Don McKee
Tea party favorite Cain garnered 232 (26%) votes to take first place, edging libertarian Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and perennial candidate, 229 votes (25.7%). Texas Gov. Rick Perry placed third with 180 votes (20%). Newt Gingrich, keynote speaker for the fry, came in fourth with 162 votes (18%). Mitt Romney was next with 51 votes (6%), followed by Michele Bachmann, 29 votes (3.3%). Three other candidates got eight votes combined.
The poll was billed in advance as “the first and largest statewide Republican presidential straw poll in the Peach State” by GOP chairman Sue Everhart of Cobb. But it surely missed the mark of her pre-fish fry prediction that the poll “could be one of the strongest early indicators of voter trends in Georgia.” For one thing, while about 1,100 Republicans attended the event according to the Associated Press, only 729 votes were cast. That’s a little strange.
Anyway, Cain has won a lot of straw polls including the Cobb GOP Independence Day vote in which he took a whopping 43 percent. But in the statewide Iowa poll two weeks ago Bachmann won 28 percent and Paul 27 percent with Cain far back at 8 percent. The bottom line: straw polls are very poor indicators of voter sentiment on a broad scale. It’s too easy for the supporters of one candidate or another to skew the results by turning out in larger numbers at straw poll events like the fish fry or the Iowa poll.
Meanwhile, in the world of real voter polls, Gallup’s latest survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents taken Aug. 17 to 21, showed 29 percent most likely to support Rick Perry , almost double his 18 percent a month earlier. Romney was second at 17 percent, then Ron Paul at 13 percent, Bachmann 10, and Cain with only 4 percent, down from 10 percent in June. Gingrich also had 4 percent, down from 12 percent in May.
The poll reflected the changing landscape after the second GOP candidate debate, the Iowa straw poll and Perry’s official announcement of his candidacy. The reality for Bachmann and Paul, Gallup observed, is that neither “appears to have gotten a big boost from the straw poll results” — not surprisingly.
Gallup found Perry strongly favored by conservative Republicans, older Republicans and Southern Republicans. He also had above average support from religious Republicans. However, Perry, “like Romney before him, rates as a weaker front-runner than those in prior GOP nomination contests,” Gallup said.
Two late entrants in previous campaigns, Republican Fred Thompson in 2008 and Democrat Wesley Clark in 2004, attracted a lot of attention “and ranked among the national leaders” (in the polls) when they got into their races, but Gallup noted, “both fared poorly in early primaries and soon after ended their candidacies.”
Rick Perry looks far more formidable — and he’s just begun to fight.
dmckee9613@aol.com
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Straw Polls are a measure of a candidates grass roots support. In other words - it's SUPPOSED to be a measure of the candidates ability to "skew" the results. It's a measure of how well the campaign is organized and working.
The early polls numbers nationally are almost always useless.
Why?
Because there is a state by state process. The early states are the most important, because they set the tone for the rest of the election. Accordingly, the candidates will be spending quite a bit of time in these states, meeting with the people, answering questions and so on.
And when those people go vote, it's often times NOT what the national poll numbers say. But again, it sets the tone for the other states. Which is why you see people polling high nationally dropping out the races after poor showings in the first states.
What does it take to get honest news that knows what it's talking about these days?
Huh? Bachmann's support dropped 33% nationally, from 13% to 10%, While Paul's ROSE 33% from 10% to 13%! So how big a gain do you have to get in order to qualify as a 'big boost'? And in what pig's eye are a 33% GAIN and a 33% DROP equivalent? Perfect example of obviously biased reporting- from a POLLING company no less!
Who will bring the troops home?
Who will cut the budget by half a trillion first day?
Who will prevent the million murders a year our government currently performs?
Who can free me from being accountable to my Creator for all those deaths?
Who will do their best to get the Patriot Act repealed?
Who really cares about ME, and truly believes that I own myself, NOT the government?
Who admits the dollar is now worth less than 2% of what it originally was?
Who wants to stop the current policy of robbing seniors by keeping interest rates artificially low?
Who wants to end the War on Drugs and use that money to actually HELP people?
You don't need me to tell you to Vote Vertebrate to know which man in the room has the spine.
Vote Vertebrate - Ron Paul 2012!
I didn't know that Pres. Ronald Reagan was endorsing from the grave.
Ron Paul: The only candidate with an endorsement from Ronald Reagan.
Ron Paul: The only candidate to predict the recession, at least 5 years before it happened at that, while all the other politicians and "mainstream" economists laughed and wrote off his numerous warnings as crazy.