PPP Poll: Clinton, Rubio Top Very Early 2016 Nomination Polls

Election 2016

PPP’s newest national poll finds Marco Rubio as the early choice of Republicans for 2016. 18% would like him to be their nominee to 14% for Chris Christie, 12% for Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan, 11% for Mike Huckabee, 8% for Condoleezza Rice, 7% each for Sarah Palin and Rand Paul, and 4% for Rick Santorum.

Rubio’s ahead because of his strength with the most conservative wing of the party. Among ‘very conservative’ voters he’s at 23% to 17% for Paul Ryan and 13% for Mike Huckabee. He also had the advantage with folks describing themselves as ‘somewhat conservative’ at 22% to 14% for Chris Christie and 13% for Jeb Bush. Christie has a big lead with moderates at 35% to 20% for Bush and 11% for Huckabee with Rubio all the way back at 5%. But there just aren’t that many moderates left in the Republican Party.

Here’s how all the Republican hopefuls stack up in terms of net favorability:

Potential Candidate Net Favorability
Paul Ryan +59 (74/15)
Mike Huckabee +58 (73/15)
Condoleezza Rice +55 (73/18)
Marco Rubio +51 (62/11)
Jeb Bush +49 (63/14)
Sarah Palin +42 (66/24)
Rick Santorum +39 (56/17)
Rand Paul +31 (53/22)
Chris Christie +21 (49/28)

The thing that really stands out here is Christie being at the bottom of the pile. Although his cooperation with President Obama in relation to Hurricane Sandy doesn’t seem to have hurt him with Republicans in New Jersey, these numbers suggest it has caused some irritation with him outside the state. His favorability with folks describing themselves as ‘very conservative’ is only 42/31, with every other person we tested over 60%.

One other note on the Republicans: 20% think Reince Priebus should continue as chair, 37% think he should be replaced, and 43% don’t have an opinion either way.

On the Democratic side it continues to be no contest. Hillary Clinton leads the way at 61% to 12% for Joe Biden, 5% for Andrew Cuomo, 4% for Elizabeth Warren, 2% for Martin O’Malley, and 1% each for Deval Patrick, Brian Schweitzer, and Mark Warner.

If neither Clinton nor Biden runs the big winner is ‘undecided.’ 45% of voters aren’t sure who they would support with Cuomo leading at 21% to 16% for Warren, 8% for Patrick, 5% for O’Malley, 3% for Warner, and 2% for Schweitzer.

Clinton has at least 60% support with all three major ideological factions of the party- ‘very liberal’ voters, ‘somewhat liberal’ ones, and moderates. One thing that really stands out in the crosstabs is that 74% of African Americans want her to be the standard bearer next time. There doesn’t seem to be any residual ill will over her 2008 battle with Barack Obama.

Beyond Clinton and Biden none of these folks are particularly well know:

Potential Candidate Name Recognition
Hillary Clinton 96%
Joe Biden 94%
Andrew Cuomo 58%
Elizabeth Warren 57%
Deval Patrick 32%
Mark Warner 28%
Martin O’Malley 24%
Brian Schweitzer 24%

All 9 of the Republicans we tested have at least 73% name recognition with their party base. Only Clinton and Biden reach that level among the Democrats, and beyond that only Cuomo and Warren even reach the 50% name recognition level. It’s really going to be wide open if neither of the big names runs on the Democratic side.

And for what it’s worth here are the net favorabilities of all these folks among the entire electorate, regardless of party:

Potential Candidate Net Favorability
Chris Christie +22 (48/26)
Condoleezza Rice +22 (51/29)
Hillary Clinton +21 (57/36)
Marco Rubio +8 (35/37)
Joe Biden +2 (46/44)
Jeb Bush Even (38/38)
Mike Huckabee -1 (38/39)
Paul Ryan -1 (41/42)
Elizabeth Warren -2 (25/27)
Rand Paul -6 (32/38)
Mark Warner -7 (9/16)
Deval Patrick -7 (10/17)
Rick Santorum -10 (30/40)
Andrew Cuomo -10 (23/33)
Brian Schweitzer -12 (4/16)
Martin O’Malley -12 (5/17)
Sarah Palin -23 (33/56)

