In response to yesterday's post about New Gingrich, a regular reader of mine wrote with the following query:

While I'm not aching for Newt to jump in the race, I haven't seen enough polls or other evidence to suggest that Newt is entirely unelectable. I'm writing just to ask if you could do a follow-up post to today's post, where you said that it's obvious that Newt is unelectable.

You very well may be right about Newt. Allow me to suggest that there may be a lot of people like me who would enjoy seeing your line of reasoning.

The lesson here, I think, is never to use the word "obvious." Nothing is ever obvious. Everything is potentially disputable. So, allow me to justify why I think Gingrich does not get elected if he runs.

Clearly, Gingrich is no longer a personality on the main stage of the American political drama. So, our data set will be limited, and we will have to be careful about the inferences that we draw from it. Nevertheless, in August Scott Rasmussen conducted a poll on whether people have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of certain individuals. Gingrich was 37% positive, 54% negative. By comparison, Dick Cheney was 39/58. Rasmussen does note: "Feeling about Gingrich, however, are less intense. While 39% have a Very Unfavorable opinion of Cheney, only 25% say the same about Gingrich."

Another comparison: Hillary Clinton - who many believe has electability problems - recently rated a 52/48 score.

Again, Gingrich is not in the public eye - so his public perception might change if he enters the race. However, he would have to construct a public image quite different from the one he had back when he was Speaker of the House. As evidence of this, I turn to the American National Elections Study. which queries more than 1,500 voters every election year about their opinions about politics. One set of questions asked in every study are known as "feeling thermometer" questions. That is, the ANES asks respondents to identify on a scale of 0 to 100 their feelings for a given individual or institution - with 0 being don't like and 100 being like.

It asked this of Gingrich back in 1996 (access the full data set here) - and his average score was 39.46. By comparision, here are some other results from the same year.

Bill Clinton: 59.34

Bob Dole: 51.78

Ross Perot: 39.58

Al Gore: 58.20

Jack Kemp: 56.88

Hillary Clinton: 52.81

Pat Buchanan: 44.37

Jesse Jackson: 46.96

Colin Powell: 69.92

Pat Robertson: 44.70

Republican Party: 53.31

I highlighted the last one to indicate that, at least in 1996, Gingrich was less popular than the generic party label itself. Clearly, he was not at all popular. Again, he might be able to recraft his public image and make a credible run - but I would put that in the "Heck - anything is possible!" category of things.

This should clarify my justification for asking "Wha?" about a Gingrich run.