I mentioned last week that St. Olaf Political Scientist Dan Hofrenning had predicted on Almanac that Tim Pawlenty will be the 2012 Repub nominee. Several TPaw-dislikers asked me what Hofrenning could be talking about, so I called the always-pleasant-and-generous-with-his-views Hofrenning and asked him.

The answer was fairly simple: Hofrenning believes that of the current list of likeliest GOP contenders, Pawlenty is the only one who seems thoroughly acceptable to both of the party's major factions, the social and the economic conservatives.

He sees the GOP likely contenders as carrying serious political problems. He dismisses Sarah Palin's chances. If she runs, she might play the role played by Pat Buchanan in a couple of previous cycles, exciting a strong following among her admirers but unable to be taken seriously as a major-party nominee.

Former Arkansas Gov. (and current Fox News Channel star) Mike Huckabee is the current favorite of social conservatives (and wins in current straw polls of Repub activists). But, Hofrenning believes, his economic populist streak comes across as anti-Wall Street and makes it unlikely that the party's pro-business wing will ever really trust him. Also, as much as the social conservatives warm to Huckabee's evangelist style, he thinks others in the party will be leery of going before the general electorate with a former Baptist minister on the ticket (no clergyman has ever been a major party nominee, Hofrenning said).

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney (whom I personally consider the front-runner for the nomination) is a master of CEO-speak and the darling of pro-business Republicans. But Hofrenning believes that social conservatives will never fully trust a candidate who, in his Massachusetts days, flirted with pro-choice and pro-gay-rights positions. Hofrenning also thinks that, considering the centrality of anti-Obama-health-care-ideas to current Repub thinking, it will be difficult for Romney to live down the current Massachusetts experiment in universal coverage (which has many similarities to Obamacare) that he signed into law.

Conceding that Pawlenty starts off with the least experience in presidential politics, the lowest name recognition, and the smallest national base of contributors of this field (that's a lot of problems to toss aside with a dependent clause), Hofrenning nonetheless believes that he will prevail in the nomination fight because he doesn't excite deep suspicion from any of the key GOP factions. He has solid social conservative credentials (perhaps some wobbling on stem cells), is an evangelical protestant but not a preacher, has focused recently on his anti-tax personna, speaks the deficit-hawk language convincingly and looks good and sounds good on the stump, although find him less than charismatic. (I, too, think that Pawlenty makes a very good impression, coming across as humorous, humble, folksy, fluent on policy details, sure-footed, unflappable under hostile questioning.)

The national punditocracy seems to have started out thinking that Pawlenty's place in the race was to be the moderate alternative. Minnesotans, certainly liberal Minnesotans, harbor no impression that Pawlenty is a moderate. Nor do I know anyone who seriously believes that the Republican base is searching for a moderate. But there's something about Pawlenty's style that, Hofrenning said, "allows him to come across to moderates as a moderate and to conservatives as a conservative." If true, especially in the age of litmus-test politics, that's quite a skill, and I have to say I sort of get what Hofrenning is saying.

I'll just mention a couple of barriers to Pawlenty that I discussed with Hofrenning. If, in the early primaries and caucuses, Republicans are divided between social conservatives whose first choice is Hucakbee and economic conservatives whose first choice is Romney, Pawlenty is liable to finish a distant third or fourth for a while before Hofrenning's analysis -- that Romney and Huckabee reach a stalemate and the party needs someone acceptable to both factions. Candidates who finish a distant third or fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire are usually gone before their subtle merits are discovered. I'm skeptical of the idea that Pawlenty has a big advantage in Iowa because he comes from a neighboring state. If anything, it will raise expectations and make a third- or fourth-place finish look worse.

Lastly, please note that political handicapping of a race three years in advance is very, very likely to be wrong, unless it turns out to be right. When Hofrenning made his bold prediction on Almanac, host Cathy Wurzer warned him that it was now on tape and would be dusted off when it turns out to be right or wrong.