Schwarzenegger 2020: Equal Opportunity to Govern

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Icelander

In order to determine how plausible various paths to a point where Schwarzenegger can run for President are, I kind of need to know whether or not modern Americans consider the 'natural born clause' important or controversial.

It's considered important enough that people get into arguments about it for edge cases (e.g. John McCain) or where it's possible to introduced FUD about the issue (Barack Obama). Schwarzenegger is not an edge case nor are there any real disputed facts, he's just not a natural born citizen.

If for some reason he ran anyway and won there's a fair chance everyone would ignore the issue after the fact (if he's popular enough to win, clearly there's a majority who don't think it matters) but there would be formidable obstacles to achieving it (a slew of lawsuits about ballot eligibility, and even if he got past those things, enough people who think it matters that he probably can't win an election, it only takes a few percent).