NBC-WSJ GOP pollster Neil Newhouse did a post-election survey last night, and here’s what he found: Just 12% of those surveyed believed Palin should be the GOP’s new leader; instead 29% of voters said Romney, followed by 20% who say Huckabee. Among GOPers, it was Romney 33%, Huckabee 20% and Palin 18%. ~FirstRead

Via Andrew

This suggests that Palin’s tremendous popularity within the GOP does not translate into support for her as the default party leader, which is an example of some understanding of political realities among Republican voters.  If all those named in this survey choose to run, it also could portend another very divided primary field where the next Republican nominee will end up winning most of the delegates by ekeing out 32-35% of the vote in state after state.  This is similar to what happened after the ’92 loss.  Few, if any, seriously backed Quayle as the heir apparent, and Pat Buchanan had loyal supporters but was obviosly loathed by the party establishment (Huckabee seems to fit this role best), which meant that the party relied on its trusty “it’s his turn” method of selecting an establishment candidate.  McCain was considered the frontrunner in 2007 for the same reason–he had been the runner-up in 2000, and he was due–and as it worked out he survived the challenges of various younger line-jumpers and outsiders.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Republicans rarely reward line-jumpers and outsiders.  A candidacy like that of Obama has not yet proved successful in the GOP, and by this I mean having the candidacy of a fairly young challenger lead to general election victory.  The last three Democratic Presidents (including the President-elect) have been long-shot outsiders of one kind or another, and arguably every non-incumbent postwar Democratic nominee has followed this pattern.  As significant as Goldwater’s nomination was, it was a fluke of sorts in the postwar era and the only one of its kind on the Republican side.  Perhaps the ’64 result convinced party leaders that they should never try anything like that again.  As we all know, Reagan had paid his dues in 1976, and was rewarded with the ’80 nomination, after losing in ’80 Bush waited his turn until ’88, and Dole had served his time and was eventually rewarded in ’96.  If the Republicans keep up this tradition, Romney would seem to be the logical successor, even though he would almost certainly be a poor nominee. 

However, McCain’s loss and the deep misgivings about his candidacy among many GOP primary voters may have changed things.  Under the old pattern, and based on the survey data above, Romney would be considered the party leader (even though he technically finished third, not second, during the primaries) and probably will be treated as such by a lot of people on the right.  Then again, McCain’s defeat may have made the old pattern seem foolish, so there could be much more resistance to anointing Romney as the heir apparent than there has been in the past.  This would normally be where I launch into my usual anti-Romney argument, but I think having mainstream conservatives and party leaders rallying behind a candidate as terrible as Romney will create the perfect opportunity for a line-jumping, perhaps even populist candidate.  As I discuss in a new article for Takimag, what we learned from the 2008 election was the powerful establishment hostility to anything resembling grassroots, populist conservatism and also the strong desire among the party’s core constituencies for a candidate who represents them:

Regardless of how one views Sarah Palin herself, the phenomenon of enthusiasm for Palin, like the grassroots mobilization for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul we saw in the primaries, shows the powerful hunger in Middle America for someone to speak for them and defend their interests.  Except perhaps on immigration, institutional conservatism and elected representatives in the Republican Party have largely failed to do this.  During the primaries, institutional conservatism was content to foist two rebranded Northeastern liberal Republicans on conservatives as their champions while denigrating the two candidates with the strongest grassroots support. As the enthusiasm for candidates as different as Huckabee and Paul shows, Christian conservatives and libertarians are looking for representation. These voters are not going to find it in a mainstream movement that loathes Huckabee and Paul, nor will they find what they seek among the “reformists,” so their support is up for grabs.    

To the extent that Palin is, as Daniel Koffler astutely observes, “the reductio ad absurdum of some of those [putatively conservative] intellectuals’ efforts to manipulate the conservative base to advance their foreign policy agenda,” she is not necessarily the one best-suited to seize the opportunity presented by another episode of the establishment rallying to Romney.