With one year to go before the first votes are cast in the 2012 presidential primaries, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee holds a narrow advantage nationally for the party nod, with Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney close behind, according to a new ABC-Washington Post poll.
Among a crowded hypothetical field of 14 candidates, Huckabee came out on top with 21%, though Palin and Romney were close on his heels at 19% and 17%, respectively. The poll has a margin of error of 5.5%, meaning the three front runners are locked in a statistical dead heat.
Beyond those top three candidates, the tallies drop off significantly, with no other candidate breaking into double digits. Newt Gingrich placed fourth at 9%, followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (8%) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (3%). Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, and Tim Pawlenty tied at 2% each, while Haley Barbour, Jon Huntsman, Jim DeMint, and Rick Santorum all garnered 1%. John Thune polled under 1%.
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The leader board is virtually unchanged from July 2009, when Huckabee led the field at 26%, followed by Romney at 21%, and Palin at 19%. Yet this time around, the survey included a few fresh faces on the national scene, notably Christie and Perry, two tough-talking conservative governors who have been hailed as rising stars in the GOP. Christie has emphatically stated that he doesn’t want to run for president, and Perry, despite a national book tour and rumors that he was polling outside Texas to gauge his chances at a national campaign, has also said he has no intention of running.
The results also closely reflect those in an NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll released this week which found the same three candidates on top, but in a different order. In that poll, Romney placed first at 19%, followed by Huckabee at 18%, and Palin at 14%.
Those three candidates have consistently led in the polls, in part due to their high level of name recognition. Yet with so much time between now and the Iowa caucus — the first presidential nominating contest — there’s plenty of time for a lesser known candidate to leapfrog the competition and capture the nomination.
The ABC-Washington Post poll was conducted January 13-16 among 425 Republicans nationwide.
