At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican, is likely to survive a recall election on June 5, according to recent nonpartisan polls of the state.

Mr. Walker leads his Democratic opponent, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, by an average of six percentage points in those polls and has not trailed in any poll since February.

Some polls issued by Democratic-affiliated groups have shown a somewhat tighter race, with Mr. Barrett trailing by about three percentage points instead. Partisan-affiliated polls have a long track record of somewhat exaggerating their candidate’s standing, however, and it may be telling that even these polls do not show Mr. Barrett ahead.

In a typical November election, a 6-point lead with two weeks to go would translate into a high probability of winning — roughly on the order of 90 percent, based on the historical accuracy of polls of governors’ races.

The dynamics of a recall election may be slightly more uncertain. But with high turnout expected, which tends to make polling more reliable, Mr. Barrett would most likely need a last-minute change in momentum to have much of a chance of prevailing.

Mr. Walker’s approval rating was poor at this time last year, after he stripped collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s public workers. In May 2011, his job approval rating averaged 42 percent across different polls, versus an average disapproval rating of 55 percent.

In an average of polls conducted so far this May, however, Mr. Walker’s approval rating averages 50 percent, with 46 percent disapproving.

Gay marriage is in the news, as the White House scrambles to explain President Obama’s “evolving” position on the issue even as other members of the administration — notably Vice President Joe Biden — find their personal evolutions progressing more rapidly. Obama’s caution on the issue is widely assumed to be not a matter of personal conviction but one of political calculation. So where are the American people on the issue?

The answer, according to a new Gallup poll : sharply divided. The survey finds 50 percent say gay marriage should be legal and valid, compared to 48 percent who said it should not.

That’s a slight, statistically insignificant downtick from the last time Gallup polled — last year, 53 percent of Americans favored gay marriage . But the long-term trend has support for gay marriage gradually climbing and opposition gradually waning. It was just last year that the trend lines crossed for the first time, and support for gay marriage outperformed opposition. Clearly, both socially and politically, this is an issue in rapid transition in terms of public opinion.

A look at the breakdowns across subgroups in the poll, which Gallup provided to me, is also revealing: Support for gay marriage is strongest among women, college graduates, the nonreligious, and the young. Democrats overwhelmingly support legal gay marriage, but not as overwhelmingly as Republicans oppose it; independents are also strongly in favor. And there is no real difference between whites and nonwhites in their views on the issue.

The age breakdown is particularly revealing: Two-thirds of Americans aged 18-34 favor legal gay marriage, compared to just 40 percent of those 55 and older. Generational turnover is a major reason that activists on both sides of the issue expect the overall trend of support for gay marriage to continue. At the same time, the political debate continues to lag, from the president to the voters of North Carolina, who are expected to approve a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Tuesday’s election. The question now is when the political debate flips, and supporting gay marriage — rather than tepidly opposing it — becomes the safe position to campaign on

It’s well known that presidential approval ratings are a powerful predictor of election outcomes. President Obama’s current 47 percent approval rating would be among the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent president who went on to be re-elected.

What’s striking, however, is that Mr. Obama may be more popular than he should be. That is the result of some new analysis that will be included in a book I’m writing with a fellow political scientist, Lynn Vavreck, on the 2012 election. I’ll preview a bit of it here.

Presidential popularity hinges primarily on several factors. There is, for many presidents, an inexorable decline in popularity that comes with time. The longer a president is in office, the less popular he is. Popularity is also affected, positively or negatively, by salient events like scandals, wars and foreign policy crises. Finally, and most important, there is the economy.

Mr. Obama’s approval rating has thus far experienced relatively few ups and downs linked to singular events. There have been no big scandals, for example. The Solyndra bankruptcy, the General Services Administration’s over-the-top Las Vegas conference and the Secret Service prostitution debacle haven’t quite proven to be Watergate, Iran-contra or even Whitewater. The killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 produced only a temporary increase in approval. Instead, Mr. Obama’s initial popularity in the “honeymoon” after he was inaugurated has generally been on a gradual decline — a trend that is most likely traceable to the damaging recession and weak recovery, which have created persistent pessimism about the economy.

But this pessimism never eroded Mr. Obama’s approval as much as it arguably should have. There are several ways to show this. One way is to predict Mr. Obama’s approval based on the economy and other fundamental factors, and then see whether his actual approval matches, exceeds, or falls short of the prediction. To do so, we use 60 years of quarterly data on presidential approval, which contain polls from 1948 to 2008, and construct a statistical model of approval that includes these factors:

Not only are Catholicism and Christianity losing ground, the study says that “one-quarter (25%) of Millennials identify as religiously unaffiliated.” Not only that, since only 11% of Millennials were raised without faith, more than half of unaffiliated Millennials left their childhood faith.

Some of them will return to their faiths as they age, “but there’s not a lot of evidence that most will come back,” added [PRRI’s research director Daniel] Cox, who said the trend away from organized religion dates back to the early 1990s.

In case you’re wondering how “unaffiliated” is defined, they’re including anyone who responded to the question “What is your present religion, if any?” with Atheist, Agnostic, or Nothing in Particular. (For what it’s worth, other responses included “Just Christian” (no denomination), Something Else, Refused (to answer), and Unitarian.)

So why is this change happening?

I think the answer is contained in large part in this statement (p. 32 in the report):

Almost two-thirds (64%) of Millennials say that “anti-gay” describes present-day Christianity somewhat or very well. Over 6-in-10 (62%) also believe that present-day Christianity is “judgmental,” while 58% agree that “hypocritical (saying one thing, doing another)” describes present-day Christianity well. Half of Millennials say that “too involved in politics” describes present-day Christianity well.

Christianity represents — to the church’s own detriment — a value system intelligent Millennials want increasingly less association with. Christians are seen as anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women, anti-sex, anti-intellectual, and pro-bullshit. The younger you are, and the more you’re surrounded by people (like atheists) who make logical, coherent arguments against much of what the church stands for (hopefully with a compassionate heart), the easier it is to realize Christianity isn’t based in truth; it’s based in an archaic and incorrect view of what one group of people (read: men) believes is good for society. Whenever the church figures that out, they’ll have no choice but to adapt (ha!) or watch their numbers dwindle away.

Mitt Romney is facing a severe crisis of popularity.

He has the weakest favorability ratings on record for a presumptive presidential nominee at this stage of the campaign, according to new polling by ABC News and The Washington Post . The organizations have been measuring such popularity since 1984.

Mr. Romney is in a situation that pollsters call “underwater”: more people view him negatively than view him positively. His favorable rating is 35 percent, and his unfavorable rating stands at 47 percent.

He was the first nominee to be underwater in the Washington Post/ABC News poll in the eight presidential primary seasons it has been surveying the subject, the poll said. The pollsters attributed the results in part on the Republican primary process, which Americans viewed negatively overall, and on Mr. Romney’s unpopularity among women.

President Obama, by contrast, is more popular than he is unpopular: 56 percent viewed him positively, while 40 percent of those polled viewed him negatively.

Mr. Obama is more popular than he has been for two years, which the pollsters ascribed to the improving economy.

The most sensible takeaways, I think, are as follows:

1) Mr. Romney’s mediocre favorability ratings at this early stage of the race are no death sentence. There have been clear reversals in favorability ratings in the recent past once the general election campaign got under way, such as in 1988 and 1992. At least one recent candidate (Mr. Clinton in 1992) won his election with similarly mediocre early favorability ratings. With that said, it would be foolish to suggest that this makes no difference at all. Mr. Romney would prefer to have a positive rating than a negative one. For that matter, Mr. Obama would prefer to have a clearly positive favorability rating than break-even numbers.

2) The favorability deficit between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama is more likely to be meaningful the longer it persists. If, for instance, we still see this favorability deficit in July — and certainly if we see it in September or October — the odds are fairly good that Mr. Obama will perform more strongly than the economic fundamentals alone would dictate and could win an election that he is otherwise “supposed” to lose. Of course, this will probably be reflected in head-to-head polls between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, which also become stronger predictors of the election outcome as November draws nearer.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that we will see some improvement in Mr. Romney’s favorability numbers over the next month or two. It has not been uncommon in the past for a candidate’s numbers to decline while he is actively engaged in a primary, but for him to go through a honeymoon period once he begins to wrap up the nomination.

We’ll have a better sense for where Mr. Romney’s numbers are likely to settle in, and whether they represent a real concern for him or just a transient annoyance, once the general election campaign has become more substantive a couple of months from now. For the time being, I’d consider them a negative but fairly minor factor when we evaluate his chances at victory.

Even as the nation rebounds from the recession, its lingering effects are reflected in the adversities facing families. Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater. Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford to send their children. More than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships.

The general election match between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney is opening with evidence that economic conditions are providing ammunition for both candidates. For Mr. Obama, there is a gradually growing perception that the general outlook is turning brighter, and for Mr. Romney, there are those individuals who are still not feeling substantial improvement in their own lives.

The poll found that the two men are locked in a tight race, with each gathering 46 percent of the support. Nearly an equal number of voters say they are as confident in Mr. Romney’s ability to make the right decisions on the economy and to be commander-in-chief as express confidence in Mr. Obama.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

A poll of American Jewish voters shows that they overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for president, just as they did four years ago, and that Israel and Iran rank low on their list of priority issues in the presidential election.

The results cast doubt on the claim that Mr. Obama has alienated a significant swath of Jewish voters because of his rocky relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We show no slippage in Jewish support for President Obama,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, an independent research group based in Washington D.C., which conducted the poll of 1,004 Jewish adults from Feb. 23 to March 5. The margin of error is plus or minus five percentage points.

