CNN has a story about Mike Huckabee warning Sarah Palin not to leave the Republican Party for an independent presidential campaign.
"I hope she remains — let me be real clear — a part of the Republican Party," Huckabee told FOX News. "I'm a little concerned when I hear her say that she mayThe Republican Party would be fools if they didn't consider Palin a threat to mount an independent candidacy. She's just not that Republican identified. Palin has never been part of the Alaska Republican establishment and her husband Tod was a member of an Alaskan separatist party until Palin ran for governor. Likewise, Palin recently mentioned that her son was not a Republican.
sort of branch out and go third party or go independent. That would be a big mistake because we need to rebuild the Republican Party, not abandon it."
In this context, Palin's reference to campaigning for non-Republicans might be taken as meaning that she'll be willing to help candidates to the right of the Republican Party.
Anyway, if Sarah Palin left the Republican Party for an independent or third-party candidacy, she'd take about 20% of the Republican vote with her, about 9% of the total.
That vote would increase if activist conservatives generally saw her as a more attractive candidate than a Republican nominee like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee.
And let's not kid ourselves.
There's a real chance that Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Limbaugh and other conservatives might do that. They could easily see an independent Palin candidacy as an opportunity to free "the conservative movement" from what they see as the death grip of the Republican Party.
I could live with it too.
With an independent Palin candidacy, the Republican candidate and Palin would be splitting about 40% of the vote. I imagine that one or the other would win eight or nine states between Utah, Idaho, and the core Confederate states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
That wouldn't even be 100 electoral votes and the conservative movement will have succeeded in it's apparent mission of destroying conservativism in the United States.
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Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Limbaugh, and don’t forget Glenn “nutcase” Beck. Four people whose wishes I NEVER thought either of us would wish to see come true. If those people want to split the republican vote with an independent Palin candidacy, more power to them!! There is logic in that line of thinking. They know that Barak Obama will sail into a second term. What better time to try and realign the politics of the conservative movement than an election year in which no conservative will win. Not Mitt and his millions. Not “Crazy Mike” Huckabee with the squirrels juggling butcher knives in his brain. Certainly not Palin of Alaska, nor Crist of Florida, nor the “not nearly as erudite and charming as he thinks”, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana…not one of this pack of talking points cardboard cut-outs of conservatism will get any closer to The White House than tourists taking in the sites in DC. Not even Palin’s “slutty airline attendant” look to which David Letterman referred, (and I agreed) will do the trick.
Not long ago you wrote here about James Carville’s new book in which he posits that the republican party is gone for at least 40 years. You on the other hand, believed that the GOP is never going to be anything more than a regional party for fringe-group, anti-government, extremist-christian, white supremacist domestic terrorists. If Palin, et al. follow the pattern you set forth in 2012, that will truly be the end, not only of the republican party as a national party, but it will end the careers of republican office holders who will be forced to choose between Wall Street millions, or the Southern Baptist Convention. Good riddance to them!!
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