If Newt Gingrich wasn't already having an awful week, the latest Daily Kos/PPP poll offers even more bad news for him: Of the major GOP contenders for the presidency, Newt is by far the least-liked candidate among Democrats. Yes, that's right: Dems profess to like Newt even less than Sarah Palin.
By now, you are probably quite familiar with Newt's recent travails. To recap briefly, on Tuesday morning, a senior aide informed the media that Newt would soon announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee. Later that same day, a different adviser contradicted the first, saying no, there was no such committee in the works - not exactly the picture of a well-run campaign. Then on Thursday, Newt himself made a big speech, in which he had a chance to set things aright. So what did he do? He unveiled... a website, and one with a weird name, too (that's already been spoofed). That's it. A website.
But even if Newt does emerge from this weird state of limbo and actually run for office, Newt has a serious problem with crossover appeal - or lack thereof. In our most recent State of the Nation poll, we asked all voters (not just Republicans) who they'd like to see as the GOP's presidential nominee. Here are the results, broken down by party identification:
The other major would-be candidates - Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney & Sarah Palin - all get double digits across the board. (And Ron Paul gets pretty consistent marks just below that tier as well.) But check out those Newt numbers: 19% of Republicans prefer him as their nominee (tying him for first with Huck), but only 5% of Dems do. That's a pretty rough spread. Now maybe Palin's numbers are inflated - some Democrats might be acting deviously strategic, saying (in a reverse Bre'r Rabbit) that they want, they really want, Sarah Palin to be the Republican nominee. (After all, that's how I would have answered!) But maybe we have it all wrong and maybe we should really be rootin' for Newton - and note also that he fares pretty poorly with independents, too.
Dems and indies may remember Newt well, and not fondly, from his notorious heyday in the 1990s. With another possible government shutdown looming, that could mean even more unwelcome flashbacks for voters who still recall the shutdown Gingrich fomented when he was Speaker of the House. As this Daily Kos poll shows, all of these memories are going to be a big obstacle for Gingrich to overcome if he does somehow capture the Republican nod - and that could be a very good thing for Barack Obama and Team Blue.