Romney's Scary Future

Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democratic polling organization but it does provide some clever insights which shouldn't be ignored. PPP sees a rough road ahead for Mitt Romney and they furnish the polling data to back it up. It might be going too far to say Florida will be Mitt's last hurrah but PPP paints a bleak near term future for the purported front runner. In Missouri's non binding primary Santorum leads Romney 45% to 34%. Gingrich is sitting that race out and Ron Paul gets 13%. What PPP has found is that there is considerable opposition to Romney and in head to head polling Romney inevitably loses.

Consider Ohio. Gingrich is at 26% to 25% for Romney, 22% for Santorum, and 11% for Paul. In two man races Santorum beats Romney 45% to 38% and Gingrich leads Romney 42% to 39%. The same is true in Missouri. Head to head Santorum beats Romney 50% to 37% and Gingrich gets 43% to Romney's 42%.

" Two takeaways from those numbers: if this ever came down to Romney, Paul, and just one out of Gingrich and Santorum, Romney would be in a lot of trouble. And he'd be in more trouble if the single conservative alternative ended up being Santorum.

Santorum is a stronger long term threat to Romney than Gingrich because he has less baggage and is simply much better liked. Santorum is easily the most popular of the Republican candidates in both Missouri (+42 favorability at 63/21, compared to +20 for Gingrich and +10 for Romney) and Ohio (+35 at 59/24 compared to +10 for both Gingrich and Romney). It's just proving hard for Santorum to get much traction while Gingrich is still in the race."

I have remarked here before that Santorum has almost incredible favorability ratings-the highest in the field. Maybe he should tell Newt to drop out. I could live with a President Santorum.