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.