June 11, 2009 06:29 PM UTC

Take Me To Your Leaders: Rush and Cheney

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Really bad news for Republicans from a new poll out today. As The Fix writes:

The headline coming out of today’s USA Today/Gallup poll is that the American people see conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and former vice president Dick Cheney as the two most prominent leaders of the Republican party.

Cable television has been all over the story and the Democratic National Committee got in on the act — sending out a release touting the poll with the headline “‘Nuff Said” and featuring an MSNBC screen shot of Limbaugh, Cheney as well as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.).

While the relative prominence of Cheney, Limbaugh et al is the sexy headline, the important number to focus on when calculating the future electoral prospects of the GOP is 47 percent. That’s the percentage of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who were unable to name a single leader of the national GOP.

Compare that to just 16 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who were unable to name a leader of their party and you begin to grasp the depth of the problem for the GOP. [Pols emphasis]

It’s not that 13 percent of the public thinks Limbaugh is the leader of the party or that 10 percent think Cheney is the chief spokesman — those are relatively paltry numbers that are stoked, at least in part, by Democrats’ desire to elevate those sorts of unpopular voices into prominence and a willingness by both men to allow that to happen.

It’s that roughly half of self-identified Republicans have no idea who leads their party or could even offer a name of who might. For a party searching for its soul, that is a very troubling number. [Pols emphasis]…

…Republicans must hope that one or two people in the current mix of would-be leaders — preferably not Limbaugh or Cheney due to their high negatives among Independent voters — emerge in the next six months and begins to point the party in a specific direction. If not, they could find themselves at sea politically for the foreseeable future.

These results come on the heels of numbers showing that almost 38% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of their own Party.