Support for Mr. Obama is still higher among Jews than among the general electorate, with 62 percent of Jewish voters saying they would like to see him elected, and 30 percent saying they preferred the Republican candidate. (That is almost identical to a Gallup poll of American Jewish registered voters taken in June 2008.)

Of the 30 percent of those polled who said they preferred a Republican candidate, 58 percent said they supported Mitt Romney, 15 percent supported Rick Santorum, 13 percent supported Newt Gingrich and 12 percent supported Ron Paul.

President Obama has emerged with an impressive lead in swing states around the country — thanks to women voters abandoning the GOP in droves, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll showing President Obama leading among women voters in the top dozen battleground states by a whopping 18 points — greater than the 12-point gender gap he won with in 2008.

One month ago, the same poll showed Mitt Romney leading the president by 2 percentage points; but Sunday, the newest poll gave Obama a 9-point lead, 51 percent to 42 percent. The change, the poll indicates, comes from women:

“The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”
Both Democrats and Republicans point to the battles over contraception coverage as a reason for the shift. Republican strategist Sara Taylor Fagen, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush, told USA Today that “The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us … and Republicans have unfairly taken on water on this issue.”

Rick Santorum, who once held a wide lead in the polls in his home state of Pennsylvania, has lost substantial ground to Mitt Romney among Republican voters over the last month, according to a new poll.

He leads now by just 2 percentage points, creating an opening for the Romney team to move in with overwhelming force and try to shut down Mr. Santorum’s quest for the presidential nomination in the state’s primary on April 24.

Mr. Santorum’s support has shrunk to 30 percentage points while Mr. Romney’s has grown to 28 percentage points, putting him within the poll’s margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points. The poll was conducted March 20-25 by Franklin & Marshall College for several news organizations in the state.

In February, Mr. Santorum led Mr. Romney in the same poll 45 percent to 26 percent, a difference of 19 percentage points.

The Romney camp has expected Mr. Santorum to win Pennsylvania’s popular vote, or the “beauty contest,” while believing Mr. Romney could at least break even in the unrelated and more important race for delegates.

These statistics are pretty interesting considering the Republicans in Congress are making Planned Parenthood, and contraception in general, one of their biggest issues. If this doesn’t describe out of touch with Americans I don’t know what does.

A few years back, the US public’s acceptance of conclusions reached by climate scientists took a dramatic drop. It’s only now beginning to recover. Not a lot has changed about the science during that time, raising questions about what’s driving the ups and downs in the polls. Studies have found correlations with the weather and a role for political leaders in driving these changes, but a new study suggests some of that is misplaced. Instead, its authors come to a conclusion we’ve heard before: it’s the economy, stupid.

The authors use polling data from a variety of sources, which creates a bit of a challenge. Not all polls ask questions that address the same things. For example, one of the studies we linked above asked about the public’s acceptance of a basic fact: has our planet been getting warmer over the past few decades? In contrast, one of the polls used here assessed feelings about climate change by asking its participants whether they felt the media “exaggerate the seriousness of global warming.”

Still, there are ways to convert these specific sentiments into a generalized sense about the seriousness of climate change. Plus, the variety of polls provide some distinct advantages. For example, this survey provides a valuable outgroup to the US population, in that a number of surveys cover all the nations of the European Union. In addition, several of the polls (those performed by the Pew) include ZIP code information, allowing the authors to compare polling trends with record high and low temperatures in the nearby area.

As with another recent survey, they do end up seeing a correlation between acceptance of climate change and the weather. However, the correlation with local weather is rather weak. Instead, the authors found a stronger correlation with the global mean temperature. That’s somewhat surprising. Most years, the global mean isn’t especially well covered by the press, which suggests this correlation might be a bit spurious. (If we accept the economy is an influence, then the correlation will be very difficult to tease apart. Especially considering the coldest global temperature of the last decade happened to correspond to the onset of job losses in the US.)

In any case, the poll numbers indicate there are some things that we probably can’t blame them on. For example, acceptance started to drop prior to the Copenhagen climate conference and the release of the e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia. Both of these may have been big news among people who care passionately about climate change, but they came too late to explain the public’s reduced acceptance of the science.

Based on their statistical analysis, the authors conclude the economy is the strongest influence on the public’s acceptance of climate science. This held when the authors analyzed things separately in each US state based on its local unemployment rate. The effect showed up in European countries, as well. In Gallup polls, this correlation holds all the way back to 1989, when the current string of unusually warm years began. Overall, the authors found unemployment had an effect that was over three times stronger than either the local weather or skeptical coverage of climate in the media.

Put in other terms, each time the local unemployment increased by a point, that state saw its average citizen’s probability of accepting climate change drop by over 10 percent.

As tensions rise over Iran’s nuclear program, a majority of Americans want Israel and the U.S. to pursue diplomacy over military action.

President Obama insists “all options are on the table” to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But Obama and American officials have cautioned Israel against a preemptive strike against Iran, urging diplomacy and sanctions instead. There is still a “window for diplomacy” to deter Iran’s nuclear development, Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month. Netanyahu insists that Israel reserves the right to secure its own national security.

But only one in four Americans favor Israel launching a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, according to a new University of Maryland poll. Seven out of 10 respondents believe the U.S. and other world leaders should continue to pursue negotiations with Iran. President Obama called for continued diplomacy in a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday. Cameron agreed.

Only one in five respondents believe a strike against Iran would delay its ability to develop a nuclear weapon for more than five years, according to the poll. And about half of Americans polled believe the conflict would go on for years.

Six in 10 respondents believe Iran is actively working to produce nuclear weapons. Nine in 10 believe Iran will eventually develop them. U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe there is no evidence Iran has decided to build a bomb. The tensions over Iran’s nuclear program appear to be taking a toll. Last month, Iran topped Gallup’s “greatest enemy” list. Threatening Israel, announcements of its growing nuclear program and the possibility that Iran could disrupt the flow of oil all contributed to the antipathy, according to the poll.

There may be no number stamped more frequently on the American landscape than the price of gas. And as the average price has climbed toward $4 a gallon nationwide, it has generated abundant chatter about the threat to the economic recovery, and to incumbent politicians.

Republicans have seized on the issue to attack President Obama’s management of the economy. The president has responded with speeches defending his energy policies, including increased domestic oil production.

But there is surprisingly little evidence that gas prices deserve an outsize reputation for economic and political influence.

Studies suggest that most voters agree with Ms. Hawks: they are angry about gas prices, but other factors, like the economy and the personal qualities of candidates, ultimately determine their votes.

Gas prices influence voters indirectly, because rising prices can slow the pace of growth. But the influence is modest, because spending on oil and its derivatives makes up only a small part of the nation’s economic activity. Gas purchases account for less than 4 percent of household spending. Prices would need to increase by at least 28 percent to lift that share by a single percentage point. So far this year, they have jumped by 15 percent.

“Presidential elections are based on evaluations of presidential performance and on the performance of the economy. You can’t reduce that to one small issue,” said Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University. “Are gas prices part of the equation that people think about? They probably are, but only a small piece.”

Rising gas prices also make Americans less confident in the nation’s economic prospects and less approving of political leaders, according to public opinion surveys. But these, too, are small effects. One study by a political scientist estimated that the impact of changes in unemployment was 27 times greater than the impact of equivalent changes in gas prices.

In part, the difference is that Americans are divided as to whether politicians should be held responsible.

Now I don’t have a highfalutin’ “degree” from some fancy “college,” unlike Rick Santorum, who has three, but I do know that a lot of people seem to think “education” is a good thing. I know this because I read an article in which a guy from the Pew Research Center explained that nearly all American parents hope their children will attend college.

Anti-college talk is a fine rhetorical strategy when your target is snobbery against adults without college educations , but basically all parents — even blue collar parents who work with their hands like real Americans — want their kids to get degrees and good jobs because that is part of “the American dream.”

This is conservative class warfare totally backfiring, basically. Maybe Santorum’s grades were actually docked because he is dumb?

As we reported: “A statistical analysis indicates that the strongest predictors of supporting the Tea Party are views of Obama, ideology, partisanship and anger at the way the government is operating. Views on the extent of racism as a problem, and views on Obama’s efforts on behalf of African-Americans, are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.”

The full analysis is here , and I’m pasting the section dealing with race below.

From our May survey:

THE QUESTION OF RACE – Tea Party supporters broadly agree on motivations for backing the movement – economic concern (cited by 83 percent), distrust of government (79 percent) and opposition to President Obama and the Democrats (72 percent). Many fewer supporters, but still 39 percent, cite dissatisfaction with the Republican Party as a reason for favoring the Tea Party.

At the same time, the movement’s supporters broadly reject the suggestion of racial prejudice against Obama. Eighty-seven percent of Tea Party backers say this is not a reason people support it. (One in 10 say it is). Racism, rather, is suggested by many Tea Party opponents, 57 percent of whom suspect prejudice in the movement’s ranks. (Among people who are neutral toward the Tea Party, about a quarter, 24 percent, suspect prejudice is at play in its support.)

Tea Party supporters are less apt than others to see racism as a major problem in this country – a majority do so, 58 percent, compared with 75 percent of all Americans. However, this concern is about the same among Tea Party supporters as it is among all adults who define themselves as very conservative (61 percent say racism is a significant problem). And Tea Party supporters are more apt to be white – 81 percent, vs. 74 percent of all adults (and 65 percent of Tea Party opponents). Whites are less apt than nonwhites to see racism as a major problem.

