Morrissey: Independents want Obama on the ticket so they can vote against him

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Ed Morrissey comments on the latest CNN poll, a survey which was conducted by Opinion Dynamics:

It’s still far too early to start debating the nomination for the 2012 presidential election — and for that, Barack Obama can be grateful, at least for a while. In the latest CNN poll, voters overwhelmingly support his renomination … but not his re-election. Instead, half of all voters prefer a generic Republican, while Obama only gets 45%...

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Which Republican gets the most support at this time? According to CNN — which didn’t supply partisan split data from the sample, by the way — Mitt Romney narrowly edges Sarah Palin. The top five are:

• Mitt Romney – 21%
• Sarah Palin – 18%
• Newt Gingrich – 15%
• Mike Huckabee – 14%
• Ron Paul – 10%

The rest fall into the noise, garnering 2-3% each and “someone else” attracting 6%. CNN did not conduct head-to-head polling on specific candidates, or if they did, those results were not part of this release.

However, they did get the breakdown on whether voters would support a primary challenge by a generic Democrat in 2012. The data doesn’t look good for Hillary Clinton. Almost three-quarters of all voters support Obama’s renomination (74/23), which extends to 78/19 among Democrats and only declines to 64/33 among independents. Independents, though, prefer a generic Republican to Obama by a wide margin (52/39), which seems to suggest that they’d like Obama to be on the ticket in order to vote against him.

Very interesting that the 3-point difference between Governors Romney and Palin is the same as the poll's margin of error. But, as Ed cautions, it's still way too early to get worked up much over any 2012 poll. There's still the matter of 2010 to take care of, and we're inside the 90-day window of the November election.

- JP