Christie finds himself at the top largely because of his appeal to Democrats, 42% of whom rate him favorably to 25% with a negative opinion. The question of course is whether he can appeal enough to voters on the right wing of his party to actually win the nomination. Rice is the most popular of the potential candidates with independent voters, 55% of whom see her favorably to 26% with a negative opinion. If there’s anyone who could pull off a successful third party campaign these days it’s probably her. Those two and Clinton are in a class by themselves in terms of their popularity, and of course Clinton has the clearest path to a spot on the ballot.

PPP_Release_National_1206

CBS News Affiliate in Phoenix Arizona Calls Race for Obama 2 Weeks Early…

CBS Calls election for Obama

Sarah Palin posted this on facebook a few minutes ago:

Isn’t it a little premature to call the race for Obama two weeks before the election? It looks like a CBS News affiliate in Phoenix, Arizona did just that last Friday for 17 seconds when they flashed a graphic showing Obama beating Romney with 99% of the precincts reporting. CBS needs to explain this. But whatever their explanation, let’s make this their “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment. Please remember to tune in to the important debate tonight. The momentum for this election is not with Obama, regardless of what some in the media might want to think.

- Sarah Palin

More from the Daily Caller

Fact Check: Top Ten Worst Lies by Joe Biden in VP Debate

biden insane

From Breitbart:

Here are the top ten worst lies told by Biden during the debate:

10. “With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey….not a single thing he said is accurate.” At the outset of the debate, Biden tried to paint Ryan as a liar–when Biden, in fact, was the one lying. Ryan had pointed out: 1) that the White House had distanced itself from the Cairo embassy’s apologies on 9/11; 2) that Obama had failed to speak up for Iranian protestors in 2009; 3) that the Obama administration called Syria’s dictator a “reformer”; 4) and that the Obama administration is imposing defense cuts and projecting weakness. All of that is true.

9. “The president has met with Bibi [Netanyahu] a dozen times….This is a bunch of stuff.” While they have met several times–not a dozen–that includes a meeting at which Obama made the Israeli prime minister enter the White House through a back entrance, refused to take a picture with him, and left him on his own for dinner. Specifically, Ryan had criticized Obama’s refusal to meet Netanyahu in New York last month, and to tape talk show interviews instead–a clear snub that sent the wrong signal, again, to Israel’s enemies.

8. “Just let the taxes expire like they’re supposed to on those millionaires.” Biden’s “millionaires” are actually households earning more than $250,000 a year, which includes many middle-class families with two earners, and small business owners in particular who report business earnings as personal income. Biden and Obama have repeatedly labeled those earning over $250,000 as “millionaires and billionaires,” distorting the actual impact of their tax plan on the non-millionaires it would hit hardest, who create a vast proportion of small business jobs.

7. “You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems that every vice presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels.” Biden’s cheap shot against Palin was an attempt to diminish both her and the man sitting across from him. But Palin never talked about “death panels” in her debate with Biden, for the simple reason that Obamacare had not yet been proposed. Nor did Ryan mention “death panels”–he had addressed the undeniable fact that Obamacare proposes a board to impose cost controls.

6. “The congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for.” Biden’s lie about Ryan’s budget was an attempt to dodge responsibility for lax embassy security–and to cover up that the Obama called for new cuts to embassy security just days after the 9/11 attacks. Ryan’s proposal, which called for a 19% overall decrease in non-defense discretionary spending, does not even mention embassy security–the Obama campaign merely made up that number by applying 19% across the board.

5. “No, they are not four years closer to a nuclear weapon.” Biden’s attempt to lie about the glaring reality of the Iranian nuclear program fell flat. Iran is indeed four years closer to a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration–believing it knew better than its predecessors–tried to reinvent the wheel on talks with Iran, causing frustration to our allies in Europe and the Middle East. Meeting after meeting this year has failed to produce results, and the loophole-filled sanctions, while hurting Iran somewhat, are not stopping its nuclear program.

