Open Thread

Mitt Romney under-whelmingly won the Maine Caucuses on Saturday, but that news was overshadowed by Whitney Houston's death. Although now it seems that Ron Paul could pull a Rick Santorum and win Maine after all. Here are the polls that came out during the weekend. Santorum has stormed into the lead in one recent national poll.

The next Republican primary contest is in Arizona on February 28th. And there is no new polling on that. So here is some Virginia polling, showing President Obama doing very well there. Meanwhile, Nate Silver thinks this primary race will now be prolonged, and Chuck Todd says we know that the economy is improving because the Republicans are reverting back to their culture war playbook.

Some more polling goodness inside.

"The biggest victim of [Friday's] blowout jobs report -- aside from the millions of Americans who still lack jobs, of course -- is Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Romney has rested his entire case for election on the sluggish economy... [I]t's all Romney has. Obama remains personally well-liked. Romney is personally unpopular. The Republican Party is extremely unpopular. Obama has had no major scandals, and his foreign policy has been highly successful to date... He simply has to keep plugging away at his theme, because his only real winning scenario involves winning on the back of a bad economy."

The primary polling is all Romney all the time, except in Michigan, a "home" state of his but also a home to the American auto industry, which Romney wanted to pull the plug on. The general election polling is all Obama all the time.

Obama leads Romney by a pretty substantial margin in Ohio, 49% to 42%, according to a new Public Policy Poll out today. What is most impressive about this poll is not Obama's lead, but it is the fact that only 28% of Ohioans have a favorable opinion of Mitt Romney, and 56% have a negative, unfavorable opinion of him. That is unelectable. Those are toxic numbers. Or at least, when Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich had those numbers, we called them toxic.

With 94% of the vote counted in Florida, there have been roughly 1,583,000 votes cast. In the 2008 Republican primary in Florida, roughly 1,950,000 votes were cast. There's probably about 100,000 votes left to count tonight, but we can already see that despite a growing population, approximately 300,000 fewer Republicans voted tonight than four years ago.

It is a slow news day and I am again slammed at work. Tonight, Mitt Romney will win the Florida primary and be the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich takes issue with those, including myself, that say that. "You mean those who said I was dead in June? Those who said I was dead in December? They are about as accurate as they were the last two times they were wrong." - Newt Gingrich, quoted by ABC News. He said the race would go on for "six or eight months" and then added: "unless Romney drops out earlier."