A new Gallup Poll documents how former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain’s steady decline is fueling former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s steady ascent as the new “anti-Romney.”
Herman Cain’s Positive Intensity Score is 17, down from 29 immediately before news broke in late October about past sexual harassment allegations against him. Newt Gingrich, who has made a dramatic turnaround since the summer, saw his score improve further this week, and he now ties Cain for the highest score among the eight major GOP presidential candidates.
The current ratings are based on Nov. 1-13 Gallup polling, covering a fairly newsworthy time in the GOP campaign. Cain continued to be dogged by allegations that he sexually harassed women while he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s. Also, the eight major candidates met for two debates, the first of which will be remembered for Rick Perry’s memory lapse while he was trying to list the names of federal cabinet departments he would shut down if elected
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Gallup also shows how Texas Governor Rick Perry will go down as yet another overhyped candidate who did not live up to his overhype:
Perry’s Positive Intensity Score, which had been in the low single digits in recent weeks, fell further to a new low of 0, meaning as many Republicans familiar with him have a strongly unfavorable opinion of him as a strongly favorable one. That compares with his score of 25 in late August/early September.
By this point in the campaign, most of the candidates are fairly well-known, with at least 8 in 10 Republicans familiar with each except Santorum and Huntsman. That higher degree of familiarity may explain why most Republican candidates’ Positive Intensity Scores are at their low points for the campaign, with many candidates seeing declines in their scores this year as they became more widely known.
Indeed the current crop of GOPers who want to be President suffer from this problem: to know more about them is not to like them.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.