Newt Now The New "Not-Romney" Candidate

When the Republican campaign began several months ago for the party's presidential nomination most pundits considered Mitt Romney to be the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. It was considered to be "his turn" at the nomination. He had lots of money and the blessing of the party's establishment, and most people figured the rest of the party would climb on board when it became apparent he was the prohibitive favorite. He also had a lead in all the polls.

But things just haven't worked out that way. Those pundits were overlooking a couple of things. First, the nomination will not be decided by the party's establishment but by the party's base, which is predominantly made up of teabaggers. Second, those teabaggers don't like or trust Mitt Romney. They don't like him being a mormon, and most of them consider him to be a liberal who has just put on some rather ill-fitting conservative clothing. Although he now professes to accept the right-wing positions on abortion, health care, global warming, and gay rights, they remember it hasn't been but a short few years when he professed much more liberal positions on those issues.

They suspect he's just posing as a conservative to get primary votes, and will move back to the left once he gets the nomination. Although Romney has lead in many of the polls for the past few months, and still leads in some polls, he has never been able to garner more than about a quater of the Republican voters' support -- and has been unable to build on that support. Instead, the teabagger base has frantically been trying to find an alternative candidate -- a "not-Romney" candidate.


At first, it looked like the "not-Romney" candidate would be either Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. But Huckabee quickly dropped out of the race, and the base became frustrated with Palin's refusal to declare her candidacy. They began to look for other alternatives. First came Donald Trump. Trading on his "birther" beliefs, he even jumped ahead of Romney in some polls. But Trump also decided he wouldn't run -- probably because he didn't want to undergo the intense media scrutiny of a real candidate.

This left the field wide-open, and for a while it looked like either Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul might be the teabagger alternative. These two candidates virtually tied in the important Iowa straw poll, finishing far ahead of all other candidates including Mitt Romney. But their hopes were short-lived. Bachmann said the right things for the teabaggers, but I don't think most of them believed she could actually beat President Obama. And Paul was too much a maverick, who just would not completely agree with the teabaggers on all issues.

Then Rick Perry entered the race and the teabaggers thought they had finally found their candidate. Bachman nearly instantly dropped back into single-digits in the polls and Paul was left only with his libertarian support. Perry shot up in the polls and the pundits declared it to be a two-man race -- between Romney and Perry. Then Perry was exposed for his utter inability to debate (not a surprise to us Texans). That, along with his unpopular views about Social Security and Medicare, started his slide in the polls back down to single-digit territory.

Once again the teabaggers were left without a viable candidate. This time they latched on to the candidacy of Herman Cain. They didn't know a lot about him, but he was saying the right things for the teabagger base and they thought his being African-American might give him the ability to attract some non-white votes in a general election. Like Perry and Trump before him, he shot up in the polls and even bested Romney in some of them. But it turned out he had some rather nasty skeletons in his closet (multiple charges of sexual harassment), and didn't have a clue when it came to foreign policy.

The newest polls show that Cain's support is now sliding downward. But the teabaggers are still not climbing on the Romney bandwagon. Instead, they have found a new "not-Romney" candidate -- Newt Gingrich. A few months ago it was thought that Gingrich's candidacy was dead, but the teabaggers are running out of time and candidates. They now seem to be willing to overlook Gingrich's own un-closeted skeletons. At least he is not Mitt Romney. Here are the results of two new polls showing the Gingrich candidacy is indeed surging:

Public Policy Polling (November 10-13)[4.1 point margin of error]
Newt Gingrich...............28%
Herman Cain...............25%
Mitt Romney...............18%
Rick Perry...............6%
Ron Paul...............5%
Michele Bachmann...............5%
Jon Huntsman...............3%
Gary Johnson...............1%
Rick Santorum...............1%
Don't know...............9%

CNN/ORC Poll (November 11-13) [4.5 point margin of error]
Mitt Romney...............24%
Newt Gingrich...............22%
Herman Cain...............14%
Rick Perry...............12%
Ron Paul...............8%
Michele Bachmann...............6%
Jon Huntsman...............3%
Rick Santorum...............3%
Someone else...............1%
Don't know...............8%

But perhaps the most interesting fact is that with only about seven weeks before the voting starts, this is still a very fluid race. The CNN Poll shows that only 31% of the Republican voters have definitely made up their minds about who to support. A full 61% said they might change their minds (and 8% gave no opinion on this question). This is still anybody's race to win.