Polling by the Evolving Strategies firm finds that Herman Cain, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney would all beat Obama it the election were held today. (Via US News & World Report's Washington Whispers)
The video below explains how the poll was conducted, meant to determine what the general public would do, those that are not political junkies who live and breathe politics.
Evolving Strategies website explains how the poll was conducted.
What makes our survey unique and uniquely informative is the fact that we had our respondents watch a video clip of President Obama speaking about the economy, followed by a video clip of either Romney, Perry, or Cain speaking about the economy during the last Fox debate (they also read a short, 120 word bio).
For those that do not read blogs or online media but get their news from the nightly half-hour or hour long news segments, this does appear to be a good way to judge what they will do.
Their analysis:
When respondents are forced to make a choice between a “generic” Republican and Obama, Obama wins by 5 points – 41-36.
- Despite several bad debate performances by Perry in September, when respondents watched a clip of Perry he actually gained more support than any of the other candidates and beat Obama by 6-points, 42-36.
- Now Romney had a slightly higher margin – he beat Obama by 7-points 40-33, but he did it with less support. He got less support than Perry, but so did Obama, and there were more people who were uncertain about him, which doesn’t come as a surprise — there’s clearly been a lot of dissatisfaction with Romney as the establishment candidate.
- Finally, the candidate we’re all most interested in — Herman Cain. The question is can he win the Republican primary? And can he win the general election?
- Well, he can certainly win the Republican primary. Across all treatments, when asked to choose among the eight GOP candidates, Cain won handily with 28% of the vote, followed by Romney at 19% and Perry at 12%.
- When it comes to a general election, Cain barely edged out Obama 35-34, but he moved from 5-points down in the control group with the generic Republican to 1-point up. And this jump came entirely out of Obama’s margin of the vote. It’s clear a lot of uncertainty remains in the general population about Cain – for starters he doesn’t “look like” the stereotypical GOP candidate. And he certainly doesn’t have the typical political background. But despite all that, people seem willing to give him a look – and when they get a look at him, he’s running even with Obama. What will be interesting to see is whether all those uncertain votes become more certain about Herman Cain when they get to see more of him.
Unless there is a major change in the high unemployment numbers and a massive turn around of the economy, any of these candidates should be able to beat Barack Obama in 2012.
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