Is South Carolina a tossup or isn’t it? My betting is: it is NOT and that, in the end, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will win and then win big in Florida — where a recent poll shows him with a whopping lead. On the other hand, the question is the trending on polling. And this poll suggests it is close in South Carolina, indeed:
As the GOP races settles into South Carolina, Mitt Romney isn’t enjoying the double-digit lead he held in New Hampshire, according to a survey conducted Wednesday night.
The former Massachusetts governor’s lead is so small in the Palmetto State that he’s essentially tied with Newt Gingrich, according to a poll for the Augusta Chronicle and Savannah Morning News conducted by InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research.
QUESTION ONE: will the ongoing controversy of Gingrich’s use of the Bain Capital issue against Romney, and his embracing a film that some say is peppered with inaccuracies, hurt him? When Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and other GOPers blast Gingrich and suggest he is almost a Communist, it can’t add to his momentum. Or could it?
Romney’s 23 percent and Gingrich’s 21 fall within the 3.6 percent margin of error. Rick Santorum, who came in second in the Iowa caucus is in third pace in South Carolina with 14 percent, while Ron Paul, the runner up in New Hampshire, is effectively tied with him at 13.
Jon Huntsman has 7, and Rick Perry has 5 while 17 percent are undecided or favor a candidate not offered as a choice in the survey.
The telephone survey questioned 726 registered voters who said they were likely to vote in the South Carolina GOP primary. Voters don’t have to be Republicans to participate in the Jan. 21 balloting, but independents generally make up a small share of the total, according to pollster Matt Towery, president of InsiderAdvantage.
Romney, Gingrich and Paul all do equally well with the independents in the survey. Paul, though, is getting little traction from long-time Republican voters.Romney does better with female voters while men prefer Gingrich.
“This is not good news for Mitt Romney,” said Towery, who chaired several of Gingrich’s congressional campaigns before becoming a non-partisan pollster. “There is no other way to put it. This means it is a dead-even race. South Carolinians couldn’t care less about New Hampshire or Iowa.”
QUESTION TWO which is two parts:
(a) Will the new development of 150 social conservative activists deciding to throw their support to Santorum help him?
(b) Will the anti-Romney vote be split so that Romney wins?
Looking at this poll, the 150 conservative activists would have been wiser throwing their support to Gingrich to stop Romney.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that decisions based on power politics are trumped by ideology.
Which means that Romney is likely to win.
UPDATE: Talking Points Memo says this is now a real horse elephant race:
The TPM Poll Average of the race shows that Romney had a ten point lead in the week after his Iowa win and expected victory in New Hampshire. When the campaign moved to South Carolina, and the circular firing squad over Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital began, he started dropping while the chief Bain critic, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has bounced back in the state. Now new Public Policy Polling (D) numbers out Friday show Romney in the lead with 29 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with 24, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) with 15 and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum at 14. The rest of the field is in single digits.
Now Romney has a mere 4.7 percent lead in our numbers...
AND:
Gingrich was already starting from a decent position in South Carolina — he was the leader by huge margins during his surge at the beginning of December and bottomed out in the high teens upon his fourth place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he and pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future have gone full bore into Romney on his role at Bain, pushing the message that Romney enriched himself while laying off workers, focusing specifically on the company’s role in the manufacturing sector. The message that seems to be playing well in SC, a state which has had plenty of factory closures over the past few decades.
For his part, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has fallen back to the mid teens, well behind Romney and Gingrich. Santorum has been attempting to bring social conservatives in the state together, but Public Policy Polling (D) data from the last two weeks has showed that evangelical voters are split nearly evenly among Romney, Gingrich and Santourm. PPP also showed that only four percent of voters said social concerns were top for them, which seems to show why economic messages have the reach punch this cycle, overshadowing more traditional plays for religious conservative voters in the GOP primaries.
As TPM has reported, the Republican establishment seems quite interested in pulling back the intraparty attacks on Romney’s Bain record, and it seems they have good reason — in just a few short days it’s made a dent in Romney’s numbers, suggesting what many pollsters have argued about his support: It’s soft.
When TPM talks about the establishment, you can see it in the circling of the wagons: Romney defended by The Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh (when Limbaugh disapproves you can usually now expect the party to quickly respond to his preferences), Sean Hannity (who does a p.r. show for Republican candidates on Fox News), and Fox News anchors commentators. And you see it now.
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.