Although I supported Obama, I liked what I saw of Huntsman, he seemed to reflect a sane and positive side of the Republicans in a way that Romney and their other candidates never could. I also know more than one staunch Northeast Democrat who was briefly captivated by Huntsman during the Republican primaries. If Huntsman can keep clear of the Tea Party stench (and cut off Grover Norquist’s nonsense while he’s at it) it just might pay off big in the long term - for everyone, not just for him.
I’m not surprised. Huntsman was as close to a moderate as a Republican can be these days.
But Huntsman never got the support of Rove or any major GOP players. He didn’t have the conservative media banging his drum. So he was an outsider in his own party. No way he could mount a successful campaign without one or both.
Yes, his image was very moderate. His actual issue positions were pretty conservative (maybe even more than Mitt Romney’s), but for some reason (either tactical for 2016, stupidity, or both) he tried to make it sound like he was running to the left.
Interesting. Of the entire GOP field this year, I liked Huntsman best, but he was (at least as compared to the others) too centrist to appeal to the typical hard-right Republican primary/caucus voter. I suspect that most of those voters will say Romney’s problem was that he wasn’t consistently conservative enough over the course of his career; they won’t be looking for a moderate or (ptui) a liberal Republican next time.
I read some of the press about Huntsman that came out of Utah (he is the ex-governor) and he appears to have left a good reputation, and he is not disliked by liberals there. Maybe he really is the type of bipartisan that George W Bush was supposed to be?
I think Huntsman could easily have picked off a lot of disenchanted Obama voters from 2008. I have a few friends who refused to vote for Obama for various ideological reasons, but felt that Romney was simply an unpalatable choice. They ended up voting for third-party candidates (Johnson and Stein, I believe). Huntsman probably could have picked up those votes. Would he have lost an equal number of votes from Republicans who found him just as unpalatable? Dunno.
The Green Party increased its share from 0.12% to 0.35%, the Libertarian Party from 0.4% to 0.98%. I’m pretty sure that 0.7% of the electorate is outnumbered by Republicans who’d be turned off by a candidate that doesn’t meet their conservative purity tests.
He’s the son of a wealthy Mormon businessman who served as a (mildly) moderate governor before trying to run on a (very) regressive tax plan to win the GOP primary.
The Obama campaign basically just did run against Jon Huntsman.
Okay, but the real question is: Do these Republicans vote for a third-party candidate or stay home, knowing that in doing so they might let the country get stolen away by the evil socialist gun-taking Obama?
I think the conservative base is going to turn out to vote for the R pretty much no matter what. That’s just a gut feeling and I could be wrong, but considering the fearmongering that conservative media outlets like to engage in, I don’t see these guys staying home or voting third-party, even if the R they’re given is some kind of wishy-washy evolution-believing compromise-making pseudo-liberal.
I dunno, I think that’s kind of like saying that Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani are basically the same person. They in fact appear to have a very different character and it’s fairly obvious why the Obama campaign respected one more than the other.
I sort of agree about the tax plan, but Huntsman’s plan did get better buzz than Romney’s (granted, that’s not a difficult achievement)
I agree that, in a general election, Huntsman would have had a much better chance vs. Obama than would any of the other Republican candidates. Even so, though, he was never actually a threat to Obama, because there was never any chance, this cycle, of him making it through the primaries. He was playing for 2016 all along, and his chance for that has probably now evaporated, too.
Huntsman, the only non-nutter among the candidates, screwed himself by tweeting that he believes in evolution and the science of global warming. In fact, he believes in what science tells us in general. No way would he have gotten the nomination after that, as he was immediately branded a liberal. :rolleyes:
Well, maybe the Pubs will take a lesson from this election, and in 2016 they’ll run somebody who is at least “liberal” enough to accept evolution and global warming and science generally, and say so.
The only reason Huntsman would have been any kind of threat is that Mitt Romney decided to run hard-right in the primaries. If Romney had somehow managed to win the nomination running on his record as governor of Massachusettes (and I’m not saying that would have been possible, given the typical Republican primary voter temperament) he would have been a much tougher opponent against Obama.
They won’t. They’re about jacking off the far right and cockblocking the Democrats and that is about all they’ve got left. They’ve changed their definition of “leadership” to something resembling Chuck Norris and, in the absence of that, are content to be discontent as long as they can make that discontent spread.
Speaking of ol’ Chucky and his Bride of Chucky. I’m curious to know what they’ve done to insulate themselves from the “thousand years of darkness” she mentioned darkly in their anti-Obama video.
Yeah. The difference is that Jon Huntsman managed to avoid looking like a wool-headed pathological liar the way Mitt Romney did. This is partly due to less media exposure; but some of us suspect that Jon Huntsman may relatively intelligent, sane, and/or honest compared to Mittens. (Whether this makes him relatively intelligent, sane, and/or honest compared to any given set of people who *didn’t *run for the GOP presidential nomination this year is another question.)
This isn’t news. There were reports of Obama admin worries in June 2011. But they were short lived. Everyone soon realized that Huntsman was far too neuro-typical for the Republican primary voter. If you want to be nominated by the Republicans you either have to be crazy or simulate crazy. Huntsman had too much dignity to do the latter.
Huntsman was an incredibly conservative candidate: as governor he cut taxes in Utah of all places. But insufficient insanity is a deal killer for the Republican primary voter.
Cite2: Huntsman never had his bump in the polls: he couldn’t even clear Ron Paul levels.
Cite3: Huntsman believed in both evolution and the scientific consensus on global warming. Republicans will only support crackpots. Category: DC - TPM – Talking Points Memo