Gov. Rick Perry is facing more bad news in the polls after the latest survey by CBS and the New York Times showed him in fifth place with 6 percent, a 17-point plunge since mid-September, when he was the Republican frontrunner.
The poll, released Tuesday night, also showed that Atlanta businessman Herman Cain has surpassed former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts to become the new leader for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Cain had 25 percent among Republican voters, compared to 21 percent for Romney. The two candidates were tied at 17 percent in an early October poll.
The poll of likely Republican primary voters shows that Perry now trails former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has 10 percent, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul, with 8 percent. At the back of the pack were Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, with 2 percent, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who each had 1 percent.
The survey, conducted among 1,650 voters from Oct. 19 through Monday, was completed one day before Perry released a sweeping economic plan that includes an optional 20 percent sales tax.
Perry is hoping that the economic initiative, which he unveiled on Tuesday in a speech in Gray Court, S.C., will help revive his foundering candidacy. The Perry team has also brought in additional advisers with experience in past presidential races to help get the campaign back on track.
Perry’s once formidable appeal to Tea Party voters has largely shifted to Cain, according to the poll. Perry, who was polling 30 percent among Tea Party voters in mid-September, had only 7 percent in the new survey. By contrast, Cain’s Tea Party support has quadrupled in the same time period, with 32 percent of Tea Party voters saying they now support the former Atlanta businessman.
One bright spot for the Perry camp is the fact that most voters are still largely undecided. Only 19 percent said their minds are already made up. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.
-- Dave Montgomery
Many conservative Texans do NOT want Rick Perry to be President. He lost my vote when he deliberately defunded our highway system and persistently tried to ram his TransTexas Corridor and toll road agenda down the throats of Texas taxpayers. It represented double (and in many cases triple) taxation on roadways we had already paid for with our vehicle related taxes and fees, but the funds had been misused and diverted everywhere else except where they were supposed to go. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), who was responsible for a vast majority of these problems (and bears notoriety for its infamous 1.1 BILLION dollar accounting error several years ago), is Perry's "baby" who can do no wrong in his estimation and refuses to accept accountability for its actions. Incompetence, mismanagement, arrogance, and criminal conduct has REIGNED within that organization, all at the direction of Rick Perry, and he continues to appoint cronies there who will do his bidding. In reality, TxDOT vastly requires complete overhaul from the ground up.
http://texasturf.org/
People who have not lived here in Texas are oblivious to this fact, and because no one is confronting him with this in the debates and/or in the media, he is getting away with not having to address this topic which is quite a controversial "hot button" with those Texans who are not in Perry's hip pocket. He has managed to stay in office as long as he has in Texas, ONLY because conservatives were terrified of letting another Democrat get in, and he was considered the "lesser of two evils." In summary: We already have one arrogant "business as usual" politician occupying the White House now. We can do much better than Rick Perry in finding a suitable replacement.
Posted by: donziebear | October 26, 2011 at 01:14 PM