(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Tom Jenson at PPP
notes a trend in the polling that backs up Jed Lewison's
insightful piece from yesterday:
There are 13 places PPP has polled the Republican race in October or November where it also did a poll sometime between January and March. In those places Romney's net favorability has dropped by an average of 15 points over the course of the year.
On average Romney's favorability with primary voters was 54/25 in these 13 places at the begininng of the year. Now it's only 50/35. His problem is partially that his positives have gone down but more than that it's that as his name recognition has increased, most folks moving off the fence have gone into the negative column.
What's most remarkable about the decline in Romney's popularity is how uniform it's been- he's less popular now than he was at the start of the year in all 13 places where there are polls to compare. And in 11 out of the 13 places that decline in his net favorability has been at least 14 points- the only places with more modest declines are Maine and North Carolina.
This is the opposite of what you want to happen at this stage in a presidential election, when voters are just tuning in. You want your upside to begin to get bigger, not smaller.
It is interesting that none of the GOP candidates have really attacked Romney hard. None have spent any heavy resources on negative ads or robocalls or rumor-laden flyers. Just imagine what his numbers will look like if one of them does.
Wed Nov 30, 2011 at 3:31 PM PT (Jed Lewison): You can also see this exact same trend taking place in Gallup's latest Positive Intensity Score. Notice how while Newt Gingrich has a U shaped score, Romney's is on a gentle glidepath downward.