Perry Problematic Among Indies

A piece at the “Perry Presidential” blog at the Chron has some polling results from Public Policy Polling that presidential candidate Rick Perry’s campaign has some inherent weaknesses among Independents. This is not a surprise to anyone, but still it’s nice to see that what you suspect might be true, is in fact, borne out by the data.

Rick Perry will win Texas, the poll shows, beating President Obama by 51 to 44%.

Duh.

The only surprise here is that the margin is so low. This is a Texas governor going presidential and he only gets a 51% vote in his own state? A Perry win in Texas is a no-brainer, the article goes on, but what about the margin in other states, swing states where the “Texas Factor” is a non-issue.

“He’s going to win Texas, so his approval numbers don’t matter that much in the overall scheme of the election. But they do raise some red flags about the kind of support he might see in some other places.”

And key to it all are Independent voters. According to the PPP poll, Perry does very poorly with Indies. Independents who approve of Perry were only 32% of those polled, while President Obama received 46% of Independent respondents.

Independents, as always, are going to decide this election, and for Rick Perry, that spells trouble for a positive outcome in November.

Making me wonder whether winning the General Election is actually Perry’s goal. We know from the far right positions he has advanced (except for immigration) he is appealing to the right wingers. And we know why. Right wingers show up at Primary Polls. Independents largely do not.

So I am starting to wonder whether the plan is to get the nomination and then use that to raise an amazing amount of campaign funds that will be necessary to run a presidential campaign. We know that Rick Perry really hasn’t a political bone in his body, and that it is all about getting rich and getting his friends rich, which gets him even richer. Rick Perry is in this whole thing for himself. And now I think I see why he is in this. He is a master of turning campaign funds into personal wealth.

Yep.