Report: Sarah Palin turned down invitation to tonight's CNN/TPX debate

She's also third in the latest CNN poll
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According to this post title at The Other McCain, Gov. Palin has turned down the invitation that CNN had extended to her to participate in the debate being sponsored tonight by the network and Tea Party Express. We had gathered as much when no news came over the weekend that she had accepted the invitation, and Greta Van Sustern announced that Sarah Palin would be a guest on her "On The Record" program tonight.

If she had accepted the CNN invitation to debate, it would have likely been a violation of her contract with Fox News, a job the governor doesn't appear quite ready to give up -- at least not just yet.

Stacy also reports the results of CNN's latest GOP presidential poll, which has Gov. Palin in third place with 15 percent, behind Ranger Rick with 30 percent and Mitt "Unemployed" Romney with 18 percent.

- JP

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%...

[...]

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