Netroots Nation: Obama vs. Romney?

22 June 2011 |permalink | email article

A text messaging straw poll conducted over the weekend for progressive activists, journalists and bloggers at the Netroots conference in Minneapolis, with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Democracy Corp., in partnership with Revolution Messaging, produced good news for Barack Obama. The President received an 80% approval rating for his first two years in office, with 27% strongly affirmable.

Once again, 66% of participants want to see the Obama administration make job growth their top priority. Protecting health care was next in priority but protecting health scored just 9%.

Asked who they would like to see as the President’s challenger, Netroots Nation rated Sarah Palin first, closely followed by Michelle Bachmann. Progressives least want Mitt Romney, with a big primary lead in California, to face Obama in the 2012 election and believe he will be nominated. Labor unions and commentator Rachel Maddow are held in very high regard, while the Democratic Party and Democrats in Congress are given near neutral ratings.

On the Huntsman trail

Among the Republican activists [in New Hampshire] who took their measure of Huntsman, however, reactions were decided more restrained. “I don’t think he was connecting as well as something other candidates,” Julia Bergeron, a prominent Republican moderate who hosted Huntsman’s first house party, told me….More troubling for Huntsman, perhaps, was that his lack of vision – this decision to begin introducing himself as a family man rather than offering any real sense of how he might govern – seemed to have disappointed a lot of voters. It was a theme that came up in several conversations I had with Republicans…. People liked Huntsman – but they were impatient for something more substantive. – Matt Bai, covering Jon Huntsman in New Hampshire, in The New York Times Magazine (June 26)

 

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