Jon Huntsman has finally found a group of voters who overwhelmingly think he would be the best choice to lead the Republican ticket next year: 337 progressive advocates among the large group that gathered in Washington this week.
The results are in from the straw poll conducted at the Take Back The American Dream conference this week, and they’re pretty good if you’re President Obama, not so good if you’re the Democrats in Congress and very good (or perhaps very, very bad) if you’re Huntsman.
An overwhelming 49% of straw poll voters at the progressive conference said Huntsman is the Republican “most qualified to be president” from a field of 11 that included the not-running Sarah Palin, the not-running Chris Christie and the still-kind-of-thinking-about-it Rudy Giuliani.
Mitt Romney was second in the “most qualified” poll, earning 22% of the 337 votes cast at the conference.
Straw polls are, of course, essentially meaningless (and for the record, Huntsman won the Utah Young Republicans straw ballot back in June.) But this one shows Huntsman has convinced some of the left he’d be the best fit for the Oval Office among the GOP field, while polls continue to show he’s failed to convince the GOP primary electorate of the same thing.
Other (and perhaps more meaningful) results from the poll:
⢠Obama earns a 72% approval rating in the results, but just 20% “strongly approve” of the job he’s doing. He earned a 66.7 on a question that asked voters to rate their favorable feeling toward him on a scale of 1-100.
⢠Democrats in Congress fared a good deal worse in that question than Obama did, earning just a 53.7 on the 1-100 favorability scale.
⢠In a sign that Obama’s jobs push (seen my many as a signal to his base to get reenergized for the election) is working, 97% of respondents said they favored the jobs plan. But in a sign of how the current wrangling over the proposal in Congress could hurt those good feelings, 65% said they’d prefer to see Obama’s jobs bill not pass rather than Obama compromise on it in order to see it become law.
Read the full results of the straw poll here.