Further, while 18 percent of Tea Party supporters say Obama is doing “too much” to represent the interests of African-Americans, exactly as many say he’s doing too little in this regard. And those proportions are about equal among all Americans – 12 percent say Obama’s doing too much for African-Americans, 13 percent too little.

Ultimately, a statistical analysis indicates that the strongest predictors of supporting the Tea Party are views of Obama, ideology, partisanship and anger at the way the government is operating. Views on the extent of racism as a problem, and views on Obama’s efforts on behalf of African-Americans, are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.

The close divide in a Senate vote Thursday over whether employers can refuse insurance coverage for contraception mirrors a sharp partisan divide among the public, according to a national poll and interviews with women around the country.

Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.

Jennifer Meyer, 27, of Sugar Creek, Mo., said in an interview that the current controversy over birth control coverage was “a way for employers to get out of footing the bill by saying they don’t agree with it.” She called herself an independent, but said she was leaning toward Democrats as the “lesser of two evils.”

Mollyann Brodie, director of survey research at the Kaiser foundation, said that since the vast majority of Americans approved of birth control, the divisions over the mandate might be more related to views on federal regulation. “In the end, the answers say more about people’s views on the role of government than on the issue of contraception,” she said.

The political returns from attacking access to contraception are in. Women don’t seem to like it.

While Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney hasn’t led the charge against the Obama Administration’s proposed new federal rules that require an insurance carrier to provide birth control free of charge to women, he certainly echoed the theme that the provisions are an assault on religious liberty , while steering clear of making it a central issue on the campaign.

Unfortunately for him, it seems he’s still suffered a precipitous drop in support among women voters.

Quinnipiac University released new numbers on Wednesday that showed a troubling trend for the former governor. In three months, he’d gone from a positive split on favorability with women (33 - 30) to a substantially negative one (30 - 45) in Quinnipiac’s numbers.

The pollster also asked whether “Mitt Romney cares about the needs and problems of women or not?” while asking the same about President Obama. Obama did very well on the question, with 64 percent of all voters saying he does and 28 saying he does not, nearly exactly the same as the split amongst women themselves. Romney earned a 41 - 41 split on the question from all voters, while only 34 percent of women said that he does care about their needs and problems, with 46 percent saying he does not.

A gender gap for Rick Santorum has surfaced in the most recent set of polls released before next week’s primaries, with women in Arizona supporting Mitt Romney over Mr. Santorum by nearly 2 to 1.

This is the first time in the campaign that polling in various states, as well as exit polls, has shown that Mr. Santorum’s backers have noticeably tilted toward men.

The latest poll, conducted in Arizona by NBC News/Marist and released Wednesday, showed that women support Mr. Romney over Mr. Santourm 46 percent to 23 percent. In addition, Mr. Romney has an eight percentage point lead among men.

Some groups and Democrats have been criticizing recent remarks by Mr. Santorum about barring women from combat roles in the military, his opposition to birth control and a much-derided joke made by his most prominent financial supporter, Foster Friess. The latest polls may be showing the first signs that Mr. Santorum is alienating women — including Republicans — with some of his views.

With the Ohio primary three weeks away, Rick Santorum is now leading the pack of Republican candidates in the Buckeye State, according to the newest Quinnipiac University poll .

Mr. Santorum has the support of 36 percent of likely Republican primary voters, trailed by Mitt Romney, with 29 percent. Newt Gingrich follows at 20 percent, and Ron Paul is in last place at 9 percent.

The state poll was released as national polls, including the latest New York Times/CBS News survey this week, showed Mr. Santorum closing in on Mr. Romney’s lead as caucus and primary contests shifted to the Midwest. The two leading candidates are battling for votes right now in Michigan , the home state of Mr. Romney’s family and where his father was governor.

Those 38-point spreads between his favorable and unfavorable ratings are a new high for Gingrich in the 2012 campaign and tie his worst numbers from 1997, when he faced ethics troubles and a GOP revolt during his time as speaker of the House. (Fun fact: now-Sen. Al Franken joked in 1996 that Gingrich’s “favorable rating is only four points higher than the Unabomber.”)

And in fact, the numbers are worse than any national political figure The Fix could find in recent years — even, arguably, George W. Bush .

Sarah Palin , even at her most divisive, never saw her unfavorable rating rise above 60 percent in the CNN poll. And even when Republicans were demonizing Nancy Pelosi in the runup to the 2010 election, her unfavorable rating never climbed beyond the high-50s.

In fact, about the only politician who gives Gingrich a run for his money in recent years is Bush. But even when Bush’s approval rating languished in the 20s, his favorable rating — which is more of a personal measure rather than a job performance measure — stayed in the 30s.

So while Bush’s unfavorable rating may have peaked slightly higher than Gingrich’s, his favorable rating was always higher. And at Bush’s worst point, the split between his favorable and unfavorable rating was negative-36 points. For Gingrich, it’s negative-38 points.

Gingrich appears to have put together the rare combination of turning off Democrats and independents, but also being unpopular within his own party. The new CBS/NYT poll showed just 36 percent of Republicans view him favorably, compared to 29 percent who don’t.

The poll asked conservatives if they approved or disapproved of the GOP in Congress. Among CPAC attendees, a 70% approval rating. Among conservatives not at the conference: only 48% approved.
This was a stunning disconnect. The activists at CPAC are in love with the GOP Congress, but outside of the hotel, even conservatives are starting to have doubts. It isn't surprising that conservatives in the country at large are not completely sold on the GOP Congress, its legislative achievements are paltry and it nearly sent the country into a default with the debt crisis. The fact that the activists within the CPAC hall aren't letting any of that register shows just how hermetically sealed CPAC is from the wider country.

In an interview with Matt Lauer that aired before the Super Bowl, Barack Obama argued that “I deserve a second term.” And if the election were held right now, he’d probably get one.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows the president opening a six-point lead over Mitt Romney (and moving over the magic 50 percent mark) among registered voters has been generating plenty of attention today. It confirms the degree to which Obama’s reelection prospects have improved recently. Just a month ago, the same poll gave Romney a two-point edge (48 to 46 percent), and not since last July had Obama run ahead of Romney among registered voters. This is also the first time either man has cleared the 50 percent mark in the ABC/WaPo poll. Among all adults, Obama notches a 50 percent job approval rating — his highest mark since last March.

Isn't that something? For a group of people who claim to support "life"—not to mention their insistence that they really want to help women when it comes to making the right decisions about their health care—it's pretty striking that they'd rather see women die of cancer than get medical care at Planned Parenthood. Guess the sanctity of their political opposition to women's health care trumps the "sanctity of life."

Facing two large hills to climb in November — maintaining control of the Senate and winning back the House – some Democrats are saying that there’s new evidence that the second is in the realm of possibility.

Mark Gersh, a political statistician with a long history of crunching numbers for Democrats, argues in a memo to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that the party’s support among voters in recent polls puts Democrats in a better position than Republicans enjoyed at this time in 2010, when they captured 63 seats and swept into control. In polls from January of that year, Republicans had a 4 point lead over the Democrats.

Mr. Gersh cites a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll , in which, when asked which party they prefer to control Congress, voters cited Democrats, 47 to 41 percent, as well as a recent National Journal poll that found that found 48 percent of voters prefer Democrats to take control of the House while 37 percent want Republicans to stay in control. In October, the same poll showed a statistical tie.

These polls come on the heels of other such surveys, as well as events on the Hill in recent months in which Democrats have seemed to emerge from legislative battles with a slight upper hand.

Neither of those outcomes are impossible — if Mr. Gingrich has some slim chance of winning, there’s also the chance that he could lose by 25 or more points. But they’re not where the balance of the evidence lies. Odds are, instead, that Mr. Romney will win by somewhere in the range of 10 points to 20 points, meaning that many networks are likely to declare him the winner shortly after polls close.

Summing up. Our forecast model currently gives Mr. Gingrich a 75 percent chance of winning the state. That seems like too confident a prediction, frankly. On the other hand, Mr. Gingrich does appear to have a modest lead in the polls — and the nonpolling factors do not clearly favor one or the other candidate, in my view. So I would call Mr. Gingrich the favorite for now — but not a clear favorite.

Gallup’s Editor-in-chief Frank Newport appeared on MSNBC to talk about the polling organization’s national tracking poll of the GOP primary race, which is changing rapidly in the last few days of the campaign for South Carolina. Newport said when their new data comes out at 1 pm eastern, “…we’ll see this gap closing more. Romney was up 23 points over Newt Gingrich. Now it will be down about ten points, so clearly things are collapsing.”

The Gallup tracking poll showed a huge lead for Romney after winning the New Hampshire primary and it seemed that he was on the way to locking down the nomination. Now that Newt Gingrich has resurged in South Carolina, and taken the media narrative along with him, Romney is faltering nationally.

“We have seen more movement, more roller coaster kind of effect this year than any other republican primary in our history of tracking,” Newport said. “I think anything is possible. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility if Romney recovers. We’ll wait and see.”

Every contentious campaign seems to have moments when there is conflicting evidence about which candidate, if any, has the momentum in the race.

There are some hints that Newt Gingrich is gaining ground in South Carolina, perhaps at Mitt Romney’s expense. But the evidence is not definitive yet, and this would represent a reversal of a previous trend that had shown Mr. Romney gaining ground there.

