• Tweet

• Tweet

In just two short weeks, Mitt Romney has gone from frontrunner to underdog in the race for the GOP nomination. How does he turn it around?

Two polls out today are spelling serious trouble for Mitt Romney. The first, from Gallup, shows Perry leading him by 12 points at 29-17. The other, from PPP, shows a 13 point difference at 33-20. That gap isn’t insurmountable by any means, especially this early in the contest. However, a deeper look inside the numbers shows a bigger potential problem for Romney than that 12-13 point deficit.

Both polls include the second-, third- and fourth-tier like Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman. While that certainly makes for good polling methodology at this stage, it’s not really reflective of reality. While none of them have indicated any likelihood of dropping out any time soon, their continued failure to seriously contest either Perry or Romney for frontrunner status will quickly begin taking a serious toll on their ability to continue to raise funds, attract endorsements or convince voters to continue supporting them. Whether it’s tomorrow, next month or six months from now these candidates will inevitably drop out of the race. The voters who are currently backing them will then have to choose between Perry, Romney or simply sitting out the GOP primaries. How those voters break will determine whether Romney can catch up with Perry to capture the nomination or if Perry simply walks away with it in a cakewalk. And that’s where things get tricky for Romney.

PPP asked some additional questions about head-to-head polling between Perry and Romney. They found that Perry currently beats Romney 52-36 with only 12% undecided. Even in the almost impossible event that Romney gets every single one of those undecideds, he would still lose 52-48. Gallup’s numbers are slightly different; however, their top line results for all candidates are pretty much within the margin of error of those found by PPP. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that they fairly represent the current state of the race.

For better or for worse, Republican voters are already familiar with Mitt Romney. With 86% name recognition, he has very little upside with those who don’t know him yet. To one degree or another, the entire field is running on a platform of lower taxes, reducing regulations, reforming entitlements, repealing ObamaCare and a smaller federal government. Therefore, Perry and Romney are going to be virtually indistinguishable from one another on the broad outlines of their programs.

So there remain a few paths for Mitt Romney to turn it around:

• Hope that Rick Perry implodes on his own. Perry’s comments about Bernanke considering a possible QE3 purely for political purposes as “almost treasonous” were widely regarded as a gaffe (though he was also regarded as correct on the substance). Similarly, he has been widely misreported as having suggested that Texas should secede, but he never did. Though he has clearly been mistreated in the press because of these statements, much like Sarah Palin the accumulation of misreporting and mischaracterizing his statements could make him unelectable. This would leave Mitt Romney as the “last man standing” in the contest.
• Go negative against Rick Perry, or let Obama do it for him. The opposition research on Rick Perry is being dumped as quickly as bloggers and the media can write columns about it. How much of it is coming from Barack Obama and the Democrats and how much is being fed by Romney and other Republican candidates is unclear. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. The question is how successful it will be. The good and bad news for Perry is that, unlike Palin, the public has more than just two short months at the height of election season in which to digest and fully contextualize all of the information. It’s unknown whether Republican voters, or the moderate Democrats and Independents necessary to win the general election, will ultimately dismiss the opposition research or Perry himself.
  
  Read more: Next Page

  Published By Jim On Wednesday, August 24th 2011.
  Under Politics, Presidential Politics, US Politics
  Tags: 2012 Election, Mitt Romney, Polling, Republicans, Rick Perry