The leaderboard is changing on the GOP side, as the two latest national polls have Santorum nudging past Gingrich in the first national post-2/7-hat-trick polls. Both the Fox and Gallup polls are of registered voters rather than of likely voters, but that should give Newt a slight advantage.
Romney is still well ahead (33-23 in Fox and 34-22 in Gallup) but he has nicely stuck to a mid-thirties trading ceiling. He's got a third of the vote, mostly moderate and establishment with a few just-win-baby conservatives on board. The other 2/3rds are flowing between the flavors of the month, with Newt and Santorum the two mainstream conservative flavors on the menu other than Pecan Paulines.
On the electability front, Santorum is now a smidge ahead of Romney in going up against Obama. Santorum is down 42-46 while Romney trails 40-50 in a pair of Rasmussen polls. If those numbers hold up over time, the Conventional WisdomTM that Romney is more electable starts to go out the window.
The current flap over making Catholic non-profits cover contraceptives will help Santorum if the election is fought somewhat more on cultural issues than economics. A lot of non-conservative Catholics aren't happy with that decision that the Obama team is trying to back-peddle out of without getting excommunicated from the Church of Planned Parenthood.
The current fudge is to make insurance companies provide the services pro-bono for folks whose employers refuse to provide them. That effectively passes the buck to the public at large who will get stuck with higher premiums, including the churches who are trying to opt out. The Catholic brass isn't quite buying in.
One thing to note is this might be more of a problem to non-Catholic swing voters than for Catholic ones, for not everyone toes the party line on this front; religious liberties are often flouted in the name of various public goods, like zoning out a church-run soup kitchen to keep the riff-raff out of upscale neighborhoods or neighbors worried about a church buying an abandoned school and changing the traffic flow of the area.
Thus, you have evangelicals who might not have any particular dog in the contraception fight but don't want the "be reasonable, do it our way" attitude of the Obama team applied to them.
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