When a prognosticator as good as Nate Silver bets money that, not only will Sarah Palin run for the Republican nomination for president in 2012, but that she will win it, you have to take that seriously. In the linked piece, Nate discusses the reasons that he thinks Palin will run, and sometime today he will publish the reasons that he thinks she can win. As this latter piece will involve Nate’s true expertise (crunching numbers), I eagerly await his analysis.

I’ve seen some people compare Palin to Ronald Reagan. Liberals never took Reagan seriously (he’s a two-bit B-Movie actor) and often expressed a desire to see him nominated because they assumed he would get crushed in a presidential election. Thus, the idea goes, Palin could surprise everyone in the same way that Reagan did. This is a version of the ‘be careful what you wish for’ maxim.

But there is another lesson from history. Sometimes the opposition party really does nominate someone who is almost wholly rejected by the national electorate. The most famous examples are Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. You could throw Walter Mondale into that mix, too, without fear of contradiction. Those nominees were beaten in almost every state in the union. Goldwater only carried his home-state of Arizona and the Deep South that was reeling from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which Goldwater had filibustered).

The elections of 1964, 1972, and 1984 were unique in the sense that they defied normal voting patterns. In 1964, Utah voted for Lyndon Johnson. In 1984, Massachusetts voted for Reagan. In 1972, Massachusetts was the only state to vote for McGovern. Each of these elections involved a wholesale rejection of one candidate without much regard for ideology.

So, my question for Nate is not whether or not Palin can win the Republican nomination, but whether she could avoid this kind of wholesale rejection by the national electorate. Regardless of how badly the economy is doing, or how difficult our foreign policy challenges have become, would Palin be able to convince the voters of more than one or two states to vote for her against Barack Obama?

In some sense, that isn’t a fair way of putting the question. I don’t think Ronald Reagan could have defeated President Carter in a normal election year. He was assisted by a perfect storm of economic and foreign policy disasters. But Reagan had other advantages that Palin will not have. As his diaries attest, Reagan had more familiarity with policy than Palin. He had not quit his job as governor of California. He was taken more seriously than Palin by the both the GOP and the media establishment. And, in any case, I am not asking Nate whether Palin can win, but only whether she could avoid a total wipeout.

As we contemplate the spectacle of Palin actually running for and winning the GOP nomination, we have to envision the apoplectic reaction of the Wall Street-Republican establishment. We’d probably see another mass exodus of formerly moderate Republicans, who were completely alienated by the rise of Palinism. I don’t think Palin could compete for any traditionally Blue States, and she might struggle to win 35% of the vote in most of them. A better question is how well she could hold up in traditionally Republican states like Arizona and Georgia and Kentucky. Would she be able to polarize the nation sufficiently to hold onto most of McCain’s map? What are the states she’d be most likely to carry? Would her map look like Goldwater’s or more like Bob Dole’s?

Or, am I wrong? Could Palin be the second coming of Ronald Reagan?