There doesn’t seem to be an enormous amount of drama ahead of Tuesday’s Florida Republican primary. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has taken a consistent lead in the polls there over the last few days, and on Monday morning two new surveys showed him with a lead of 14 and 19 points.
Quinnipiac numbers showed Romney moving to a healthy 43 – 29 advantage over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, his toughest competition in the state. Gingrich briefly held the lead in Florida polling last week, directly after his January 21st victory in the South Carolina primary, but since then Romney fought back hard in both televised debates and on television. The approach has led to Gingrich falling back while Romney has collected new GOP voting blocs.
“Gov. Mitt Romney is headed towards a double-digit victory that touches all the GOP bases,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in a release. “Romney carries every part of the GOP coalition, including the parts central to Gingrich — self-described conservatives, white evangelical Christians and Tea Party supporters. If this margin holds up tomorrow, it’s hard to see where Gingrich goes from here.”
Another survey, a snap poll conducted by pollster We Ask America on Sunday, showed Romney with a 19 point lead. Over half a million Florida GOPers have voted early by mail, something the Romney campaign has emphasized, running a program helping supporters get their ballots in early. Public Policy Polling (D), which also released numbers on Sunday night showing Romney in the lead, has tracked the early vote as a key metric helping Romney in the state.
“Romney continues to have a large lead in the bank in Florida,” PPP wrote in its analysis. “34% of our respondents said they’d already voted and with those folks he has a 45-33 lead. That puts Gingrich in a position where he’d have to not only win the election day vote, but win it by 6 or 7 points to upset Romney in the state. The kind of reversal necessary to make that happen seems unlikely to occur in the next 48 hours.”
At least one poll — another snap poll from InsiderAdvantage conducted Sunday — showed the race tightening slightly, with Romney’s lead at only five percent. But the overwhelming consensus from the last few days is that Romney will walk away with the vote on Tuesday. Our TPM Poll Average shows the former governor with a double digit lead.
Florida Republican Primary
