With one major drawback: His name recognition is low but that’s nothing a little grass-roots activism can’t change.
Businessman and likely presidential candidate Herman Cain may not be all that well known among Republicans, but those who know him really like him, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.
In a relatively diffuse Republican presidential field, where a number of the candidates have limited name recognition among primary voters, Gallup has created a metric called ‘positive intensity,’ which measures the candidate’s favorability rating among the people who know him or her.
Cain, who only has a 29 percent name recognition according to Gallup, has a positive intensity score of 24, higher than any other candidate that Gallup polls. Michele Bachmann has the second highest score of 21.
Other more well known candidates, like Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, whose names are familiar to over 80 percent of Republicans, fare less well in positive intensity. Sarah Palin gets a score of 16, Romney gets 14, and Gingrich gets 13.
It’s worth noting that one’s positive intensity score has not yet transferred to the polls. Romney won the trial heat that Gallup conducted between March and April (after reallotting votes cast for Huckabee and Trump to the respondent’s second choice candidate). Cain received less than 0.5 percent of the vote.