USA / FILE: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is surging in new campaign polls. After pundits declared his candidacy nearly finished two months ago, Gingrich now places in a statistical dead heat alongside Mitt Romney

Record ID: 347741

  • Title: USA / FILE: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is surging in new campaign polls. After pundits declared his candidacy nearly finished two months ago, Gingrich now places in a statistical dead heat alongside Mitt Romney
  • Date: 16th November 2011
  • Summary: WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES (FILE) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) PRESS CONFERENCE WITH HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH GINGRICH TALKING ABOUT "CONTRACT WITH AMERICA"
  • Embargoed: 1st December 2011 12:00
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  • Location: Usa
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: International Relations,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA61RIX83QXW995FWXRC3LASUFD
  • Story Text: Only weeks after his political obituary had been written by some of America's leading political pundits, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is surging in the campaign polls and, by some measures, running neck-and-neck with longstanding frontrunner Mitt Romney.
    Indeed, one recent poll by the Public Policy Polling organization shows the former House Speaker leading the field.
    The most powerful man in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the 1990s garnered 28 percent of support among GOP primary voters, besting businessman Herman Cain at 25 percent and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at 18 percent support, according to the PPP survey, which calls itself a Democratic polling company.
    The PPP poll of 576 Republican primary voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
    "There are voters out there who are looking to an alternative to Mitt Romney. Romney's clearly the front runner in most of the polls but there are a lot of conservative voters in the Republican Party who don't view him as a credible conservative," said American University Government Professor Danny Hayes.
    "We've seen some of these other candidates Bachmann, Perry, Cain rise in the polls but have questions raised about their electability or other issues and so I think that now it almost seems like it's Gingrich's turn to take on that mantle of the alternative to Romney," he added.
    Gingrich's bid for the Republican nomination is showing new life after potential rivals stumbled in recent weeks. Herman Cain has been running against some nagging charges of past sexual harassment and Rick Perry has had several poor debate performances.
    "Ultimately the question that Republican voters consistently go back to is who can go toe-to-toe with the President in the general election campaign of next year," said Brian Gardner, Senior Vice President of Washington Research at Keefe Bruyette & Woods.
    "As they look at the candidates, as they look at their debating skills, as they look at their proposals, as they look at the comfort factor that they have up on the stage in the spotlights, who never gets flustered and can really give a good debate performance against Barack Obama and Romney and Gingrich just outshine the field pretty substantially in my opinion," Gardner said.
    This scenario is a complete change of fortune from where the campaign was just five months ago, when staff members of Gingrich's inner circle headed for the door in the midst of tales of a six-figure credit line at Tiffany's and his two-week luxury vacation to the Greek Isles.
    But while Gingrich may be seeing a resurgence in the polls, Hayes says he's likely to be behind in campaign coordination, which will be key in a match-up against the President.
    "Compared to somebody like Romney, he certainly doesn't have the kind of organization on the ground that Romney does and that's going to provide an advantage to Romney and some of the more well-heeled candidates who can run a national campaign for longer and actually have better organization in these states. That matters a lot to getting voters out on election day and making sure that you get those votes that you think you're going to get based on the polls," Hayes said.
    A CNN telephone poll of 1,036 voters released on Monday finds 24 percent of Republicans and independents leaning toward the party said they would most likely vote for Romney, while 22 percent chose Gingrich.
    Fourteen percent of those polled by CNN named Cain. The CNN survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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