Up until about 24 hours ago, it had appeared that Mr. Romney was building his lead in South Carolina. Rasmussen Reports had shown Mr. Romney with a 14-point lead in a poll it conducted on Monday night, up from seven points in its poll from last Thursday. Likewise, InsiderAdvantage had given Mr. Romney an 11-point lead in a poll it conducted on Sunday, up from just two points in a poll it conducted Jan. 11. Because of these and other polls, Mr. Romney had been slowly but steadily gaining ground in the FiveThirtyEight forecast of South Carolina, which estimated his chances of winning the state to be 90 percent.

Ms. Haley’s confidence is well justified, however. It would require an upset of historic proportions for Mr. Romney to lose New Hampshire.

Although Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat of Barack Obama in the 2008 New Hampshire primary was an incredible story, for instance, it would not be in the same ballpark as Ron Paul or another candidate upsetting Mr. Romney. Had we run our forecast model on Saturday, Jan. 5, 2008, it would have put Mrs. Clinton 8.7 points behind Mr. Obama based on the polling at that time and given her a 10 percent chance of defeating him.

By contrast, Mr. Romney’s lead over his nearest competitor, Ron Paul, is 22.6 percentage points based on polling through Saturday morning — more than twice as large as Mr. Obama’s. That’s why our forecast model gives Mr. Romney just a 1 percent chance of losing.

In fact, were Mr. Paul or another candidate to defeat Mr. Romney, it would be the largest last-minute upset ever in a primary, according to our database, which consists of robustly polled primaries and caucuses since 1980.

The bounce that candidates receive in the polls after a primary or caucus is typically as much a function of exceeding expectations as their actual performance. Although Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucuses by eight votes, it looks as though Rick Santorum will see the largest improvement in his poll numbers.

Mr. Santorum received 21 percent of the vote in a national poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports on Wednesday. Although Rasmussen Reports had not polled the Republican race since November, this reflects a huge improvement over Mr. Santorum’s typical numbers, as he had never polled above 6 percent in a national survey until this week.

Meanwhile, Mr. Santorum’s share of the vote increased to 11 percent, from 8 percent, in the Gallup daily tracking poll . What’s impressive about this is that Gallup uses a five-day rolling sample, meaning that only 20 percent of its interviews were conducted after Mr. Santorum’s showing in Iowa. A little bit of algebra would imply that Mr. Santorum polled at or just above 20 percent in interviews conducted on Wednesday alone, consistent with his standing in the Rasmussen Reports survey.

Two polls released on Tuesday further underscore the lack of commitment among many Republicans toward a particular presidential candidate, with results once again highlighting how unsettled this contest remains two weeks before Iowans cast the first votes.

A ABC News/Washington Post poll finds nearly four in 10 Republicans dissatisfied with the field of Republican candidates. On top of that, eight in 10 Republican voters who back a candidate in a CBS News poll say they could still change their mind.

Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the ABC/Post poll say they are very or somewhat dissatisfied with the choice of candidates, while 59 percent are satisfied. Satisfaction was higher around this time during the 2008 presidential primary season. In an ABC/Post poll in November 2007, 69 percent of Republicans were satisfied with the field while 28 percent were dissatisfied.

At the same time, 79 percent of Republican primary voters who currently back a candidate in the CBS News poll say they could still change their mind, up 7 points since November.

Although Latinos strongly disapprove of President Obama’s immigration policies, which have brought high numbers of deportations, they would favor him by wide margins over a Republican candidate in the presidential race, according to a poll released on Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

The Pew poll is the first to put numbers on the growing discontent among Latinos with Mr. Obama’s immigration policies, which have led to nearly 400,000 deportations in each of the last three years. According to the poll, 59 percent of Latinos disapprove of the deportations; only 27 percent approve.

Yet if the election were held now, the poll suggests, Mr. Obama would win a matchup with Mitt Romney: 68 percent of Latino voters said they favor Mr. Obama; only 23 percent favored the former Massachusetts governor. In a hypothetical contest with Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, Mr. Obama would win 69 percent to 23 percent.

Increasingly, however, pollsters find it difficult to get people to talk to them. This should not be a surprise. Pollsters call us during inconvenient times when they expect us to be home (the dinner hour, for example) and then can ask all sorts of personal questions about our age, sex, religion, party affiliation, income and whom we intend to vote for.

I have never been called by a political pollster and don’t know anybody who has, but I know some pollsters, who assure me they don’t make the numbers up, and I believe them.

Pollsters, or rather the phone-bankers who make call after call (or computers that make robo-call after robo-call) do get people to talk to them. Not vast numbers of people, but pollsters do not require vast numbers.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, which is highly respected, tells us that “Gingrich and Romney are each favored by 30 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.”

Also, the “survey shows President Obama receiving his highest approval rating since March … [and] the number who disapprove of his overall performance has dipped below 50 percent for the first time this fall.”

We are a nation of nearly 313 million people. So how many people did the pollsters actually speak to? If you have extremely good eyes, you can find the answer in tiny type at the bottom of a chart: The Post-ABC poll was conducted by phone “among a random sample of 1,005 adults.”

That represents 0.0003 percent of the nation at large. (The number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents was an even smaller sample of 395 people.)

While poll after poll this month finds Newt Gingrich to be the preferred candidate among Republicans nationally, and in several early voting states, his unpopularity among all Americans in some of the same surveys underscores the deep challenges he could face in a general election.

In a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 35 percent of Americans express a favorable view of Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, while more, 48 percent, hold an unfavorable opinion. While his positive rating is unchanged since late last month, negative views of him are up 6 points.

The poll finds Mr. Gingrich viewed favorably by a majority of Republicans and conservatives, but he is viewed more negatively than positively among independents, whose support is considered crucial in a general election. Indeed, independents’ views of Mr. Gingrich have grown increasingly more unfavorable in the last few weeks. In an ABC/Post poll in late November, his favorable-unfavorable rating was 36 percent to 43 percent. Now, it is 33percent to 48 percent. A majority of moderates, moreover, view him negatively.

At the same time, the latest ABC/Post poll finds President Obama’s unfavorable ratings at a career high of 49 percent. Still, he remains more popular on balance than Mr. Gingrich, with 48 percent of Americans expressing a favorable opinion about the president. And while independents view the president more negatively than positively by 8 percentage points, that’s better than Mr. Gingrich’s 15-point negative gap within this important group.

Similarly, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds Mr. Gingrich rated positively by crucial groups in the Republican primaries – conservatives and Tea Party supporters.

Mr. Gingrich, however, is viewed far less favorably among independents and women. In the poll, Mr. Gingrich’s ratings are 18 points more negative than positive among women and 24 points more negative than positive among independents.

To be sure, Mr. Obama has many vulnerabilities heading into the general election next year. But the latest national polls suggest that if Mr. Gingrich makes it that far, he does, too.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted among 1,012 adults. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll was conducted among 1,000 adults. Each poll was conducted nationally by telephone (including landlines and cellphones) Dec. 7-11 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Barely half of Americans - a record low - are currently married, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.

Just 51% of adult Americans are married, compared with 72% in 1960.

The median age of first marriage has also hit a new high, of 26.5 for brides and 28.7 for grooms.

Pew said the number of adults co-habitating, single-person households and single parents had meanwhile increased in recent decades.

The study found that 20% of adults today aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59% in 1960.

It is unclear whether they are delaying matrimony or abandoning it altogether.

The analysis also found the number of new marriages in the US had declined by five percentage points between 2009-10.

This may not necessarily have been caused by the economic downturn, since a similar trend has continued in Europe regardless of business cycles.

Pew, a nonpartisan think tank and polling organisation, found the percentage of those Americans who have been married at least once had declined as well - 72% in 2010, from 85% in 1960.

If the trend persists, in a few years less than half of Americans will be married, Pew said.

While Pew did not study reasons for the trend, it noted that the marriage rate for college-educated adults declined "far less" than among the less-educated.

A Pew survey in 2010 found that four out of 10 Americans believed marriage was becoming obsolete, but that 61% people who had never married would like to do so someday.

Nearly 20% of women in the US are raped or suffer attempted rape at some point in their lives, a US study says.

Even more women, estimated at 25%, have been attacked by a partner or husband, the Centers for Disease Control said.

The findings form part of the first set of results from a nationwide study surveying sexual violence by intimate partners against men and women.

More than 24 people a minute reported rape, violence, or stalking, it says, with 12 million offences reported.

Experts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) described the results of the first year of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey as "astounding".

What’s a little different about these forecasts is that one of these factors — how recently the poll was conducted — really dominates everything else. We’ve analyzed literally thousands of primary and caucus polls dating to 1972, and what we’ve found is that you optimize forecast accuracy by being extremely aggressive about trying to identify the current trend. In the late stages of a primary or caucus race, a week is an eternity and even a couple of days can be meaningful.

This characteristic is especially relevant in this instance since there seems to have been a shift in the Iowa polls over the last week or so. In particular, the candidates who have been leading nationally, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, have lost a bit of ground while other candidates are gaining. Our current polling average puts Mr. Gingrich at 25 percent and Mr. Romney at 15 percent of the vote, as compared to 29 and 17 percent at the Real Clear Politics average (which is less aggressive about weighting recent polls). Conversely, our numbers are a little higher for the other five candidates, including Ron Paul.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas’ hard turn the past two days on gay issues, in which he has suggested that gay rights are inconsistent with both American and Christian values, has generated enormous criticism from lesbian and gay organizations and some religious groups, and has even helped split Mr. Perry’s top campaign aides over a new ad.

In that campaign ad, released on Wednesday, Mr. Perry says “you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday” to know it is wrong that gay men and lesbians openly serve in the military at a time when there is no organized prayer in public schools.

