Businessman Herman Cain doesn’t have much of a campaign structure, something that TPM has been tracking for weeks now. His rise in the polls as the latest alternative to former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney has been fueled almost completely by his likeability, while former frontrunner Texas Gov. Rick Perry has completely tanked on favorability, and consequently fallen hard in the polls. But the new allegations that two women accused Cain of “sexually suggestive” harassment (which he has called “false”) strikes directly at exactly what’s driving Cain’s rise to the top of the GOP primary.
For Mr. Cain, Politico‘s story dropped just as Cain has become a widely known national figure. Gallup showed last week that Cain’s name ID has been rising as he’s been all over the national news as the media tries to figure out if his spiking support is real or merely another GOP fad — roughly a month ago one in two Republicans knew Mr. Cain. At the end of October that number had shot up to 78 percent.
Up until Sunday night, that was great news for the Cain campaign. Polling from the Washington Post and ABC News had previously documented in their polling that the more that Republicans heard about Mr. Cain, the more they liked him.
Gary Langer, the President of Langer Research and pollster for ABC, said that it’s hard to overestimate how important favorability is at this particular moment — calling it an “especially sensitive time” for these candidates. GOP voters are still very much formulating their opinions, he said, calling personal popularity “the baseline, most fundamental rating for the voters.”
But it doesn’t mean that these allegations are going to take down Cain, he said. At a time when voters are still evaluating candidates, the specific facts of the allegations and how he and his campaign respond to them will shape the response of Republicans. “The allegations are somewhat threatening to him,” he said, but urged caution. “Voters in the GOP primary are really in the early stages of sorting out how they will vote. There’s plenty of time for choices.”
Over the last few weeks, voters liked what they saw. Gallup has showed that just as his name ID was rising, so was his favorability. While the rest of the field is bunched up with fairly even favorability levels among GOP voters, Cain is far ahead in Gallup’s “positive intensity” score, which rates how strongly a candidate is liked versus how strongly they are disliked.
Of course, Mr. Cain’s explosion in popularity has come despite some embarrassing public struggles on the issues. On abortion he initially staked out a position that sounded remarkably pro-choice, but now claims to be “pro-life, from conception.” His 9-9-9 tax plan didn’t get much scrutiny until he started to surge in the polls, and he’s since had to rehash it in order to respond to criticism that it would hurt the poor. He’s had a number of stumbles on foreign policy, some intentionally, almost reveling in the fact that it’s not his strong suit while mocking the idea that someone running for president should know every head of state around the world.
Pollster Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling (D) said in an email that Cain’s support, while high right now, has been soft in their numbers. The firm just conducted polls of North Carolina and Maine, finding that only 46 and 25 percent of the respective GOP fields were strongly committed to him.
“If these allegations really do prove to be something voters care about, those folks aren’t exactly entrenched in his corner,” Jensen wrote. “He’s not like Mitt Romney who has a base of support that’s been with him for five years. Cain’s voters have been with him for five weeks and it’s not going to take much to cause them to move onto the next thing.”
“Whether the Politico allegations hurt Cain or it’s something else further down the line, he does not have a solid base of supporters and that’s always made his nominal front runner status tenuous,” Jensen wrote.