4. “No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise…has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact.” No, it is not a fact–it is the opposite of a fact, and saying “that is a fact” does not make it any less a blatant lie. The Obama administration is forcing religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortion drugs through their insurance policies. That is the reason several dozen religious institutions are suing the administration to defend their First Amendment freedom of religion.

3. “It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card…I was there. I voted against him.” Biden voted for both the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war. He did not vote for George W. Bush’s plan to extend coverage of Medicare to prescription drugs (though he voted for an earlier, similar proposal), nor did he vote for the Bush tax cuts. But he voted for both of the wars he derided last night. To quote Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention: “It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.”

2. “What we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back — applied it to Medicare.” Biden repeated the lie the Obama administration has been telling since before Obamacare passed in 2010: that cuts to Medicare today were savings that extend the life of the program. They would be–if the same $716 billion wasn’t also being used to pay for Obamacare. As Ryan pointed out in 2010, and again last night, you can’t double-count the same cuts. Taking $716 billion out of Medicare means exactly that–and hurts, not helps, the program’s solvency.

1. “Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security again.” Biden lied through his teeth about the fact that the administration–specifically, the State Department–had been told again and again that security on the ground in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular, was inadequate. The day before, in Congressional hearings on the Libya attacks, former regional security director Eric Nordstrom described his frustration with having those requests turned down by the government bureaucracy: “For me the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”

Steven Rattner: ‘We Need Death Panels’; Will PolitiFact Reverse ‘Lie of the Year’ Tag on Palin?

steve rattner We Need Death Panels

From NewsBusters:

For those who want the short answer to the question in this post’s title, the answer is almost definitely “no.” But in a New York Times op-ed piece in mid-September, former Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner effectively said that the so-called “fact-check” site known as PolitiFact should make amends to former Alaska Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In December 2009, PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan outrageously characterized the following statement made by Palin in an August 2009 Facebook post as its “Lie of the Year” (bold is mine):

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

What follows are several paragraphs from Rattner’s Times September 16 op-ed. Rattner understates the real-world power of ObamaCare’s Independent Advisory Board, which makes his citation of England’s version of death panels as something worthy of imitation a de facto admission (to the point where it doesn’t matter whether he himself admits it) that Palin is right about ObamaCare as it was proposed (at the time of her Facebook post) and ultimately enacted (bolds are mine):

WE need death panels.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

But in the pantheon of toxic issues — the famous “third rails” of American politics — none stands taller than overtly acknowledging that elderly Americans are not entitled to every conceivable medical procedure or pharmaceutical.

Most notably, President Obama’s estimable Affordable Care Act regrettably includes severe restrictions on any reduction in Medicare services or increase in fees to beneficiaries. In 2009, Sarah Palin’s rant about death panels even forced elimination from the bill of a provision to offer end-of-life consultations.

Now, three years on, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Paul D. Ryan, has offered his latest ambitious plan for addressing the Medicare problem. But like Mr. Obama’s, it holds limited promise for containing the program’s escalating costs within sensible boundaries.

… Mr. Obama’s hopes for sustained cost containment are pinned on a to-be-determined mix of squeezing reimbursements, embracing a selection of the creative ideas that have spewed forth from health care policy wonks and scouring the globe for innovations.

To Mr. Obama’s credit, his plan has more teeth than Mr. Ryan’s; if his Independent Payment Advisory Board comes up with savings, Congress must accept either them or vote for an equivalent package. The problem is, the advisory board can’t propose reducing benefits (a k a rationing) or raising fees (another form of rationing), without which the spending target looms impossibly large.

… No one wants to lose an aging parent. And with price out of the equation, it’s natural for patients and their families to try every treatment, regardless of expense or efficacy. But that imposes an enormous societal cost that few other nations have been willing to bear. Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care.

Take Britain, which provides universal coverage with spending at proportionately almost half of American levels. Its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence uses a complex quality-adjusted life year system to put an explicit value (up to about $48,000 per year) on a treatment’s ability to extend life.