Internally, a top Perry campaign adviser, Tony Fabrizio, was critical of the ad. A Perry aide did not deny division inside the campaign over the commercial — a split first reported by The Huffington Post — but chalked it up to the “occasionally salty” and robust interchanges between advisers.

The ad came a day after Mr. Perry stood out in attacking as “silly” a new Obama administration initiative using diplomatic efforts and foreign aid to promote gay rights around the world and beat back efforts in other nations to criminalize homosexual conduct and persecute gays. This policy, Mr. Perry contended, was an “example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country.”

Perry aides said neither the criticism of Mr. Obama nor the new ad were intended to be anti-gay, nor were they coordinated; they said that the ad had been in the works for weeks and that they had no advance notice of the administration’s new policy.

Either way, Mr. Perry, who once was atop polls of the Republican presidential field, is running out of time to find a means to connect with the sort of social conservatives who have long been an important part of his base in Texas. Some social conservatives have abandoned Mr. Perry over his support for granting lower-cost in-state college tuition to some children of illegal immigrants. Iowa’s first in-the-nation Republican caucuses, which social conservatives dominate, are Jan. 3.

Mr. Perry’s decision to seize on gay issues appears to be an effort tap into the sentiment that led Iowa voters to remove three Supreme Court justices one year ago after they voted to legalize same-sex marriage. But this year, economic issues — which had initially dominated the focus of Mr. Perry’s campaign — remain the overwhelming concern for voters.

In Iowa, where Mr. Perry is expected to campaign nearly nonstop for the three weeks before the caucuses, economic issues are weighing heavier on the minds of likely Republican caucusgoers than social issues like abortion or same-sex marriage, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll of these voters. A majority of evangelical voters also shared that view.

And another finding stood out: Nearly three out of five respondents said that they support legal recognition in one form or another for same-sex couples. The poll found that 22 percent said same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, while 36 percent said they supported civil unions. Only 38 percent said they supported no legal recognition for same-sex couples, though a majority of evangelical Christians responded that way.

Nor is it clear whether Mr. Perry’s attacks on the Obama administration’s repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in the military will help him. One poll of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found about three out of four were comfortable around gay service members, and the nation’s two most senior military officials during the debate over repeal — who had both served under President George W. Bush — backed the change in policy.

But even if most voters do not have a problem with the issues Mr. Perry is focusing on, his approach might still succeed. Analysts say even a narrow issue — but one that gives some voters a reason to turn out for him — might improve his single-digit standing in most polls.

“This might be his best shot — he needs something, right?” said J. Ann Selzer, an Iowa pollster.

Surging Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney in the key election state of Iowa, a poll shows.

The former House of Representatives Speaker was on 33%, compared with 18% for Mr Romney and Ron Paul in the ABC News/Washington Post survey.

Meanwhile, it was reported Mr Romney had erased email records in his last weeks as governor of Massachusetts.

The contenders are competing to become next year's Republican nominee.

In January, Iowa will hold the first in a series of state-by-state contests that will help pick the party's candidate to challenge Barack Obama for the White House in November 2012.

The poll published on Tuesday found that Iowa voters rated Mr Romney behind Mr Gingrich in terms of empathy, experience and electability.

Although the political world is laser-focused on the coming presidential contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina primary is looming on Jan. 21, and former Speaker Newt Gingrich now holds a commanding lead in the state, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The statewide Winthrop poll found that 38 percent of likely Republican voters in South Carolina support Mr. Gingrich, up from just 5 percent in a September poll by the same organization. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, trails Mr. Gingrich with 22 percent support and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has 9 percent (down from 31 percent in September).

As Mr. Perry’s support has waned, voters in South Carolina seem to have also cooled on the Tea Party in recent weeks. Just 15 percent of Republican voters consider themselves to be members of the movement – down from 28 percent in September. Still, 61 percent of Republican voters approve of the Tea Party movement in general.

Many voters in South Carolina differ with the Republican candidates’ platforms on how to address the federal budget deficit. Over all, 63 percent of voters in South Carolina (including a 47 percent plurality of Republicans) say tax increases will be necessary in order to address the federal budget deficit.

With immigration now a front-burner issue in the Republican presidential contest, a new poll shows a substantial age gap among Republican voters over whether there should be a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in the country illegally.

A majority – 57 percent — of Republicans who are 65 and older say that tighter border security and tough law enforcement should be the only focus of immigration policy, with no path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan group in Washington. Only about one-quarter of this group, or 24 percent, favor combining strict enforcement with a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Among Republicans who are younger than 30, the poll found, 42 percent favor a combined approach of tough enforcement against illegal immigration with a path to citizenship, while 30 percent wanted only enforcement. Among these younger Republicans, another 26 percent said that opening a path to citizenship should be the immigration priority, with or without tougher enforcement.

The poll showed other differences. Among Republican voters who agreed with the Tea Party, 52 percent favored a policy based only on tougher enforcement. Among Republicans who disagreed with the Tea Party or had no opinion, 36 percent wanted only enforcement, while 44 percent favored policies pairing enforcement with a path to citizenship.

According to the poll, Republicans as a whole were about evenly divided between those who want only border security and tough enforcement – 43 percent – and those who want both enforcement and legalization for illegal immigrants– 41 percent. Only 14 percent of Republicans said the priority should be only on creating a path to citizenship.

The Pew findings seem to present a quandary for the Republican candidates, who have been working to frame the divisive issue of immigration to appeal to the largest number of primary voters. Older Republicans tend to be more engaged and turn out in larger numbers than younger voters, and though the Tea Party’s popularity has shown a decline recently, its voters are active and remain influential within Republican ranks.

Mr. Cain’s polls were headed on a sharp upward trajectory until Oct. 31, when Politico first reported on accusations that he had sexually harassed two women. They then reversed course and embarked upon an equally sharp downward trajectory. Not a whole lot more complicated than that.

The reason this is worth mentioning is that some of the post-mortems on Mr. Cain’s candidacy have tried to draw much broader lessons from it — for instance, about the electoral prospects for an outsider with relatively little political experience in an era of months-long, multi-million dollar campaigns. These story lines are certainly worth discussing. So is the question of how well a candidate can do when he lacks support from the party establishment. It is possible — I would say somewhat likely — that Mr. Cain’s polls were liable to decline even in the absence of the scandal.

The problem is that the scandal intervened, Mr. Cain’s polling took a 180-degree turn, and that makes coming to any conclusions about these interesting questions extremely dubious. Some of the write-ups about Mr. Cain’s campaign have only mentioned the allegations of sexual harassment and infidelity in passing, which is a bit like asking “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

I don’t know that there is any one right answer to this question, but I will tell you what I think is an overlooked part of the problem: Mr. Romney is not all that well-liked by moderates in the Republican party, a group with whom he should be racking up a big advantage given the conservative slant of most of his opponents.

Yes, Virginia, there are still moderate Republicans out there. Not as many as there used to be, but enough that they will constitute perhaps one-third of the Republican primary electorate.

I looked at all the surveys of Republican primary voters that the firm Public Policy Polling has released since the start of October — a total of 17 polls covering 14 states as well as a couple of nationwide surveys. Public Policy Polling breaks out its results based on whether the voters identify as moderate, somewhat conservative, or very conservative. Although the sample sizes for each group are small in any one survey, they become quite meaningful when averaged together.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Romney does not do all that well among the most conservative voters. Over the past two months, his support among voters who describe themselves as very conservative has averaged 13 percent. That isn’t nothing, but he’s almost always trailed among this demographic — first to Mr. Cain and more recently to Mr. Gingrich.

As Herman Cain returns to Atlanta on Friday to discuss the future of his Republican presidential campaign with his family, a new poll in Iowa shows that his support has dramatically fallen in the state that opens the Republican nominating contest on Jan. 3.

Mr. Cain is supported by 8 percent of Republicans who are likely to attend the Iowa caucuses, according to the latest Iowa Poll by The Des Moines Register. That is down from 23 percent in late October.

The poll was taken Nov. 27 to Nov. 30, just as the latest report was unfolding about new allegations against Mr. Cain and his sexual conduct toward women. On the second day the poll was being conducted, an Atlanta woman stepped forward to say that she had a 13-year affair with Mr. Cain, an assertion that he denied.

When voters were asked by the Iowa Poll about the candidate they believed was most likely to have a scandal in the White House, Mr. Cain’s numbers rose from 25 percent at the start of polling to 36 percent and then to 47 percent at the end of polling.

The poll was taken of 401 Republicans who said they were likely to attend the Iowa caucuses. It has a margin of error of five percentage points. The full results of the Iowa Poll will be released on Saturday evening.

The Iowa Poll found that Mr. Cain was leading the way in one category: 27 percent of likely caucusgoers said that he was the least knowledgeable in the field of Republican presidential candidates.

UK broadband speeds drop by an average of 35% from their off-peak highs when most people are online in the evening, according to a report.

The research, conducted by the comparison site Uswitch, was based on two million broadband speed tests.

The peak surfing times between 7pm and 9pm were the slowest to be online, the report said.

There were also huge regional variations between evening and early morning surfing times.

The report suggested the best time to be online was between 2am and 3am.

But the biggest piece of news here is Mr. Gingrich and his rise in the polls: he, Mr. Romney and Mr. Cain may now be in a rough three-way tie for the Republican polling lead. Polls certainly aren’t everything in a presidential primary, and for reasons I outlined earlier this week, Mr. Gingrich might have trouble maintaining his momentum as his campaign begins to receive more scrutiny. Still, it looks as if he’s going to enjoy his moment in the sun.

Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology.

