Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s forthcoming autobiography has been at the top of the Amazon book charts for weeks, and it hasn’t even been released yet. At least in the eyes of the political Left, she is now perhaps America’s most visible national Republican.

But new Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveying finds Palin losing handily in face-to-face march-ups with her two likeliest challengers for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Among likely Republican primary voters, Palin now trails former Arkansas governor-turned-Fox-TV-host Mike Huckabee by 20 points – 55% to 35%.

When her opponent is ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Palin loses by 15 – 52% to 37%.

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When given a list of five candidates and asked who they would vote for in 2012, 29% of Republican voters nationwide say Huckabee, while 24% prefer Romney and 18% Palin.

In July, it was close to a three-way tie: 25% said Romney, 24% Palin and 22% Huckabee.

It’s noteworthy that Huckabee’s gains since July are matched almost precisely by Palin’s decline. That suggests a large pool of voters are committed to choosing between two candidates routinely dismissed as unacceptable in the eyes of Republicans in Washington, DC. At the moment, 47% prefer either Huckabee or Palin while 42% prefer a candidate more acceptable to Republican political leaders. That divide is also reflected, with similar results, in a Huckabee-Romney head to head match-up.

Twenty-one percent (21%) of primary voters also say Palin is the GOP candidate they would least like to see win the party’s presidential nomination. Just nine percent (9%) say the same of Romney, and eight percent (8%) feel that way about Huckabee.

Support for Huckabee and Romney against Palin is nearly the same among both men and women.
Suggesting that Romney’s Mormon faith may still be a problem among some Christian conservatives, Palin leads him by 14 points – 52% to 38% - among GOP primary voters who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians. But Romney beats Palin by 26 points among other Protestants – 58% to 32% - and holds similar winning margins among Catholic voters and those of other faiths.

On the other hand, Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, beats Palin by 17 points among Evangelical Christians and 29 points among other Protestants. A similar spread is evident among Republican voters of other faiths, but Huckabee has just an eight-point edge over Palin among Catholic voters.

Earlier polling showed that Palin trails Hillary Clinton in a general election match-up.

In early July, 40% of Republican voters nationwide said Palin’s decision to resign as governor of Alaska hurt her chances of winning the party’s presidential nomination in 2012.

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