Rasmussen hypothetical: Palin 47, Biden 44

posted at 2:00 pm on September 16, 2008 by Allahpundit
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I guess her Bush Doctrine answer didn’t do much damage, huh?

Note that she only fares slightly worse against Biden than Maverick himself.

Just over half of voters view both of the vice presidential candidates at least somewhat favorably, although 35% rate their opinion of Palin as Very Favorable while only 23% feel that way about Biden. Twenty-eight percent (28%) have a very unfavorable opinion of the woman governor of Alaska versus 20% who say that about the longtime Delaware senator.

Women continue to be more skeptical than men of the Republican vice presidential nominee, only the second woman to be on a national political ticket. While men split 50% to 37% in Palin’s favor, women support Biden 50% to 44%…

In the same survey, Palin’s running mate, John McCain, beats Biden 49% to 45%…

In a Biden vs. Palin race, 84% of Republicans and 16% of Democrats back the Alaskan, and 75% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans support the senator. Unaffiliated voters give Palin the edge 45% to 39%.

Rasmussen polled Hillary and Palin head to head back on September 3 and Her Majesty won by 11 points, four more than the margin of victory for Obama in a hypothetical match-up with Palin. As such, today’s result isn’t so much a reflection of Palin’s strength as it is a statement on Biden’s weakness and The One’s failure to realize that having 35 years of foreign-policy experience on the ticket can’t reassure voters if they don’t know who he is. Revisit Tapper’s post about reporters deserting Biden en masse after the ‘Cuda was picked; in an all-out media war, with different interests firing from all sides, Greasy Joe’s been left without a weapon. That explains why, until he gave his McCain = Bush attack speech yesterday, the only news about him that had crossed the wires in two weeks had to do with his gaffes and his dopey admission that Hillary would have been a better pick. What’s happening with the Rasmussen poll, I think, is undecideds (and even some Democrats) preferring a candidate they have some vague idea about rather than someone they don’t know at all. And ironically, thanks to the feeding frenzy, it’s Palin who’s the known quantity, not the guy who’s been a senator since Nixon was president.

Exit question: What are we to make of the fact that nine percent of Democrats apparently have no opinion on Palin versus Biden? PUMAs weighing their options? Obama devotees who don’t care about the VP picks simply abstaining? Or is Biden’s profile so low even within his own party that he can’t find 80 percent who know him and like him?

Update: No sooner did I finish writing this post than this UPI piece dropped into my RSS reader. Brutal:

Someone should break the bad news to Sen. Joe Biden: As a vice presidential candidate he’s doing far worse than Dan Quayle.

Biden has never run anything. Senators don’t. McCain hasn’t either, but he at least is certainly outside the Senate norm of being permanently protected from responsibility, because five years as a heroic, defiant and disgracefully tortured prisoner of war is probably the best inoculation anyone could have against the meaningless pomposity of the United States Senate. Obama already has picked up that contagious infection after only four years sitting there…

So far, Attack Dog Biden hasn’t managed to land even a friendly lick on John McCain’s face. While Palin flourishes amid the media’s most frenzied efforts to smear and destroy her, Biden shrivels under that far crueler death blow to any politician’s ego — amiable and polite forgetfulness. He is too ineffectual and peripheral to even warrant contempt.

It’s not his fault; he’s just being Biden. Blame The One, who assumed (understandably) that he owned the media for the duration of the election and thus could afford to anchor the ticket with loads of experience and zero star power. Biggg mistake in hindsight.

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