Over at MSNBC’s First Read blog , Ellie Hall points out that Sarah Palin has endorsed 18 men and 10 women running in primaries and calls it “interesting” that three out of Palin’s last four endorsements have been men, considering that the former Alaskan governor has been playing the Mama Grizzly card for the last few months.
Interesting to Hall, maybe. But it’s an empty gotcha. It’s hard to attack Palin for betraying her fellow lady pols when you consider that she’s not endorsing men over women. I took a quick look at the primary opponents of the candidates that Palin endorsed. It turns out that Palin endorsed a man over a woman two times- she picked Gov. Rick Perry over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Texas gubernatorial primary, and she’s endorsed Paul Gosar over Sydney Hay in a U.S. House race in Arizona. Hutchison is a long-established politician, and so it’s not like an endorsement would have been in the same category of Palin lifting up unknowns like Nikki Haley and Karen Handel and turning them into rising stars.
What’s actually interesting-or alarming, depending on how you feel about Palin-is Hall’s find that Palin’s endorsed eight winning candidates and four losing candidates, for a winning percentage of 66.7. It’s an awfully small sample size, but it, um, bears watching.
Photograph courtesy of Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture/Wikimedia Commons
