The news today on the polling front deviates very little from what we have seen for the past week or so. On balance, that is bad news for the Romney campaign. The Gallup tracker remains a double-digit Santorum lead, and while Romney leads in one Michigan poll, a second poll gives Santorum a continued edge in the Michigan primary. And, PPP looks ahead to Washington, and finds Rick Santorum staked to a double-digit lead.
Even the semi-encouraging Michigan news isn't that encouraging, when you think about it. More on that after the jump, though.
NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Santorum 36, Romney 26, Gingrich 14, Paul 11
ARIZONA (CNN/Opinion Research): Romney 36, Santorum 32, Gingrich 18, Paul 6
ARIZONA (We Ask America): Romney 37, Santorum 27, Gingrich 15, Paul 8
GEORGIA (Insider Advantage): Gingrich 26, Romney 24, Santorum 23, Paul 12
MICHIGAN (Mitchell Research/Rosetta Stone): Romney 32, Santorum 30, Gingrich 9, Paul 7
MICHIGAN (Rasmussen): Santorum 38, Romney 34, Paul 10, Gingrich 9
WASHINGTON (PPP): Santorum 38, Romney 27, Paul 15, Gingrich 12
There is very little on the general election front. In fact, the daily Rasmussen tracker is the only item on the agenda on this Tuesday.
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama d. Romney (45-43); Obama d. Santorum (46-44)
As stated earlier, team Romney is either up two in Michigan, or down four. Either way, this represents an improvement of about ten points for Romney over last week's polling in Michigan.
That's actually lousy news for Mittens. Follow me past the fold for a little history lesson as to why.
It seems like a year or two ago, but it was exactly three weeks ago that Mitt Romney dominated the Florida primary with a fourteen-point win over Newt Gingrich in the Sunshine State.
What is notable about that is the fact that polling just one week earlier, in the midst of the Newt Gingrich post-South Carolina boomlet, showed that Romney was a marked underdog to Gingrich in the state. By primary eve, however, Mitt Romney had righted the ship.
Check out the disparity in the numbers, taken from our Polling Wraps on the dates in question:
January 23rd: Gingrich +7.3
January 30th: Romney +13.9
What happened in the interim, of course, was a multimillion dollar bludgeoning of Newt Gingrich by Mitt Romney and his allies. Mitt Romney, in the past week or so, has been trying to run the same play on Rick Santorum in Michigan.
The problem for Mitt Romney? The play is not working to same level of success that it did in Florida. If you take the last two days worth of polling in Michigan, Santorum has a very narrow 1.5 percent advantage. But if you took Monday and Tuesday's Michigan polls and averaged them out, you would have a Santorum lead of 8 percent.
In Florida, the one-week swing was over 21 points. In Michigan, the one-week swing was less than 7 points.
Now, to be fair, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. There was a lot more polling in Florida to digest, because the schedule was so compact and the stakes were so high. In the Michigan example, we are dealing with only seven polls total (three last week, four this week). On the 30th alone, there were eight polls in Florida. We'll probably see that in Michigan, too, come next week.
For now, though, there is this bit of evidence to suggest that the Romney strategy of outgunning his rivals with far superior resources is working less successfully in Michigan than it did in Florida. If he doesn't have that weapon at his disposal, Mitt Romney's path to the general election gets quite a bit more complicated.
Update/Correction: One of the deans of Texas blogger-dom, Charles Kuffner, noted something that I neglected to include in last night's edition of the Polling Wrap. In his post on the UT/Texas Tribune poll in the Lone Star State, he noted that the double-digit GOP leads over Barack Obama in Texas were on a likely voter screen. Among all respondents (and they all self-identified as registered voters), the margins were considerably closer: Obama trails the GOP contenders by 1-5 points. It was a point worth noting, and while big disparities between registered voters and "likely voters" are not unheard of, one of this magnitude is certainly curious.