Wrapped Up By The End Of The Month?

If Public Policy Polling's latest results from South Carolina are accurate (and PPP is usually pretty close from my experience) then as Josh Marshall points out Mitt Romney may have the nomination wrapped up by the end of the month.

There’s a real dearth of polling data out of South Carolina at the moment. The last public poll was completed on December 19th, which might as well be a hundred years ago. And remember that in recent years, it’s South Carolina much more than Iowa or New Hampshire where you really need to win to secure the Republican nomination.

We know that Public Policy Polling is currently in the field in the state. And they’ve just tweeted a few polling morsels from there first night of polling. And the first night shows Mitt Romney ahead by 10 points in the state, with Gingrich and Santorum battling for second.

It seems very likely that Romney will win convincingly in New Hampshire. If he then goes on to score a clear win in South Carolina, that would likely be pretty much it in terms of a real battle for the nomination. 

Gingrich had big leads in both South Carolina and Florida in December.  If Gingrich has crashed and burned there as hard as he did in Iowa, and people start coming around to Romney as the inevitable candidate, by the time we get Florida's results on February 1 it's entirely possible that a Romney win will be a foregone conclusion.

And the reason that may happen is Citizens United, pure and simple.  Romney has the backing of SuperPACs that are injecting millions into the race right now on his behalf, just as the rest of the field is sputtering and running out of cash.   Meanwhile, Romney has plenty of his own fortune left to fight with too.  A blitz of negative ads from these Super PACs basically won Iowa for Romney and the other candidates simply can't compete with that sustained level of bombardment.

If South Carolina and Florida go the same way, and what this PPP result showing Romney going from down by 20 in SC to up by 10 means is that the Palmetto State is responding to the ad blitz there, this really could be over by the first of February.  There will be tremendous pressure at that point for everyone else to then fall into lockstep behind Romney and start going after President Obama.

We'll see how the rest of the month turns out, but right now, everything's coming up Mittens.