Another day, another dribble of idle speculation about Tim Pawlenty’s political future. (OK, the Strib’s a guilty as anyone, including questions about his vice-presidential prospects in the most recent Minnesota Poll.)

Anyway, the polling firm SurveyUSA has cooked up a statistical parlor game by running nationwide test heats between John McCain and Barack Obama, while grafting hypothetical running mates onto their backs.

This week, the company released its poll of Pennsylvanians (residents of a potential battleground state in November). The results were all over the map, with Obama winning 13 of the matchups (including the one that didn’t include running mates), McCain winning four.

For Pawlenty-watchers, the most notable takeaway was the fact that he didn’t exactly set the GOP ticket on fire. McCain-Pawlenty lost all four of its matchups against Obama and a running mate. Their best performance came against Obama and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, losing by 3 percentage points. Their worst: Obama and former Sen. John Edwards thumped them by an eye-popping 17 points (and that was by far the worst Republican performance in any of the test heats).

Of course, it’s not likely McCain and his brain trust are relying on such polls to make their veep pick, but if you’re a Pawlenty partisan, that has to sting a bit.

For the full poll results, click here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under John McCain, Main, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Presidential, Republicans, Tim Pawlenty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.