(Daron Dean/Reuters)
Look out!
Newt Gingrich led Mitt Romney 34-28 in PPP's South Carolina polling last night, the first of what will be three nights of tracking. Ron Paul at 15%, Rick Santorum at 14%, Rick Perry at 5%, and Buddy Roemer at 3% round out the field.
This is not a case of Romney imploding. His support has been pretty steady in the 28-30% range in our South Carolina polling so far. But Gingrich has risen from 23% to 34% over the last two weeks, benefiting from declining support for Santorum and also from undecided voters moving into his camp.
It hasn't been a very good day to be Mitt Romney, has it?
Let me say again, though, that this is just from one night of what will be a three-night poll. It's unorthodox for a pollster to release data in this fashion, but with the race moving so fast and so hard today, it's understandable why Public Policy Polling wanted to get this information out there. Indeed, PPP's Tom Jensen says he had no intention of doing things in this way, but felt that Rick Perry dropping out "kind of necessitated" this unusual approach.
But as Jensen notes, the margin of error here, due to the smaller sample size, is ±5%, which is pretty sizable, and could mean Newt's six-point lead won't hold up. We'll know soon enough, though, since Tom adds:
We will conduct our first post-Perry, post-Marianne Gingrich interviews tonight. Expect fresh numbers sometime between 10 and 11 PM.
Can't wait!