"I coulda been a contend...aw, who am I kidding?" (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Oh, how the
mighty largely irrelevant
have fallen:
In a sign that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign is still struggling, Public Policy Polling announced Monday night that Texas Gov. Rick Perry will replace Pawlenty in general election polling match-ups against Pres. Barack Obama.
Pawlenty will still be included in the organization’s Republican primary polls, but his removal from this company’s general election poll match-ups bodes badly for Pawlenty, who has faltered in recent polls, leading some observers to speculate that his campaign is sinking.
Lest anyone think this is that "Democrat pollster" attempting to derail the T-Paw Express, take a gander at the latest NBC/WSJ survey of the field:
NBC/Wall Street Journal (7/14-7/17. Republican primary voters)
Mitt Romney 30
Michele Bachmann 16
Rick Perry 11
Ron Paul 9
Newt Gingrich 8
Herman Cain 5
Rick Santorum 3
Jon Huntsman 2
Tim Pawlenty 2
In PPP's own survey this week of the GOP primary field, Pawlenty does manage to edge Huntsman. Nevertheless, he does languish in seventh place, polling at just 5 percent.
Predictably, Pawlenty's campaign manager, Nick Ayers, is trying his damnedest to challenge the notion that his candidate is on life support. He's busy mocking the notion that early national polls matter. He specifically points out that in polls from July of 2007, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain would have been the nominees of their respective parties.
Perhaps, but even back then, John McCain was polling in the teens, and Barack Obama was largely in the mid-20s. That is, I suspect Ayers would concede, a far cry from somewhere between 2-5 percent.
Besides, do national polls start to matter when your candidate's support has eroded so badly that one of the leading pollsters in the nation doesn't even bother polling you anymore?
