With the spotlight in Florida on the Republican candidates for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s roll as the GOP frontrunner is stalling. His poor debate performance sent conservative pundits running and wondering if the whole process was basically back to square one. And in this case, square one is former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney.
In a new Public Policy Polling (D) survey of the Republican electorate in Florida, pollsters found two things. First, as PPP’s Tom Jensen tweeted, the debate mattered. Before the debate, Romney was up by two in the state. After, Romney expanded his lead to ten points, on his way to an overall lead. Romney leads the field with 30 percent of the Florida GOP, with Perry at 24 percent and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at ten. The rest of the candidates are in single digits. Romney also beats Perry in a head-to-head matchup within the GOP primary, outside the margin of error at 45 percent against Perry’s 36.
Within the poll, Romney is doing much better with conservative voters than at any point since Perry entered the race, who basically swooped in to take the right flank. In the PPP survey, Perry wins “very conservative” voters by a eight point margin, but Romney actually bests Perry among “somewhat conservatives,” and has a large lead on moderates GOPers. The same trend happened in the head-to-head match-up: Perry has an edge with the far right but nowhere else, which is enough for Romney to piece together a lead with the rest of the voters in the field. Romney also does much better with women voters in the poll, picking up the support of 34 percent versus Perry’s 22, while their support among men is basically tied.
Romney has completely rehabbed his image among Florida GOP voters since the summer. In a PPP poll from the end of June, Romney had an underwater favorability rating, with only 41 percent of FL Republicans having a positive view of him with 45 percent in the negative. He is now by far the most popular candidate, as 65 percent of Republicans view him favorably against only 22 percent who see him unfavorably.
Given Florida’s demographics, there were also fault lines among age. A near majority of Florida Republicans don’t believe that Perry’ characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” was accurate, and that may have filtered down to the actual GOP trial heat. Within the head-to-head match-up between Romney and Perry, those between 46 and 65 broke for Romney by 13 points, and by 11 points among those over 65.
A Quinnipiac poll from last week also showed Romney doing much better against President Obama than Perry in the state: Romney was shown to be up by seven points, versus Perry down two against Obama.
The only good polling news over the last few days for Perry was that a new CNN/ORC national poll showed that his lead was holding in a countrywide sample. But with the Florida GOP thinking about moving up their primary and Romney making a move there, it’s continuously looking like the Republican race will be more like a prolonged slugfest than the traditional coronation.
