Up, up and away -- revisted

A while back, Ryan was crowing about Romney gaining momentum.  And I disputed his analysis here, characterizing Romney as having flat, topped out support.  The release of a slew of CNN/ORC polls prompted discussion.  At that time, Romney was +1 ahead of Cain in the national.

 

Well, a new CNN/ORC national GOP poll is out, and Romney is +2!  Momentum!  Except, Romney has gone from 26% support to 24%, a loss of 2 points.  So it appears Romney is still stuck and gaining no traction, at least for the moment.  As I said in my rebuttal, "Right now it's a race between Gingrich and Perry to unseat Cain for the not-Romney position."  This latest poll shows Cain declining from 25% to 14%, a loss of 11 points!  And it looks like Gingrich is making a strong run and beating Perry in the not-Romney race, surging from 8% in the previous poll to 22% in the current.

 

Ryan has been eager to write the Cain candicacy's obituary, and it looks like it's finally time.  I cautioned earlier about drawing too many conclusions from one poll.  But I think this is inidicative of how things will unfold (or unravel) for Cain.  Also, I heard an anecdote from Erick Erickson about the recent Rasmussen Florida GOP poll that, while Cain came out on top, each day his support was declining as the allegations unfolded.  The perfect storm brought Cain to prominence, and the perfect storm looks to be taking him out and blowing Gingrich in.

 

I think Gingrich is really the last man standing.  And he has a history of going off the reservation such that he could implode as well.  The good news for him is the time is much more limited for that to happen.  The bad news for him, given the amount of baggage he has (both political and personal), there almost certainly is dirt to be dug and he will have even less recovery time when it starts flying.  Though he presents well now as a conservative idealogue, his history of going off the reservation has to make him at least as big a political risk as Romney for conservatives.  And I think at crunch time, electibility and political risk will be the main tradeoff in conservatives' calculations.

 

I've made fun of Romney's stagnant support.  But he is still in a pretty good position.  He hasn't done or said anything really terrible.  He is acceptably conservative to most of the party.  He presents well.  As the time gets closer to the primaries, many more people are going to be looking at electability.  Cain was suspect on that score even before the allegations and has to be considered damaged goods (unless he can show definitively all are false and that he is a vicitim of a hackish political takedown).  Newt has a lot of political baggage and his personal life will present the same type of problem with women voters that Cain now has.  Perry has continued to be irrelevant.  That leaves Romney as the most electible by process of elimination.  And not only that, the polls continue to show that in matchups with Obama (although "generic GOP candidate" still polls best--but he ain't running).

 

Romny isn't rising yet.  But it's just a matter of time.

 

--dmac