Is Sarah Palin’s 2012 Run Already Done For?

You can already imagine that former half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s polling numbers are way, way down among hunters, outdoor enthusiasts, animal lovers and fisherman in light of the unflattering portrayal of her outdoor skills on her TLC reality show.

But a daunting new set of figures about Palin’s popularity among her own Republican cohorts could spell some serious trouble for an all-but-certain 2012 presidential bid.

According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll 49 percent of Republicans said they were “very” or “somewhat likely” to support a presidential bid by Palin. And while that sounds pretty good, the Real Clear Politics blog pointed out that the figure is a massive drop off from the 67 percent of Republicans who said they were likely to support a Palin run when asked the same question in a December 2008 poll.

What a difference two years makes, huh?

Keep in mind, despite the debacle of the Katie Couric interview, the Bristol pregnancy revelation, ShoppingGate and other flare ups on the campaign trail, at that time in 2008 the GOP was still basking in the glow of the enthusiasm Palin stirred up in its members. It helped that they were equally disillusioned by candidate John McCain’s lackluster showing on election night.

You’d think that in the ensuring years, what with the two best-selling books, a handful of successful endorsements in the 2010 midterms (amid some typically boneheaded ones like Christine O’Donnell) and her high profile gig on GOP mouthpiece Fox News that Palin’s popularity among her party faithful would be much higher.

Instead, potential rival, fellow Fox News contributor and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee got the support of 67 percent of voters in the new poll when asked who they were somewhat or very likely to support, while 59 percent said the same about former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Like her multiple attempts to shoot a caribou on "Sarah Palin's Alaska," Palin isn’t just firing blanks in one survey. Hell, according to the Democrat-affiliated Public Policy Polling organization, Palin’s not even putting up
numbers in her native Alaska, with 58 percent giving her an unfavorable
rating to a 33 percent favorable vote. Worth nothing, her favorable
percentage is around the 35 percent of the vote that her handpicked
Alaska Senate candidate, Joe Miller, pulled in during his failed bid in
November.

It’s early in the game still and Palin is nothing if not an avid supporter of the scrappy underdog, but as her potential rivals make the rounds of key states, Palin is starting out in the hole. A recent profile in the Sunday New York Times Magazine painted a picture of a political machine that is dictatorially run from the top down, with Palin calling all the shots in a small organization of operatives who’ve mostly been with her for a short time and, as is the case with her chief blogger, have no relevant professional political experience.

Between the hypocrisy of clubbing fish and shooting animals to “provide” for her family (when we assume there's a grocery store down the street from her lakeside mansion) and shrill fights with the First Lady over the rights of overweight school children to eat cookies, whatever political machine Palin is building doesn’t appear to conform to anything we’ve seen before.

I’ve frequently asked whether Palin is a politician or an entertainer and from the sounds of it, her party’s members have made that decision for her. They love lining up to get her signature and one of her patented winky smiles. But, gosh darn it, they just don’t seem that interested in voting for her, now do they!

How’s that alienating your base working out for ya?