Considering he’s a socially conservative former Governor from a southern state, this isn’t surprising, but Mike Huckabee has taken the lead in South Carolina:
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll of South Carolinians was released Friday Huckabee was the choice of 24 percent of South Carolina Republicans in the survey conducted by telephone between Dec. 9 and 12. When the same poll was conducted in July, Huckabee was in the lower tier with just 3 percent of support from registered GOP voters.
Former Sen. Fred Thompson was second with 17 percent, slightly down from his previous 18 percent.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who led in July with 30 percent, dropped to a tie for third with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both at 16 percent. Romney’s showing was a major improvement of his 6 percent standing in the previous survey.
The poll showed Sen. John McCain falling from 21 percent in July — the second highest — to a fifth place 13 percent now. Rep. Ron Paul’s 11 percent for seventh was a major boost from the two percent registered by the July survey.
The sampling error for the poll of Republican primary voters is 4 percent.
The other point of interest about the poll is that it’s the first poll in any state that shows Ron Paul breaking the ten percent barrier.
And that’s not all. The latest Rasumussen poll has Huckabee taking a lead in Florida, one of the biggest states to hold a primary on Super Tuesday:
Mitt Romney’s strategy for winning the Republican nomination was to win the early states and build momentum. Rudy Giuliani’s plan was to accept defeats in the early states and come back strong on January 29 in Florida and in many large states on February 5.
The latest Rasmussen Reports polling in the state of Florida suggests that Giuliani might need to work on a “Plan B.’ Mike Huckabee now leads in the Sunshine State Primary with 27% of the vote. He is trailed closely by Romney at 23% and Giuliani at 19%. Fred Thompson is at 9% in the poll, John McCain at 6%, and Ron Paul at 4%. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter each attract 1% and 8% are undecided.
As Rasmussen notes, this represents a stunning reversal for Giuliani in the course of less than a month. It was only five days ago that he was on Meet The Press responding to Tim Russert’s questioning about his weakness in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina by saying, more than once, that he was leading in Florida.
Well, that’s no longer the case.
What we may be witnessing here is the slow collapse of the Giuliani bubble, and the reason it’s happening is something that people have been expecting for a long time now; social conservatives have found their alternative and his name is Mike Huckabee.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
[...] he’s leading in two of of the three early primaries, and the man who led Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign is taking over as his campaign chairman: [...]