The Republicans' latest non-Romney flavor-of-the-month has of course been Newt Gingrich, but there are reasons to suspect that his swan dive, like those of diva non-candidates Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, and flashes in the pan Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, may now have begun.
The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll has the following figures for Newt Gingrich during the last three polling cycles:
Dates of sampling: Gingrich %
12/4-12/8/11 37%
12/5-12/9/11 35%
12/6-12/10/11 33%
A drop of 4% may not sound like much, but when one considers that this is a rolling average, and that the first three days of the LAST polling period were also included as last three days of the FIRST polling period, it's obvious that the results of polling at the end of the last period were considerably below even the 33% shown for the entire period.
The title of this diary is phrased as a question because the small sample size on each separate day (200 Republican voters nationwide) is small enough that the margins of error for any given day's sampling are large (which is why Gallup only reports 5-day rolling averages). But the trend over the past week (in other words, since Cain dropped out and people started really focusing on Gingrich) have been negative. If these trends continue, Newt's resurrection as a supposedly "serious" candidate may prove to be nearly as short-lived as the previous non-Romney flavors of the month.
And where has Newt's support been going? Not to any of the other candidates. Instead, the 4% gain for "None/Any/Unsure has exactly paralleled the 4% drop in support for Newt Gingrich. But my reaction after the last debate was to predict a Santorum uptick on the basis that he really HAS been a pretty consistent righty on the great majority of issues (although his religious faith has led him to support some things such as HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa which are anathema to the hard right), and he's the only one left who hasn't enjoyed a surge of support yet. We'll see, but it may not be time for the Republicans to rally around Newt as their ultimate leader quite yet.