The sure sign that you are a hopeless Daily Kos Elections political addict: if your New Year's Eve plans revolve around the 7 PM (ET) release of the Selzer/Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, you have a problem.
But, trust me, you have lots and lots of company, including presumably the eight candidates still trying to become the Republican nominee for president. Some pollsters got into the mix today, as well, so before we look inside the numbers, let's look at those GOP primary numbers:
NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Romney 26, Gingrich 24, Paul 11, Perry 7, Bachmann 5, Santorum 5, Huntsman 2
FLORIDA (Tel Opinion Research): Romney 27, Gingrich 26, Paul 5, Bachmann 4, Perry 4, Huntsman 1, Santorum 1
IOWA (NBC/Marist): Romney 23, Paul 21, Santorum 15, Perry 14, Gingrich 13, Bachmann 6, Huntsman 2
IOWA (We Ask America): Romney 24, Santorum 17, Paul 14, Gingrich 13, Bachmann 12, Perry 10, Huntsman 4
As has been the case all week, the attention is solely on the primary election polling, so (once again) there are no Obama v. GOP matchups to close the week. For a look under the hood on the three primary polls listed above, head past the jump for all the goods.
This is the first effort in Iowa from NBC/Marist since the beginning of the month. Like everyone else, the most obvious change is with Newt Gingrich. Leading the field handily at the start of the month (with 28 percent of the vote), Gingrich now languishes in fifth pace, at 13 percent.
If there is a dark horse that emerge from the pack, look not only to Rick Santorum (this poll joins others, including today's We Ask America poll, in moving Santorum towards the first-tier), but also to Rick Perry. One of the more intriguing stats in the NBC/Marist poll is that Perry is the second choice of 20 percent of Iowa caucus-goers. Only Mitt Romney is cited more often. A potential liability for Ron Paul: only 9 percent of caucus-goers see him as a second alternative. When the speakers come into the caucus to praise their candidate, the Ron Paul validators seem unlikely to move the needle all that much.
While Romney leads the Iowa horserace in both polls today, that NBC/Marist poll does have a note of caution for the former Massachusetts governor. 54 percent of Iowa caucus-goers say that it is more important to have a "true conservative" as their standard bearer, versus just 39 percent who find it more important to have someone who can debate with Barack Obama. And Romney comes in fifth among the candidates when respondents were asked who they thought was the "true conservative" in the field. In one of the clearest signs yet that Newt Gingrich is dead candidate walking, he actually finished behind Romney on the "who is the true conservative" question.
As I have noted repeatedly, the only way for conservatives to derail a Mitt Romney nomination is to see several of those alternatives to him drop out, allowing for some consolidation behind one candidate. Absent that, and it is hard to see a path for anyone not named Mitt Romney to win this nomination, even if it is with just 30-35 percent of the vote.
In other polling news, we see our first non-"first in the nation" poll in quite some time, as GOP pollsters Tel Opinion Research (who used to be the go-to pollster for the right-leaning Civitas Institute in North Carolina) head into Florida and find that Newt Gingrich no longer leads in this key southern state. Remember: some early December polls in Florida had Gingrich close to doubling up Romney in the state. What a difference a month makes in this absurdly topsy-turvy campaign.