What a difference millions of dollars can make.

Quinnipiac polls - this week and last week

Just after Newt Gingrich's huge win in South Carolina, the conventional wisdom was that Mitt Romney's many flaws were become more and more evident and there was nowhere to go but down.  It was agreed that Newt Gingrich's many flaws were also evident, but Republican voters had decided to ignore them and give him the nod.  The next state was Florida, also in the south, also adjacent to Georgia, Newt's alleged home state - in actuality, he's a Washington insider now and lives in Virginia - and Newt would smack around Romney once again, leaving his once seemingly inevitable nomination in grave doubt.

Then the cash rolled in.

A flip switched early this week, or should I say if flipped for the third time. In early December polling, Gingrich looked great in Florida, then he faded and Romney looked great, then it was Gingrich again, and the last flip was to Romney.  All the polls of the past few days have shown Romney around 40% and Gingrich around 30%. The race for who will finish a distant third between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum is not so clear, but noises are being made that Santorum is ready to pack it in.  Paul's impossible dream is a Quixotic quest, and those kinds of people don't give up so easily.

You know what I mean by "those kinds of people".  The bughouse crazy.

The column charts above show two polls from the folks at Quinnipiac University.  The poll on the right is one of the first to show Romney back in the lead after South Carolina, and the one on the left shows how much that lead has been expanded.  The pro-Romney super PACs have out-spent the pro-Gingrich super PACs about 4:1, and as people delicately put it, this can make a big difference to "low information voters".

You know what I mean by "low information voters". The rock fucking stupid.

To be fair, I don't consider it stupid to switch from Gingrich to Romney.  That said, I expect another big Newt surge when Santorum goes away. Most observers think Mitt is doing better at the debates, and as long as he doesn't do his punching bag impression at these bizarre circuses, he and his supporters - who cannot coordinate with him in any way, as Stephen Colbert explained to us in South Carolina - will spend enough money to force Gingrich to go back to writing books and getting money from companies who need lobbyists who don't call themselves lobbyists.

You know what that means. He's an escort, not a ho.