Gingrich to the fore

Yesterday saw three national polls and three different leaders in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Politico’s Battleground poll (conducted early last week) shows Herman Cain leading Mitt Romney by two points. CNN’s latest (conducted over the weekend) has Romney narrowly leading Newt Gingrich, with Cain down in third. Most eye-catching of all is the PPP poll (also conducted over the weekend), which has Gingrich in first place, followed by Cain and then Romney in third.

These polls do have one thing in common: they’re good news for Newt Gingrich. Whether he’s actually in the lead or not, he’s certainly well ahead of where he was last month. He’s up 13 points on his October showing according to PPP; or up 14 according to CNN. This makes him the latest right-wing candidate to surge to the front – after Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. Here’s the trajectory of the contest so far, according to PPP’s national polls:

As I said a couple of weeks ago, Gingrich has managed to pull off an incredible turnaround since July, when his poll ratings were dire and his campaign looked almost dead. Should he manage to win the nomination, it’d be an even more impressive recovery than John McCain’s four years ago. He went from a close second to Giuliani in early 2007 to as low as fifth in some December polls before coming back with a win in the New Hampshire primary.

The flipside to Gingrich’s surge is the beginning of a slump for Herman Cain. His campaign has struggled to deal with the sexual harrasment allegations against him, and yesterday – as Alex has noted – Cain compounded his woes with his very own ‘oops’ moment on Libya:

What’s striking is that – even with the collapses in support for Bachmann and Perry – Mitt Romney has failed to increase his standing at all. He has been stuck in the mid-to-low 20s all year, and even dips to 18 per cent in PPP’s latest survey. Instead, supporters of one right-wing candidate have always transferred to another right-wing candidate. The danger for Romney is that they end up sticking to one.