File this one as you will. But businessman Herman Cain gets the top spot in three new surveys of GOP voters from Public Policy Polling (D), conducted in North Carolina, West Virginia and Nebraska.
“In 4 years at PPP I’ve never been as befuddled by a set of polls as this past weekend’s,” PPP pollster Tom Jensen tweeted on Monday. “Cain/Newt to top of GOP field out of nowhere?”
Yes, GOP voters have been incredibly fickle this time around. Yet this may mark the fastest plummet yet: Texas Gov. Rick Perry has gone from national frontrunner to competing in the middle of all these polls. Cain leads the field by ten points in North Carolina, six in West Virginia, and 14 in Nebraska in the PPP surveys. Just as confounding? Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is second in all the polls, except for North Carolina, where he is tied with former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney.
All three surveys probably reflect a boomlet that the Cain campaign is experiencing following an impressive showing in the FOX/Google debate and his surprise win at the P5 straw poll in Florida. ABC/WaPo also released some data Tuesday that showed Cain’s increasing buzz has a lot to do with the GOP primary audience getting to know him and coming away with positive feelings.
Cain’s performance in the PPP polls was so unexpected that the firm didn’t even test his favorability within each survey, Jensen confirmed, showing how incredibly fast this Cain surge has come.
The key for Cain in all the polls was his appeal to self-identified “somewhat conservative” voters and “very conservative” voters, both groups that Cain took a plurality of in each survey. In Nebraska, where he did the best, he dominated the “very conservative” GOPers, a population that Perry was thought to have locked down. These three surveys show the Texas Gov. fighting for the middle among these voters, thus pushing him down to the middle of the pack in the general trial heats.
One thing is sure: Herman Cain is experiencing billowing support right now. But at this rate, it’s hard to gauge any lead for a Republican candidate as anything close to solid. The field is truly in flux.