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group, finds that the vast majority of tablet owners-fully 77%-use their tablet every day. They spend an average of about 90 minutes on them.

Consuming news (everything from the latest headlines to in-depth articles and commentary) ranks as one of the most popular activities on the tablet, about as popular as sending and receiving email (54% email daily on their tablet), and more popular than social networking (39%), gaming (30%), reading books (17%) or watching movies and videos (13%). The only activity that people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the web generally (67%).

The survey also finds that three-in-ten tablet news users (defined for this study as the 77% of all tablet users who get news at least weekly) say they now spend more time getting news than they did before they had their tablet. Just 4% say they spend less time while two-thirds (65%) spend about the same amount of time.

A third (33%) of tablet news users say they are turning to new sources for news on their tablet, sources they had not turned to on other platforms such as television or their desktop computer. And, more than four in ten (42%) say they regularly read in-depth news articles and analysis on their tablet.

Tablet news users also say they now prefer their new devices over traditional computers, print publications or television as a way both to get quick news headlines and to read long-form pieces.

Basically, I think Surge Theory errs by lumping four separate and distinct cases into one. There are some parallels between Mr. Perry’s surge and Mrs. Bachmann’s — but Mr. Cain’s and Mr. Trump’s were different sorts of phenomena.

Except for one thing. All of these candidates, with the partial exception of Mr. Perry, are anti-establishment candidates. They are not considered acceptable choices at all by Republican elites.

The lack of elite support may be some of the reason that they faded in the polls. (For the record, I am persuaded that elite support matters, I’m just not sure that it can’t ever be outweighed by other factors.) But perhaps also, the lack of elite support explains why these candidates rose in the polls in the first place.

The Republican establishment is not very popular right now — even among Republicans. Republicans perceive it as having delivered a failed candidate in John McCain, and having been complicit in unpopular things like the Iraq War, rising deficits and the federal bailouts. Some Republicans, even some staunch conservatives, also do not think highly of George W. Bush, perhaps the Republican establishment’s most recent real success. The Tea Party movement that helped to revitalize conservatives in 2010 was a reaction to much of this.

Tim Pawlenty was never going to pass for an anti-establishment candidate — not when he had been in elected office since 1993, not when he had more support among pundits than he seemed to have among voters, and not when his personality and his campaign were so cautious and predictable. But he sometimes tried to run as one, particularly late in the race when he frequently went toe to toe with Mrs. Bachmann.

Mr. Pawlenty also had problems as an establishment candidate — especially his poor fundraising numbers, which as much as anything explained why he ended his campaign.

Just 17 percent of Americans say they are better off financially than they were last year at this time, according to a new Bankrate.com survey.

Greg McBride, senior financial analyst for Bankrate.com, cited the weak economy, sluggish housing sector and a volatile stock market in the results: “Americans’ feelings about their savings, debt and net worth continue to erode,” he said in a statement.

Bankrate.com’s Financial Security Index fell in October to 92.8 from 93.9 and is now at its second-lowest level of the year. (Any reading below 100 indicates feelings of less financial security relative to 12 months ago.)

The study was conducted in October by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, using landline and cellphone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults. The margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points. The full survey can be viewed here.

In other findings, just 11 percent of Americans are more comfortable with their savings now compared with one year ago, and only 20 percent of Americans are more comfortable with their debt now, a figure that has dropped every month since June.

Nineteen percent of Americans report higher net worth than one year ago, while 30 percent report lower net worth.

The survey found that older Americans have been hit hard by the economic turmoil. Thirty one percent of Americans from ages 50 to 64 feel less secure in their jobs, and 56 percent of those from ages 50 to 64 feel less comfortable with their savings, while only 5 percent are more comfortable.

One bright spot (for waiters, at least): 70 percent said their tipping habits haven’t changed due to the economy.

A new poll of Texas Republican voters indicates that Gov. Rick Perry is not even leading in his home state, the latest sign that he faces a huge task to regain the momentum and support he seemed to effortlessly generate in the first few weeks of his campaign.

Herman Cain, the former pizza-chain executive and restaurant industry lobbyist, attracted the support of 27 percent of registered Texas voters who identify themselves as Republicans in the poll by the University of Texas and The Texas Tribune. Mr. Perry won support from 26 percent, a statistical tie.

Representative Ron Paul of Texas came in third with 12 percent, followed by Mitt Romney, 9 percent; Newt Gingrich, 8 percent; and Michele Bachmann, 2 percent. Rick Santorum, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Gary Johnson all took 1 percent, and 12 percent said they either did not know who they favored or wanted another Republican candidate.

The results suggest that Mr. Perry’s dive in support in Texas has been similar to his decline in national polls: another survey conducted about five weeks earlier by Public Policy Polling found that Mr. Perry had support from 49 percent of usual Texas Republican primary voters, compared with 44 percent for the rest of the Republican field combined.

For Herman Cain, these are the sweet days.

His surge in the polls, supposed to last a week, is a month old and showing no signs of deflating. His tax plan was laid low in debates, but his standing keeps climbing.

In a survey of likely Iowa caucusgoers released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, Mr. Cain was in a statistical tie for first with Mitt Romney, with the rest of the field well behind. The results echoed a New York Times/CBS News poll earlier in the week.

“I’m the unconventional candidate,” Mr. Cain said, grinning, as he dug into a stack of spareribs in a foam takeout container on his campaign bus on Saturday. “I have the unconventional message: Bold, solutions-oriented.”

He asked an aide for a napkin. “And bring me those baked sweet potatoes back,” he said.

“My point is,” he continued, “maybe what we’re doing is working.” He let out a hearty laugh.

Since winning a Florida straw poll on Sept. 24, his crowds have been standing room only, which Mr. Cain attributes to voters, if not pundits, overcoming hesitations about his ability to gain the nomination. “That is no doubt in peoples’ minds now, so they’re unleashing their desire to want to support me,” he said.

Donations have been flowing in, his top aide said recently, at the rate of $1 million a week, refilling the well that Mr. Cain primed with $685,000 of his own money.

And yet his candidacy still has an ad-libbed quality. His tax plan, picked apart by rivals and independent analysts, would wallop the middle class and benefit the rich. He has retracted many shoot-from-the-hip statements, suggesting a lack of focus (and maybe a lack of sleep). His inexperience — not to mention an unintentionally hilarious Web video of a cigarette-puffing senior aide — has raised questions about whether even he takes his campaign all that seriously.

Asked if he was aware that many people consider his candidacy to be a punch line, Mr. Cain replied: “I understand that. I’m not offended.”

“Why do you think we’re smiling?” he added. “Because the joke is going to be on them.”

With the nation’s first nominating contests just two months away, a large majority of Republican primary voters have yet to make up their minds about the candidate they would like to see as their party’s nominee for president in 2012.

About eight in 10 Republican primary voters say it is still too early to tell whom they will support, and just four in 10 say they have been paying a lot of attention to the 2012 presidential campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Herman Cain, the former restaurant executive, is riding a wave of support among Republican primary voters that has placed him in a statistical dead heat with rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, in a race that has been characterized by momentum swings among the candidates.

The poll found Mr. Cain with the highest level of support, with 25 percent of Republican primary voters, and Mr. Romney with 21 percent. This difference is within the poll’s margin of sampling error.

Adding to the fluidity of the contest, about one in 10 Republican primary voters say they would like to see someone else nominated.

Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman who has never held elected office, is tied for the lead in national polls of Republican voters — or perhaps even slightly ahead of Mitt Romney, as he was in Tuesday night’s New York Times/CBS News poll. Mr. Cain has also led in most recent polls of the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary, has taken the lead in Ohio, and is close to Mr. Romney in Florida. If all you had to go on was the polls, you might think that Mr. Cain was the favorite to win the Republican nomination.

But then there are the nonpolling factors, some of which can be objectively measured and some of which cannot, but which would generally point toward Mr. Cain as being a second- or third-tier candidate. Mr. Cain has no endorsements from Republican members of Congress or Republican governors, and very few from officials in key early voting states. He has raised very little money. He has not hired well-known names for his campaign staff. He does not have traditional credentials. He has run for elected office just once before. He has begun to get a fair amount of media coverage, but the tenor of it has been fairly skeptical. His campaign commercials have been … interesting.

Has there ever been a candidate with such strong polling but such weak fundamentals? Almost certainly not, at least not at this relatively advanced stage of the race.

(CNN) - Political junkies keeping track of the GOP presidential horserace probably know the candidates by first name only: Mitt, Rick, Michele and so on.

But a new Pew Research Center survey finds only small percentages of Americans can name any of the 2012 Republican candidates. When asked to name a person running for the nomination, only 28% identified Texas Gov. Rick Perry, 27% named former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and 15% identified Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.

All of the other candidates got results in the single digits. Forty-seven percent of Americans couldn’t name any candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination.

However, any gains for Mr. Romney — in an absolute rather than relative sense — are hard to perceive. He averages 22 percent in the surveys, up only nominally from 21 percent before.

Instead, the candidate making the largest gains is Herman Cain, the Georgia entrepreneur who won a straw poll in Florida over the weekend. He’s up to 13 percent in the surveys, more than doubling the 6 percent that he had before.

The other candidate to make gains is Newt Gingrich — up to 10 percent from 7 percent.

The numbers for Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann have slipped somewhat, however. Mrs. Bachmann in particular, who was in the double-digits in many polls at her peak, is now down to about 5 percent of the vote. And a separate poll of Iowa voters shows her having fallen behind Mr. Romney there. (Although I wouldn’t put as much emphasis on that one because the pollster in question, American Research Group, has a dubious track record.)

