As Republican presidential candidates have been on the campaign trail in pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and businessman and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney have emerged as front-runners in quite a few polls and have lately been battling for the lead position. In an unlikely turn of events, Herman Cain won a GOP straw poll yesterday in Florida with a convincing 37% of the 2,657 votes cast. In his WSJ Online article today, Patrick O'Connor discussed some of the reasons why Cain may have come out ahead of his opponents who have been gaining more support and tend to be relatively more moderate than the former corporate executive (though Perry has led a considerably more conservative campaign than Romney).
The straw poll immediately followed a Thursday night GOP debate, in which Perry stood by "a Texas law he had signed making illegal immigrants eligible for in-state university tuition," which disappointed many conservatives and alienated some voters. This is typical of the dilemma faced by candidates of having to appeal to two different audiences while trying to win a single-party primary but also taking into consideration appealing to the median voter in the general election later on. In a two-party election, Perry's policy would still have alienated some conservatives, but it also likely would have won him some moderate votes by moving him closer ideologically to the Democratic candidate. The primary is a balancing act where the candidates must determine how conservative (or liberal, as the case may be) they must be to win primary votes without going past the point of no return where they cannot come back close enough to the middle to compete for Downs' decisive median voter in the general election against a candidate of the other party. Therefore, although either Perry or Romney would likely be ultimately more electable than Cain in the general election, he was able to surpass both candidates for a win this Saturday.
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