By Walter C. Jones
ATLANTA — The seesaw race for Republican presidential nominee has tipped again, giving Newt Gingrich the lead in South Carolina.
In a poll conducted Wednesday night by InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research for The Augusta Chronicle, Gingrich reversed the momentum of Mitt Romney, who had an expanding lead in the same poll Sunday night.
Gingrich’s 32 percent to Romney’s 29 percent puts the two inside the poll’s 3.8 percent margin of error, but the 11-point lead Romney held in the Sunday evening survey has evaporated. Romney’s strength had been building after wins in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
Wednesday’s poll included 718 registered voters who said they were voting in Saturday’s GOP primary.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul is in third place with 15 percent, followed by Rick Santorum’s 11 percent and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s 3 percent. Seven percent remain undecided and are unlikely to vote, while 3 percent favor some other candidate not listed as a choice.
Gingrich, who represented neighboring Georgia in Congress for two decades and rose to become House speaker, took support from Santorum and Perry to pass Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, according to pollster Matt Towery, the InsiderAdvantage CEO. Gingrich captured the lead, Towery said, through his performance in Monday night’s televised debate in Myrtle Beach that included a standing ovation from the live audience in response to his defense of conservatism.
The candidates debate again tonight, which will give Gingrich a chance to cement his lead and Romney, a chance to redeem himself.
The demographic breakdown of Wednesday’s poll results shows Gingrich not only doing well with male voters and those who declare themselves to be Republicans, groups that have traditionally backed him, but also with female voters.
“His biggest weakness are voters who are 30-44, who are overwhelmingly for Romney,” Towery said. “They don’t know anything about Gingrich. They don’t know what he’s achieved, so they’re voting against him.”
A CNN poll released earlier Wednesday was conducted between Friday and Tuesday. It also showed Romney’s lead disappearing despite the fact that most respondents had not yet seen Monday’s debate. In that survey, Romney and Santorum were losing ground while Gingrich was gaining.
Leaders of national conservative groups hoping to defeat Romney for being too moderate for their taste agreed over the weekend to back Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania. Apparently South Carolina conservatives have decided to coalesce behind Gingrich instead.
me thinks that these romney boys know how to play dirty. Bring the ex in to explain 'just how it was'. This stuff is true shakespeare.
Lee Atwater and Newt invented the modern era of dirty.
Gingrich and Obama are two sides of the same coin: masters of rhetoric that can fire up the ideals of their base in order to put themselves in a position for self-enrichment and the further enrichment of those that helped pay to put them in office.
I really hope that I don't have to choose between those two.
Goooooooo....ANYBODYBUTROMNEY!
I guess Chip Shirley will be voting for Obama in November.
These kind of stories about daily tracking polls are important because we have a huge contingent of people in this country who vote only for the frontrunner. Principles don't matter to them. They feel better when the person they vote for wins. Somehow, it validates their very self in their own minds.
Me? Eight times out of ten I ended up voting for the loser.
Me too Little Lamb, I typically buck the "establishment guy" trend. I don't like the fact that candidates are chosen for us, not by us.
Look at obama, they were grooming him for years (playing dirty Chicago political tricks from the beginning). They were waiting for the perfect storm to occur. When the terrorists took down our economy in 2008, ironically, in stepped obama.
Coincidence? Not hardly. Check out the book called Secret Weapon by Freeman (secretweapon.org). The author contends that there are 3 phases of economic terrorism (all well documented). He says we are now in Stage 3 (uh-oh). It's not a conspiracy theory. It is has happened and is happening.
Good news for you and I Little Lamb. In November of 2012, we are guaranteed to vote for the winner because we are not voting for obama.
Chillen, it started way earlier than that. When the Egyptian gods came down from their Martian homelands, they guided construction of the pyramids to guarantee the positioning of Obama for election at this critical time. Moses fled Egypt with warnings about this, which is why Obama is conspiring with his secret Muslim accomplices to destroy Israel. It's all well-documented, with astronaut hieroglyphs and Exodus and the photos of the giant face on Mars that looks like Obama.
Talk about fishy...Now we know that Santorum won Iowa, but it doesn't make sense the way this played out. Not that many folks vote in the Iowa Caucus, it shouldn't have taken very long to get a good count AND since the media knew the Romney margin was too small to count on...it's just really fishy that the media (Left and Right) declared him the winner. If he hadn't gotten that good publicity and instead the headline said 'Little Ricky Beats Romney' then Romney might have still won NH, but he'd be in 3rd in SC now....
By the way, I want the R candidate who I think would make the best prez just in case he does beat obama, to me that is Santorum. He's the only one I trust, but Romney is the one I trust LEAST. I'd rather have Perry than Romney.
As of now the only dirt the press can pull up on Santorum is a "sexist" email from his crew. They can't touch him much closer b/c he lives an honorable life, is dedicated to his family and works hard to get things done. That to me says a lot. I am pretty sure the press does not give him much air time b/c they know he can win.
Debate Preview:
Romney- So Newt, you 'experimented' with having an open marriage?
Newt- Yeah, I was young and foolish. I should have turned Mormon then I could have had all the wives I want.
Santorum has a record of spending, but is it as much as Obama has spent?
Newt let the voters see his "other side" last night. He has always been a loose cannon and he unleashed his anger against John King during the debate last night, a man who had nothing to do with breaking the story. It was the ex who did the expose', not the media. Was ABC supposed to turn her down. Not hardly.
As Krauthammer said on Tuesday...You can never tell when Newt will lose control and show you the hidden persona within. Well, he did it last night.
Chip..Aren't' you actually a Democrat pretending to be Republican?
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