Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner has an interesting study of conservative attitudes towards Obama. Their big point is that race plays less of a role in these attitudes than is commonly believed. I haven’t had time to read it thoroughly, but it’s interesting. I’ll have some more comment on this in the updates later.
Update. I’m on a conference call about this right now and it’s quite interesting. For example, conservatives that they spoke to didn’t cite a single Congressional leader as speaking for them; almost to a person, they said that Fox News spoke for conservatives. They showed very little enthusiasm for any 2012 candidates except for Sarah Palin.
The GQR analysts believe that tea partier/conservative base politics will play a much more important role in the 2012 Republican primary than they did in 2008.
Update update. Another interesting nugget: the GQR people say that the hostility towards Obama seems much more ideological and much less personal than with Clinton. In fact, the few good things conservatives did say about Obama were almost always personal — he seems like a good family man, his children are well-behaved, etc . With Clinton, the animus was primarily personal and less ideological.
