previous 6 months when Romney first trailed Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich in our national polling he still did on average 6 points better than them in our general election tests.

Now these findings don’t necessarily mean Santorum is really more electable than Romney. Like Santorum’s overall lead, his relatively strong showing in test heats against Obama is significantly attributable to the easy ride he’s had in the GOP contest so far; about the only negative attacks he’s attracted from rivals, in debates or in ads, have been designed to undermine his standing with hard-core conservatives, not with the general electorate.

Santorum’s relentless extremism on cultural issues—up to and including his enthusiastic embrace of a national “Personhood Amendment” similar to the initiative recently trounced by the voters of that secular-socialist stronghold Mississippi—is not going to go over well in a general election. Nothing about his economic platform makes him more attractive to general election voters than Mitt Romney, or for that matter, the House GOP. Then there’s the inconvenient fact that the last time Rick faced a general election, as an incumbent U.S. Senator, he lost by 19% (yes, it was a bad year for Republicans, but not that bad).

So at some point, Santorum is likely not going to look all that electable The problem for Romney is that this “some point” is not right now. And to the extent that the entire GOP nominating contest has represented a frantic search by conservatives for an alternative to Romney who isn’t a sure general election loser, the activists of the GOP “base” probably won’t look too deeply at any available evidence they’ve finally found one in Santorum.

Unless this survey is an outlier, it might help convince Romney to ignore the counsel of those who have argued he can’t afford to “go negative” on Santorum as he did on Perry and Gingrich. Could be he can’t afford to do anything else.

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a Special Correspondent for The New Republic.
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Comments

  • stormskies on February 14, 2012 3:49 PM:

    electability.....don't think so

    From C&L

    Well! This is heartening news. Can it be that reality is sinking in, and voters are starting to pay attention to the sheer craziness of the Republican agenda?

    While positive ratings for Congress remain at an all-time low, more voters than ever see the Republican agenda in Congress as extreme.

    The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 35 percent of Likely Voters say it would be more accurate to describe the agenda of Republicans in Congress as mainstream, while 52 percent feel extreme is a more accurate description. Thirteen percent (13 percent) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

    The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters nationwide was conducted on February 8-9, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.

  • c u n d gulag on February 14, 2012 3:52 PM:

    I don't know how Mitt's going to be able to "take" this.

    Santorum's the one who's used to "coming from behind."

  • Josef K on February 14, 2012 3:56 PM:

    Again, the lunatic or the fop. Not much of a choice for the GOP, is it?

  • T2 on February 14, 2012 4:09 PM:

    "losing electabililty" ?? What electability? The guy has, except for one spurt, been unable to break out of the 25% range in his OWN party. He's never been ahead of president Obama in any polls. It's been the Media that has bestowed the Front Runner status on Romney and the "best to beat Obama" tag. There has been no evidence of either of those.....to the opposite. Now he runs behind a true idiot in Santorum and is trounced by Obama. You can't lose what you never had.

  • hells littlest angel on February 14, 2012 4:30 PM:

    Electability, in a reality-based world, is a political "hot-stove league" topic for discussion. That it's being hyped in the middle of an election tells you all you need to know about the viability of the Republican party's candidates, and all you need to know about the press's irresponsible fixation on the sporting contest aspect of a major election.
    If you want to talk about electability, wake me up in December and we can debate Elizabeth Warren vs Sherrod Brown in the 2016 primary.

  • troglodyte on February 14, 2012 4:40 PM:

    HLA,

    That is a dilemma devoutly to be wished. Warren or Brown? Wouldnt it be nice to have Elizabeth Warren on the stump in 2016 making the same arguments for policy that she has been making in Mass?

  • TCinLA on February 14, 2012 5:02 PM:

    Once people get a sense of Senate-Loser Frothy Mixtures combination of things you shouldn't mention that everyone thought had been settled 50 years ago, he;ll go back to losing by a bigger margin than he did in 2006.

  • bob h on February 15, 2012 7:49 AM:

    If little Ricky were able to take blue collar Ohio, and his home state of PA, that could spell trouble for Obama.

  • dalloway on February 15, 2012 9:47 AM:

    Blue collar Ohio and Pennsylvania may have a very conservative minority that will vote for Little Ricky over the Mittbot. But when the rest of the working class voters in those states realize he wants to abolish unions and Medicare, I don't think he'll be much of a threat to Obama.