Election Update

After surges by Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain died out, Newt Gingrich is now the Anti-Romney candidate of the moment.

Gingrich has surged from 11% a month ago to over 30% in the latest national polls.  He's also leading by double digits in the latest polls from Iowa, and seems to be narrowing Romney's lead in New Hampshire.  As a result, Intrade now gives Gingrich a 34.1% change of victory and Romney a 45.5% chance (a month ago, Romney hovered around 70% and Gingrich hovered just above 5%).

The jump in the polls has Gingrich facing an awful lot of questions about his personal life, past positions, and the legitimacy of his campaign.  Gingrich's ground organization is scrambling to expand after running only a bare bones operation since the summer -- Mitt Romney holds the clear edge in this regard, which can prove crucial in states with caucuses and on multi-state voting days.  Gingrich is also scrambling to raise money (where, once again, he badly trails Mitt Romney).  Despite these logistical issues, The Economist writes that Gingrich is the strongest of the prominent Anti-Romney candidates to date.

Nate Silver points out that Romney has won about 55% of major endorsements while Gingrich has only netted about 5% and wonders whether the institutional support is actually hurting Romney among Republicans deeply skeptical of institutions.

The latest poll on the Iowa race has a few interesting nuggets:
-Mitt Romney rated the lowest (40%), Ron Paul (81%) the highest, and Newt Gingrich in the middle (63%) when people were asked whether candidates said what they believed vs. what people wanted to hear most of the time
-22% of likely caucus voters said gay marriage should be legal and an additional 36% said civil unions should be legal, while only 38% said there should be no legal recognition of gay couples' relationships
-The highest percentage of people had been personally contacted by Ron Paul's campaign (77%), while Mitt Romney (60%) was in the middle of the pack and Newt Gingrich (38%) near the bottom.
-Among the 37% who reported watching Fox News the most for information about politics, Gingrich received four times as much support as Romney
-In a state with a large group of conservative Christians, Gingrich received three times as much support from self-identified evangelicals as Romney

Meanwhile, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wonders whether Christian conservatives, despite current poll numbers, really want to support Gingrich.

It isn’t just that he’s a master of selective moral outrage whose newfound piety has been turned to consistently partisan ends. It’s that his personal history — not only the two divorces, but also the repeated affairs and the way he behaved during the dissolution of his marriages — makes him the most compromised champion imaginable for a movement that’s laboring to keep lifelong heterosexual monogamy on a legal and cultural pedestal.

Links, 12-6-11

*David Brooks writes about Cass Sunstein, "the wonky liberal" (and co-author of Nudge) and his work administering the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which calculates the degree to which new regulations will help and hurt economic and social causes.

This office, under Sunstein, is incredibly wonky. It is composed of career number-crunchers of no known ideological bent who try to measure the trade-offs inherent in regulatory action. Deciding among these trade-offs involves relying on both values and data. This office has tried to elevate the role of data so that every close call is not just a matter of pleasing the right ideological army.

He concludes that "Obama’s regulations may be more intrusive than some of us would like. They are not tanking the economy."

*Paul Krugman dissects the Republican primary race, arguing that " There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless."  He says the reason Romney has so far failed to take control of the race is:

Mr. Romney’s strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn’t a stupid man — but he seems to play one on TV. Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party’s nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

Krugman worries about the potential of the nominee because, he says, "the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process."

*A new study finds a large jump in worldwide carbon emissions in 2010

*The unemployment rate dropped to 8.6% last week, but mostly because people stopped looking for work

*Conservative Frederick Hess and liberal Linda Darling-Hammond, two of the leading experts on education policy, have co-authored an op-ed articulating the four things the federal government should do to/for schools when NCLB is reauthorized

*According to a new report, Tennessee's obesity rate dropped from 32.8% to 31.7% in the past year, dropping us from 3rd to 9th in the country.  The nation's obesity rate, though, increased from 26.9% to 27.5% (lots of stats here).

*Here's an article relevant to tomorrow's presentation on women at war