Certainly, one way that Mr. Romney could win is if the support among the more conservative portion of the Republican electorate were divided among several different candidates. With the decline in Mr. Perry’s numbers, the landscape has become more favorable for him.

Nearly three out of four Americans send text messages on the phone and among those who do, 31 percent prefer texting to talking, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center.

Those numbers are even more pronounced for younger people. Cellphone owners between the ages of 18 and 24 send or receive an average of 109.5 messages daily. The rest of us on average exchange 41.5 messages daily, Pew found.

The poor text more often than the rich. According to the survey, conducted on the phone with 2,277 adults, those with incomes of under $30,000 exchanged nearly 57 messages on average each day, while those earning over $75,000 exchanged 32 messages on average.

A separate Pew Center study earlier this summer documented how vital our cellphones had become. Among those who owned cellphones, 42 percent said they used their device to stave off boredom and 13 percent pretended to be occupied with their phones to stave off unwanted attention from others.

And what’s happened to voice? It turns out that 53 percent of Americans still prefer to talk to one another on their phones.

They note that “in April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.” Tea Party types, one cannot help but notice, are even less popular than “atheists” and “Muslims.” (To be fair, there’s an easy explanation for that. Atheists and Muslims have beliefs that most Americans find less objectionable than those of Tea Party types.)

A study of the views and attitudes of 2000 voters sympathetic to the Tea Party presented to the 2011 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association by four academics added that their attitudes could be characterized as reflective of “four primary cultural and political beliefs” in greater measure than in other Americans: “authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.”

The audience for the CNN debate showed why this may be the case the other night. The audience cheered the death of a sick man who lacked health insurance. They booed when one of the candidates pointed out that not all Muslims were responsible for 9/11.

Obviously, CNN is envious of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network’s superior ratings and could not help but notice that they too promote the Tea Party and provide its members with millions worth of free publicity. Perhaps next they will also start wiretapping the phones of murdered young girls as well.

A self-professed Christian goes on a murderous rampage and kills nearly 100 people. Is he a True Christian? Does he still represent the faith?

According to a new study (PDF) from Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute, 83% of Americans don’t think so. In fact, only 13% of people say that a self-identified Christian who commits a crime is still a Christian.

Meanwhile, if a group of self-identified Muslims fly a plane into a building, should they be considered True Muslims? 44% of Americans say yes.

Social networks have crossed another milestone.

For the first time, half of all adults in the United States said they use a social networking site, according to a survey released Friday by the Pew Research Center.

That’s 50 percent of all Americans, not just those who say they are online. Six years ago, when Pew first conducted a similar survey, only 5 percent of all adults said they used social sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

It is a sign of how deeply and widely social networking companies have penetrated the lives of ordinary people and in turn, transformed the ways in which people communicate, authorities govern and companies sell things.

Parents use Facebook to vet nannies, car makers to launch new models, police to keep tabs on suspects. Federal government authorities are preparing this weekend to use social networking sites for hurricane preparation on the East Coast.

The Pew survey found that among adults who are online the rates of participation are higher: 65 percent, according to the survey, up slightly from 61 percent last year.

A new study released by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, from main author Debra Stulberg, surveys 1,144 ob-gyns (1,800 were initially approached) to see how many provide abortion services. Though legal, abortion is much harder to come by than one might expect: while 97% of ob-gyns reported having encountered women seeking an abortion, only 14% said they were willing to perform the service.

There are, to be sure, several reasons that Mr. Romney should not panic.

First, with these shiny new numbers will come higher expectations for Mr. Perry, particularly during the three Republican debates that will be held in September.

Second, Mr. Romney should have a fair amount of breathing room since the Republican field is heavily tilted toward very conservative candidates like Mr. Perry. Were Rudolph W. Giuliani or Chris Christie to enter the race, Mr. Romney might face a bit more pressure, as he would if Jon M. Huntsman Jr. were somehow to surge. Still, the conservative part of the Republican field is far more crowded, and will be even more so if Sarah Palin runs.

Third, Republican elites have not given Mr. Perry a warm welcome. Of course, the same can be said for Mr. Romney; that Republicans have been casting about for a candidate like Paul Ryan or Mr. Christie reflects poorly on him as well as Mr. Perry. But as Barack Obama looks more and more vulnerable, Republicans may begin to prioritize electability over ideological purity.

Finally, although national polls at this stage have a fair amount of predictive power, they are hardly foolproof. At this point in 2007, Rudy Giuliani had about 29 percent of the Republican vote, about where Mr. Perry is now.

Instead, the key numbers for Mr. Romney are in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Mr. Romney retains a reasonably large lead in New Hampshire for now. The danger is that, if Mr. Perry were to win Iowa convincingly, he could clear the field of other conservative candidates. New Hampshire has a lot of moderate and independent voters — but it is still majority conservative. And although Mr. Romney holds a solid lead over each of the individual conservatives, he does not hold a lead over them collectively: Mr. Perry, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich together have in excess of 50 percent of the vote there, based on a trendline constructed from recent polls of the state, as compared to 34 percent for Mr. Romney. If, for example, Mr. Perry were to knock out Mrs. Bachmann, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Cain by winning Iowa, picking up most of their votes, the New Hampshire contest would become very tight.

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.

The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans' religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend. That Republicans tend to be frequent churchgoers helps explain their doubts about evolution.

The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution's explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.

According to a report issued on Wednesday, consumers who already own or plan to buy a new tablet are only interested in one thing: the Apple iPad.

The report, which was published by Robert W. Baird, a Milwaukee-based wealth management and analyst company, was conducted through a survey of 1,114 people, 98 percent of whom lived in the United States.

More than 50 percent of those surveyed, who were between 22 and 60 years old, said they already owned a tablet or were interested in buying one soon, with 95 percent of these respondents choosing the Apple iPad.

Although survey participants were allowed to pick multiple tablet choices, only 10 percent chose the Hewlett-Packard TouchPad as their tablet. A mere 4 percent said they would buy Research in Motion’s new BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook. The Acer Iconia tablet, which runs Google’s Android software, barely scored 1 percent among survey participants.

New data from the latest national CNN poll out on Thursday shows that the distance between President Obama and his possible GOP opponents is tightening among the declared (Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney) and nearly declared (Tex. Gov. Rick Perry) GOP frontrunners. But it also showed that there was one Republican candidate in the poll who outpaced Obama in a matchup, 51 - 45. That candidate was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Just one problem...he's probably not running.

Other candidates did have a decent showing against Obama: the President was ahead of Romney only by a point, 48 - 47, and Perry was able to pull within five points, at 51 - 46, despite not even announcing or having a formal campaign yet. Even Bachmann, beginning to sag in the polls due to the entrance of Perry, was able to get close to the President at 51 - 45.

But despite the matchup data against Obama, the poll showed that Giuliani would face the same problem he had last time: winning the GOP nomination. He came in a tie for third when CNN asked GOP primary voters who they would like to see as the party's standard bearer, registering 12% alongside fellow non-candidate former AK Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). Romney led the field with 17%, and Perry hit 15%.

Residents of 16 states and the District of Columbia gave President Obama approval ratings of 50% or higher during the first half of 2011, led by the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. Idaho residents had the least positive appraisal of his performance, with 27% approving.

GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, today marks the culmination of 10 years of pioneering research documenting the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students with the release of The 2009 National School Climate Survey.

The 2009 survey of 7,261 middle and high school students found that at school nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment at school in the past year and nearly two-thirds felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation. Nearly a third of LGBT students skipped at least one day of school in the past month because of safety concerns.

A new study released by market research firm Nielsen on Thursday shows that more people are buying smartphones and Apple is seeing growth in the market.

According to Nielsen’s May survey, 38 percent of mobile consumers in the U.S. purchased a smartphone in the previous three months. That’s up from 34 percent one year ago.

In the smartphone market, Android leads with 38 percent share, Apple’s iOS has 27 percent share and RIM has 21 percent share.

One of the pleasures of following the annual surveys of the state’s environmental attitudes by the Public Policy Institute of California is witnessing how one-time cataclysms (financial crises, tsunamis, oil spills and the like) throw the neat progression of opinion change out of whack for a year or so. And then, like a rubber band springing back into shape, the attitudes largely revert to their old patterns; the cataclysm seems to have little lasting influence.

So it was last year, when the gulf oil spill knocked 17 percentage points off overall support for offshore oil drilling, from 51 percent to 34 percent. In this year’s poll, the support column gained back much of what it had lost; now 46 percent support offshore drilling. In 2010 the Climategate ruckus seemed to be responsible for knocking 7 percentage points off the total share of Californians who thought global warming was underway; it declined to 54 percent from 61 percent. This year the seven points were regained.

This year’s nuclear catastrophe in Japan had an impact similar to that of Climategate in late 2009 and early 2010 and the oil spill in the spring and summer of 2010: the latest P.P.I.C. survey showed that support for more nuclear energy development dropped from 44 percent to 30 percent. It will be interesting to see if next year’s poll shows a resurgence in support.

But cataclysms tend to mask other trends. In one interesting development, California Republicans appear to be getting more concerned about climate change again.

At the betting market Intrade, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has overtaken Mitt Romney and is now considered the most likely person to win the Republican presidential contest. Mr. Perry is given a 35 percent chance of claiming the nomination as compared to Mr. Romney at 29 percent; Michelle Bachmann is a distant third place and assigned a 9 percent chance of winning.

