No, she hasn’t made any formal announcement, and she may yet choose to run. But with the 2010 midterm elections behind us, Sarah Palin has lost her relevance. Recent polls find her popularity at an all-time low, even among Republicans and right-leaning independents. Whereas a few months ago she looked like the wild card of the 2012 presidential primaries, today it appears impossible for her to find a viable path to the GOP nomination.
Many on the left (and some on the right) were astonished that people would treat her as a viable candidate in the first place. Those objections aside, it is little use denying her electric performance during the midterm elections. She provided energy to the tea party movement and commanded six-figure speaking fees. Her voice shaped public discourse. Not all her endorsements produced winners, but Palin sat at the heart of a national swing to the right that netted six Senate seats and sixty-three House seats for resurgent Republicans.
As perhaps the most visible national Republican figure of 2010, she appeared to have a path to the 2012 GOP nomination. Energized conservatives would flock to her campaign whether she announced her candidacy late or early, so while the Tim Pawlentys and Mitt Romneys of the field began the long, methodical approach to a national campaign, Sarah Palin could play to her strengths: sit back, commit as late as possible, and never stop talking. Perhaps she would have scant hope of taking down Obama in the general election, but the primaries are fought among the voters who love her best.
No longer. The national swing to the right has finished, halted in its tracks as newly-minted governors and congressmen begin to govern. Tea partiers and other conservatives find themselves pacified by victory, and Palin’s role is suddenly obsolete. As a bold voice for the many Americans who felt disenfranchised by a Democratic Congress and White House, Palin was a provocateur of conservative victimhood. “Take our country back,” she said, and voters did. But with its impressive new majority in the House, the GOP can’t play victim all the way to the White House.
The new dynamic shows in Palin’s poll numbers. She was a figure of the tea party, a champion of the 2010 conservative push. As the 2010 movement dissipates, so does her popularity.
Besides the end of midterm season, the turning point for Palin may have been her self-centered response to the Tucson shootings in January. By spending the majority of her 8-minute video defending herself from critics, she again played victim. But the nation was riveted by the fate of real victims, and next to President Obama’s moving speech – delivered later the same day – Palin’s squeaky-wheeled refrain struck a glaring sour note.
Suffice to say, her path to the nomination is closed. Primary voters will not flock to her candidacy if she decides to drop in at the last moment, and she is ill-suited to the kind of methodical campaign necessary to boost her poll numbers. Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post observes that Palin would have to go on a “major charm offensive” to woo independent voters in the general election. Increasingly, the same could be said about winning skeptical Republicans in the primary. But she won popularity by doing the exact opposite – “She sticks it in their faces,” as one tea partier told me on Boston Common last April. Sarah Palin attempting to charm the centrists would no longer be Sarah Palin.
As other national Republicans build their images and hit the campaign road, they will eclipse Palin, and she will find herself unable to command the media’s attention either as a candidate or a commentator. 2010 was Palin’s moment, and that moment is over. Count her out for 2012.