Republicans Are Not Happy With Their Presidential Candidates

This is turning out to be a rather strange situation regarding the Republican candidates for next year's presidential nomination and election. While it is still several months before the delegate selection process begins, normally there would already be one or two candidates that had emerged as favorites (especially considering this is the time when money must be raised and candidacies solidified). But that has not happened in the Republican Party this year, and there is little to show that this situation will change anytime soon.

A few months ago it was believed that by now some clear favorites would have been emerged, and the smart money was betting on Romney, Huckabee and Palin. But none of these candidates, or any of the others who have joined them, seems to be able to generate any real traction among Republican voters. No candidate has even shown the ability to top about 25% in the polls (and different polls show different leaders, but none of them clearly ahead of the pack). And recently the situation has been clouded even further by the emergence of Donald Trump, who polls about as well as Romney and Huckabee (and slightly ahead of the others).

It is becoming clearer every day that none of the current candidates really appeal to a majority of the voters (and all seem to be carrying their own kind of baggage). This view is verified by a recent poll which shows that a large number of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) are not satisfied with the candidates they are being offered at this time.

An ABC News/Washington Post Poll released yesterday shows that Republicans are much more dissatisfied with their options this year than they were at this same time in April 2007. Although there was also a large field of Republican candidates in 2007, just like this year, Republican voters had a much higher opinion of the choices they were being given. Here are those numbers for both years:

APRIL 2007
satisfied...............65%
dissatisfied...............31%
no opinion...............3%

APRIL 2011
satisfied...............43%
dissatisfied...............40%
no opinion...............17%

It's pretty easy to see why most of these candidates are not breaking out of the pack. All of them, including Romney who used to be considered a moderate, are trying to run as far to the right as possible to please the teabaggers who now dominate the base of the Republican Party. They have moved so far to the right that they are starting to alienate moderate Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Making all of these candidates seem even weaker is the fact that none of them do very well when compared to President Obama. This same poll showed that although Obama has lost some favorability numbers, he still easily would defeat all of the Republican candidates if the election was held today. Here are the numbers on how some of the candidates match up against the president:

Obama...............49%
Romney...............45%

Obama...............50%
Huckabee...............44%

Obama...............51%
Bachmann...............39%

Obama...............52%
Trump...............40%

Obama...............53%
Pawlenty...............38%

Obama...............54%
Gingrich...............39%

Obama...............55%
Palin...............38%

There's still a long way to the nomination of the Republican Party, but if someone doesn't start breaking out of the pack pretty soon we could see a situation where several candidates arrive at the convention with a substantial number of delegates but not a majority. That would mean a teabagger-dominated convention could choose the candidate for the party. This would make it more likely that a fringe right-wing candidate like Palin or Bachmann could get the nomination (and Democrats across the nation would rejoice).

All in all, the next 12 to 14 months are starting to look very interesting as these Republican clowns battle it out.