Game on! At long last, Floridians will go to the polls today in a mass ritual designed to drive away evil spirits by placating them with votes. If successful, the plague of attack ads and debates and smarmy campaign photo-ops will leave the state for good. Or at least until August.
Latest polls suggest Romney will wipe the floor with Gingrich in Florida today. The aggregate spread for Romney is 13 points, but I think that's skewed a bit high by a single poll out of Suffolk University that showed Romney up by 20. Other polls are a bit more cautious, projecting an 8-10 point lead. Imma go ahead and project the results:
Romney: 40%
Gingrich: 30%
Santorum: 15%
Paul: 11%
Other: 4%
This thing is still far from over though.
National polls continue to show Gingrich with a 1-5 point lead, even as his momentum in Florida got swept under by Romney's newly-aggressive ad offensive. Although there's no really recent poll data availalble, Gingrich has polled extremely well out west, pulling an 18 point lead in Minnesota as recently as a week ago, and a 19 point lead in Colorado a couple of months back. Could be a typical Western mistrust of an "East Coast/New England moderate", although it should be pointed out that Georgia is on the East Coast too.
Even in Nevada, with its substantial Mormon population, Romney's lead had shrunk from 20 to 4 in the last couple of weeks. Could be people upset with the way Huntsman got treated, could be the non-Mormon population voting against the Mormon candidate, or just people who like to bet against the house.