Major National Poll: Election 2012 — Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

A major national poll of voters has found that a hypothetical 2012 election race between president Obama and Texas Congressman Ron Paul results in an almost dead heat.

The Rasmussen survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) say they prefer a different candidate, with 6% declaring themselves undecided.

Though there are mixed feelings about the Congressman among Republican voters, independent voters, those not affiliated with either major party, give Paul a 47% to 28% edge over the president.

According to Rasmussen, 39% of all voters have a favorable opinion of Paul, while 30% view him unfavorably. This includes 10% with a very favorable opinion and 12% with a very unfavorable one.

Twenty six percent (26%) of GOP voters think Paul shares the values of most Republican voters throughout the nation, while 25% disagree. Forty-nine percent (49%) are not sure.

Thirty-four percent (34%) of nationwide voters see the Congressman as a new direction for the GOP, according to the poll.

At the weekend, the Congressman virtually tied with Mitt Romney in a GOP leadership 2012 straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

Romney received 439 votes to Paul’s 438. Paul trounced Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich who received 330 and 321 votes respectively. Despite this the mainstream media ran with headlines akin to “Romney defeats Palin in straw poll”, completely ignoring Ron Paul and his supporters.

Prior to the SRLC poll, in February, Paul walked away with the most support for a 2012 presidential bid in a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The Congressmen attracted 31 percent of the vote.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The results of the survey and the straw polls are sure to spur Ron Paul supporters to renew calls for the Congressman to mount a presidential run in 2012.

In recent months Paul has said that he does not plan to repeat his 2008 campaign, dubbed the “Ron Paul Revolution” by supporters.

At the height of the campaign in late 2007, the Congressman smashed the all-time record for political donations on one day, beating John Kerry’s previous effort as he hauled in over $6 million dollars during a 24-hour period that coincided with the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

Indeed, as we have continuously highlighted, The Tea Party movement, originally Libertarian in origin, grew out of this trend of honouring the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. An event held in 2006 was repeated in 2007 with the Ron Paul Money bomb, and the movement evolved from there over the following three years.

Whether neocon and corporate Republicans like it or not, Ron Paul has had and continues to have a far reaching impact upon the direction of the party. Every intelligible thing that Sarah Palin has said regarding limited government, fiscal economic policy and the restoration of freedom is taken straight from the Ron Paul handbook.

The core difference between Paul and Palin is that the Congressman has built a real grass roots following over the course of several decades. Paul is the real deal, while Palin, Romney and Gingrich, on the other hand are all neocons at the core, supporting the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations in step with the grossly bloated empire building military industrial complex. Never pandering to the crowds, Paul has consistently hammered home this key difference, once again doing so last weekend at the SRLC.

Of the current crop of possible 2012 GOP presidential candidates, Ron Paul is once again the only one truly in step with the majority anti-war, anti-big government sentiment in America.

This article was posted: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 4:22 pm

---

---

---

---