Time will tell, but it seems we at Cain Watch World Headquarters may have picked the wrong Metro Atlanta candidate to blog about.
The latest Public Policy Polling survey shows Cobb County’s very own former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is ahead of Mitt Romney and Herman Cain in the competition for the hearts and votes of Republican primary voters. PPP has Gingrich at 28 percent, Cain at 25 percent and poor Mitt Romney at 18 percent. Newt’s surge can also be seen in my favorite poll, the Real Clear Politics average of polls.
Although Gingrich is still in 3rd place on RCP’s average, he is clearly surging at the expense of Cain, whose support is falling. Citing fundraising figures, Cain and his team have boasted that multiple sexual harassment have actually helped the campaign, but Cain’s trajectory on the RCP average of polls tells a very different story.
From early September through the end of October, Cain’s support quickly rose from about 5 percent to 25 percent. But the rise stopped abruptly at the end of October, when the first sexual harassment allegations against Cain were reported. After hovering at 25 percent for a few days as news of the scandal started to spread, Cain’s support has begun to drop as quickly as it was rising before the scandal broke.
I expect Cain’s support to drop even further after the release of a video yesterday showing Cain answering a question about the recent war in Libya as it were the first time he’d heard the name of the country.
Cain’s campaign insists he only fumbled the answer because he was sleepy. How sleepy does a presidential candidate have to be to forget the only war his country started and ended during the presidential campaign?