If this keeps up, Mitt Romney will no longer be the one called “front-runner” since it will be greatly outdated. Former House Speaker has now opened a nine point lead over Romney in a national poll:
Newt Gingrich has opened a sizable lead over Mitt Romney in the first national poll taken since the former Speaker of the House earned the key endorsement of the New Hampshire Union-Leader, showing Gingrich with a nine-percentage point lead over the former Massachusetts governor.
The poll, conducted by Majority Opinion Research Sunday night, showed Gingrich leading the Republican field with 32 percent of support. Romney earned 23 percent, while Herman Cain rounded out the top three with 14 percent of the vote. Ron Paul led the remainder of the field with 6 percent.
If this is the new trend, Gingrich is the front runner. It’s also impressive when you consider where he is making his gains:
Gingrich’s lead has opened up as the former Speaker has rallied both older voters and Independents. 39 percent of those 65 and older support Gingrich, versus 28 percent for Romney, while those in the 45-64 year old age range back the speaker by a 37 to 19 percent margin. Those figures would tend to support the emerging theme that conservatives are rallying behind Gingrich as their preferred alternative. Gingrich and Romney are virtually tied among voters 18-44, who are more likely to hold liberal views.
But Gingrich is also rallying Independents, garnering 32 percent of likely voters who do not affiliate with a party. Among Independents, Romney actually trails Ron Paul, who pulls 17 percent of the vote to Romney’s 16 percent.
Further boosting the Gingrich campaign is the knowledge that much of Herman Cain’s support comes from Democrats that the polling firm believes will crossover to vote in open primaries. Cain was the choice of 36 percent of Democrats – more than double any other Republican nominee – suggesting that his poll numbers might be nationally inflated and that conservatives truly are coalescing around Gingrich.
Still, the former Speaker faces a tough road to the nomination. A rocky start to his campaign means that he has been playing catchup in Iowa, hiring his first paid staffers and opening two offices in the state earlier this month. Traditionally, the caucuses have favored candidates who have engaged in retail politics and spent generously in the state, meaning Gingrich will have to account for conservative defections to candidates like Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum.
Tough road ahead? Yes. But he is proving to the most formidable of the “anti-Romney’s” who’ve skyrocketed and crashed and burned in recent months. Is he in for a big crash and burn, too?
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.