Unnamed Republican Candidate Beats Obama If Election Held Today
A generic Republican candidate would beat President Obama by a slight margin if the election were held today, according to the latest Gallup poll released on Thursday.
Forty-four percent of the respondents said they would vote for a Republican candidate while 39 percent stated they would support Obama. With a five percent difference, this range is slightly out of the plus or minus four percent margin of error. Eighteen percent of respondents said they had no opinion.
The poll was based on phone interviews held between June 9 and June 12 with 914 respondents. Gallup states that the results of the poll are statistically insignificant. However, the numbers indicate that the race is close which is very good news for the Republican Party which has otherwise expressed concern for their lackluster set of candidates.
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However, conservatives should not celebrate just yet. According to many political surveys, Obama is predicted to do better when going one on one with any of the specific GOP candidates. For example, a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Obama would lead 49 to 43 percent in a race against GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney. The margin was even wider when Obama was matched against any of the other GOP candidates.
These numbers indicate a general dissatisfaction with Obama as well as a lack of enthusiasm for the GOP field.
Still, most conservative voters plan to vote Republican regardless of who obtains the nomination. A recent Rasmussen Report found that 83 percent of conservative voters plan to select a Republican for the White House. This number reveals the Right’s sentiment of supporting anyone who can beat Obama in 2012, regardless of his or her stance on many traditional conservative issues.
The Republican’s “anyone but Obama” mentality may be humorously summed up with Donald Unsworth’s obituary that went viral in September 2010; his family asked that “in lieu of flowers that memorial contributions be made to the American Cancer Society or to the campaign of whoever is running against President Barack Obama in 2012.”
The results of the Gallup poll come as no surprise to political pundits Brit Hume and Rush Limbaugh who have been saying for months that if the election were held now President Obama would lose. Hume states that the race “is unlikely to be about the Republican nominee. It will be about President Obama and his record and if the public decides it wants to make a change, and it would do that if the election were held today, they will elect a Republican.”
Limbaugh even went so far to say that whoever the Republicans nominate would be preferable to President Obama – even Elmer Fudd. The conservative radio talk show host added that although he thinks an Elmer Fudd candidate could beat Obama, he doesn’t want to squander this opportunity to elect a robust conservative candidate. So far, however, the GOP base does not seem to consider any of the current contenders as robust.
While Hume and Limbaugh are confident that a Republican would win if the election were held today, both have expressed uncertainty about what will happen 505 days from now.
