After repeatedly touting the analyses of Jay Cost at RCP — including in posts with titles like “What do you do with a candidate like Obama?“, I cannot help but note that his latest post in the Horse Race Blog is titled, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like McCain?”

Is that you, Jay?

Anyway, Cost argues that it is a bit hasty to declare McCain the frontrunner, and not just because this campaign cycle has been highly fluid:

There is another reason I am hesitant about this bandwagon. I think that the problem that nearly destroyed his candidacy last summer is still there – and it could yet do him in. The problem? Conservative leaders do not care for his candidacy.

Before I get into this, I need to clarify a common misconception. Many people wrongly assume that average voters are as ideological as party leaders (broadly defined to include elected party members, prominent personalities in the party, and ideologues on op/ed pages and in opinion journals). They are not. In fact, the highest estimate I have seen for the percentage of the public that thinks ideologically is 30%. And many of those people think in an effectively ideological manner – e.g. they use the information they get from trusted opinion makers to formulate opinions on inter-related issues.

This means that McCain is probably more acceptable to rank-and-file Republicans than we might initially think. For instance, according to the New Hampshire exit poll, McCain won voters who identified themselves as “somewhat conservative,” 38% to 35%. Romney won those who identified themselves as “very conservative,” 43% to 18%. These results are consistent with the previous paragraph. Romney won the strong ideologues. McCain won the weak ideologues.

That is even more striking in light of the fact that conservative leaders are likely to know that Romney’s record as governor was not incredibly conservative (though his supporters will frame this in the context of trying to govern the People’s Republic of Massachussetts).  Cost notes the data that shows McCain to be generally conservative.  On the other hand, to those who are ideological, the bill of indictment issued by Mark Levin will ring true.

Cost has plenty more on the complex relationship of viability with likeability — and how his analysis applies to Mike Huckabee – so RTWT.  

But before you do, note that the McCain mutiny rages in the blogosphere also, such as the reax at HotAir to the latest polls from the NYT and the WaPo, many of which can be classed as denial — denial of the poll results, denial of the validity of polling generally, misunderstanding polling methodologies, and so on.

One thing Allahpundit missed in his piece on these polls is name ID.  According to the ABC/WaPo poll, 11% still have no opinion of McCain.  Twenty percent still have no opinion of either Romney or Mike Huckabee.  Twenty-six percent still have no opinion of Thompson.  Those numbers give some context to the favorable/ unfavorable numbers reported therein.  Indeed, those numbers are ultimately based on the poll respondents’ self-assessments of whether they think they know enough about a candidate to have an opinion.  Of course, perception is often reality in politics, but it is one reason to caution against reading poll numbers too literally, even at this stage of a campaign. 

That returns us to the first point –  the still fluid nature of the GOP race.  McCain has high name ID, but it remains possible that support could flow to another candidate.  Allahpundit hypothesizes that it could flow back to Giuliani in Florida, just as McCain seems to have picked up support currently at Giuliani’s expense.   I would hypothesize that the current run of “Giuliani implosion” stories in the media makes it at least as likely that if McCain loses in Michigan or South Carolina, his supporters could to flow to a lesser-known candidate like Romney or Thompson who becomes better-known through debates or showings in those states.