Are the bettors being sensible or getting ahead of themselves? Although this is all fun and games as compared to the debt ceiling debate, a quick overview of the state of play is in order.

An average of the seven most recent polls of Republican voters (the six contained in the Real Clear Politics average plus the Economist / YouGov poll) finds Mr. Romney with the lead, with an average of 22 percent of the vote. After that, there’s essentially a four-way tie between Ms. Bachmann (13 percent), Sarah Palin (13 percent), Mr. Perry (12 percent) and Rudolph W. Giuliani (11 percent in the polls in which he is included). Herman Cain’s momentum appears to have faded, while Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty are now often polling in the low rather than the high single digits.

What Obama has offered — and Republicans have refused to accept — is a deal in which less than 20 percent of the deficit reduction comes from new revenues. This puts him slightly to the right of the average Republican voter.

So we learn two things. First, Obama is extraordinarily eager to make concessions. Second, Republicans are incredibly unwilling to take yes for an answer — something for which progressives should be grateful.

A new CNN poll finds that 55 percent of voters have a negative view of the Republican Party, tied for their second-highest unfavorable score since CNN began asking this question in 1992. The Republicans also achieved a 55 percent unfavorable rating in a poll conducted in April 2009, although the party’s all-time high, 57 percent, was recorded as the House of Representatives was in the process of impeaching Bill Clinton in December, 1998.

The news for Democrats is not any better. Some 49 percent of voters now hold a negative view of the party, according to the poll. Although this figure is slightly better than for Republicans, it matches the Democrats’ record high unfavorable rating of September 2010 and is part of an upward trajectory that has persisted for the past three years.

The combined unfavorable score for both parties — 104 percent — is also a record, and represents the first time that the figure has been above 100.

If we re-run the numbers with this adjustment, we find that a few Republican candidates are essentially in a toss-up with Mr. Obama: Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee, for instance, trail him by just 2 percentage points each, while Mr. Giuliani is a point or so ahead of him. Others fare somewhat more poorly, however. Two of the more likely nominees, Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty, trail him by 6 and 7 percentage points respectively, even after the name recognition adjustment. And several Republican candidates, like Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, trail him by double-digits.

McKinsey has now released some (not all) of the details from its mystery study. True to form, the company now claims that a study touted as evidence that companies “will” drop coverage was “not predictive.” Uh-huh.

So what do we learn? It was basically a poll — which is a really bad way to assess how firms will make decisions about whether or not to maintain health coverage. Such a decision is, after all, a big issue, one that won’t be taken without careful study of the numbers and consequences. A relatively casual answer to a poll probably isn’t a very good predictor of that decision.

While Americans are closely divided over whether the debt ceiling should be raised, the public gives President Obama higher marks than Congressional Republicans for his handling of the negotiations, according to the latest CBS News poll.

The number of Americans who say the debt ceiling should be raised has increased from 24 percent last month to 46 percent this month, the poll found. Currently, 49 percent say it should not be raised, down from 69 percent in June. Majorities of Democrats and those who are following the debate very closely support raising the ceiling.

Two-thirds of all Americans want an agreement to contain both spending cuts and tax increases, including majorities across party lines, and most would prefer that lawmakers reach an agreement, even if it’s one respondents do not fully support, rather than have the United States default.

Americans are increasingly convinced that a severe downturn in the economy will result if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Yet they are skeptical that the United States will actually default on its debt if a deal isn’t reached. A slim majority of Americans — 51 percent, including majorities of Republicans and independents — say the United States probably will not default in the absence of a deal.

There is no consensus on whether the Obama administration is accurately describing the consequences that could result from failing to raise the ceiling, with roughly an equal number saying Mr. Obama and his surrogates are making things sound worse than they and saying the administration is describing the situation accurately.

Despite their doubts, the public’s faith in the president is stronger than in those he is negotiating with. Six in 10 Americans say Mr. Obama is really trying to find a solution, which is roughly the same number who say Republicans are not. Additionally, 49 percent of those polled blame Congressional Republicans for the budget standoff, while 29 percent blame the president.

The odd truth about the 2012 Republican presidential primary is that there really isn’t one yet.

If primary campaigns are meant to offer a clash of ideas from which a party’s voters can pick their preferred candidate, the Republican contest hardly qualifies. Instead of striving to define each other, the nine Republicans who have officially jumped into the race are primarily focused on drawing contrasts with President Obama.

“This is a powerful coalition the left fears,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said during her announcement speech in Waterloo, Iowa, on Monday. “And they should because, make no mistake about it, President Obama is a one-term president!”

Collectively, the Republican Party’s leading White House hopefuls appear to have concluded that voters are less interested in how they each might differ on Medicare reform, war policy, debt reduction or even abortion. Rather, they seem convinced that Republicans merely want an “anti-Obama” who has the ability to retake the Oval Office and reverse the policies of the last three years.

They may be on to something, but a New York Times/CBS News poll suggests that none of them has yet made the case that he or she is that candidate.

The poll released Wednesday morning shows that Americans remain highly critical of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy and still believe — by more than a two-to-one margin — that the country is headed in the wrong direction. But the poll also found that two-thirds of Republican voters were not excited by any of their candidates. And none of the hopefuls earned enthusiastic support from more than 8 percent of the Republican base.

Those numbers are sure to change as the fall election season arrives and more Americans start tuning in to the election.

And the relatively hands-off approach toward one another is likely to end, too, as the candidates and their strategists come to the inevitable conclusion that being the best at beating up on Mr. Obama is unlikely to earn them a ticket to the Republican National Convention next summer.

Republican voters are not satisfied with the candidates running for the Republican nomination and wish they had more choices, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. None of the candidates currently hoping to challenge President Obama in 2012 has earned enthusiastic support from more than 7 percent of Republican voters.

At the same time, Americans are closely divided over Mr. Obama’s handling of his job as president: 47 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove. With the exception of a short-lived jump in approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden, the public’s evaluation of Mr. Obama’s stewardship has remained steady — ranging from 44 percent to 49 percent over the past year.

Americans are especially critical of the way Mr. Obama has handled the economy, though they are more likely to blame the Bush administration and Wall Street for its dismal state than Mr. Obama.

More than twice as many Americans say the country is seriously off on the wrong track as say it is headed in the right direction: 63 percent versus 28 percent. Americans have been more gloomy than not about the direction of the country since 2003. The public’s opinion about the country’s direction was at its worst just before Mr. Obama was elected when nearly 9 in 10 Americans said the country was on the wrong track.

Bleak assessments of the economy and the country’s direction along with a job approval rating below 50 percent are a potential danger signs for an incumbent. So far, though, the field of prospective Republican nominees has not stirred up much anticipation among voters.

Nine candidates have officially declared they are running for the Republican nomination. About 70 percent of Republican voters said they wished there were more candidates; only 23 percent said they were satisfied with the current field.

When asked to name a Republican presidential candidate they were enthusiastic about right now, two-thirds of Republican voters said they were not excited by any of them. The former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota did best, each named by 7 percent of Republican voters.

Nine percent of conservative voters said they were enthusiastic about Mr. Romney; 7 percent said the same of Mrs. Bachmann. Supporters of the tea party have similar opinions: 10 percent are enthusiastic about Mr. Romney and 8 percent are excited about Mrs. Bachmann.

These numbers are sure to change as the primaries draw closer. Currently, only 27 percent of all voters are paying a lot of attention to the presidential campaign. Looking forward to November 2012, most voters said they were no more or less enthusiastic about the election than usual.

Four years ago, Times/CBS polls registered a similar lack of enthusiasm and attention in the campaign. As the election grew closer, both measures of voter interest rose.

The telephone poll was conducted with 979 adults nationwide, of whom 886 said they were registered to vote. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for all adults and for voters. For the 257 Republican voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 6 percentage points.

Thus, the bulk of the studies cited by Politifact have nothing to do with whether Fox viewers believe the truth, or falsehoods, on politicized and contested issues. I cannot stress how fundamental a distinction this is. Indeed, it is quite literally a separate issue from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience.

From the point of view of the political brain, whether 2 + 2 = 4, or whether Joe Biden is the vice president, is one type of question. It’s the type of question where there’s no political stake and anyone can agree, because it doesn’t require any emotional sacrifice to do so. It therefore likely engages circuits of “cold reasoning.”

However, whether global warming is human caused is fundamentally different. The latter issue is politicized, and thus engages emotions, identity, and classic pathways of biased reasoning. It therefore likely triggers circuits of “hot reasoning.” (For a study showing why the two are so different with respect to the brain, see here.)

It is of course around contested political facts, and contested scientific facts, where we find active, politically impelled, and emotionally laden misinformation campaigns—and it is in the latter realm that Fox News viewers are clearly more misinformed. Once again, I’ve cited 5 studies to this effect—concerning the Iraq war, the 2010 election, global warming, health care reform, and the Ground Zero Mosque. By contrast, Politifact only cites two of these studies, and attempts to critique one of them (the 2010 election study)—misguidedly to my mind, but who really even cares. It is obvious where the weight of the evidence lies at this point, unless further, relevant studies are brought to bear.

As a result of all of this, Politifact should either produce relevant research to rebut Stewart, or run a far more forthcoming retraction than has been issued so far. Note, however, that the issue grew a tad more complicated last night when Stewart did an excellent segment on all of this, where he both dramatized how much Fox misinformed viewers and yet also kind of conceded Politifact’s point, when he didn’t actually have to. He wasn’t wrong. They were wrong.

When the fact checkers fail—and in this case, they not only failed, they generated a falsehood of their own–they have a special responsibility to self-correct.