New Insider Advantage and PPP polls show Romney's lead in Florida shrinking

[highplainsdem]

The PPP poll shows only a 1-point change, from 40/32 to 39/32:

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/01/little-movement-in-florida.html

The reason we don't find Gingrich getting blown out by a double digit margin in Florida is that he's winning a lot of the same groups he did in South Carolina. He's up 37-33 with Evangelicals, 40-33 with Tea Partiers, and 36-29 with voters who describe themselves as 'very conservative.' The problem for him is that he's not winning those groups by the same kinds of margins that he did in the Palmetto State.

Romney continues to have a large lead in the bank in Florida. 34% of our respondents said they'd already voted and with those folks he has a 45-33 lead. That puts Gingrich in a position where he'd have to not only win the election day vote, but win it by 6 or 7 points to upset Romney in the state. The kind of reversal necessary to make that happen seems unlikely to occur in the next 48 hours.

Almost Romney's entire lead in Florida is coming from moderate voters. He has a 58-15 lead over Gingrich with them and only a 1 point advantage with the rest of the electorate. Other groups that continue to be a particular source of strength for Romney are seniors (48-32) and women (43-30).

OTOH, Insider Advantage says Newt is surging, with Romney slipping from an 8-point to a 5-point lead.

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/gingrich-romney-insideradvantage-poll/2012/01/29/id/425901

And yes, that is a NewsMax link, but once again they got the Insider Advantage poll results first (no other news links for the poll yet), and they also have some comments from Insider Advantage's chief pollster, Matt Towery.

"The trend is favoring Gingrich," Towery said, noting that while Romney's lead was still outside the margin of error of 3.8 percent, "It's not by much."

Towery said Gingrich is doing "substantially better" with men than Romney, 38 to 28, but the former House Speaker still faces a "gender gap," as women are still favoring Romney.

"Men are moving in droves to Gingrich and away from Romney," Towery said.

As for Florida's important Latino vote, InsiderAdvantage has Gingrich beating Romney by a large margin, leading 42 percent to 29 percent.

Insider Advantage is an outlier in showing Gingrich winning the Latino vote in Florida. Other polls have shown Romney winning the Latino vote there.

[Hugabear]

1. Gingrich brings out the crazy

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups

[creeksneakers2]

2. Other polls disagree

Rasmussen has Romney up by16 and NBC Marist has Romney up by 15.

[highplainsdem]

3. There's been lots of disagreement in the Florida polls. From today's Miami Herald:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/29/2614782/for-hispanics-its-not-just-about.html

The Republican who said he’d veto the pro-immigrant legislation as president, Mitt Romney, is winning the likely Hispanic vote by 16 percentage points in a theoretical matchup against President Barack Obama in our latest Florida poll.

Romney’s 53-37 percent Latino lead over Obama has emboldened Republicans, who gleefully play up the president’s relatively tepid support among Hispanics. Yet Romney might not have an edge at all due to the size of the poll’s margin of error.

Democrats said they doubted the poll’s finding, pointing to other surveys showing Obama would win Latinos in Florida by double-digit margins. Another survey shows Obama and Romney running neck-and-neck.

That's polling Latinos on Obama vs. Romney, instead of Gingrich vs. Romney, but it's another example of just how much variation there is.

[Obamacare]

6. There is no way

Mittens leads Obama among Latinos in FL 53/37. I just saw an interview Obama did with Univision (a Latino network) and the interviewer told Obama he leads among Latinos.

[MjolnirTime]

4. It's gonna be close, unless Santorum drops out. Watch for that.

[NotThisTime]

5. Romney wins this thing, he sucked as a Governor why the hell should he run a country? I hear nothing

about it... since I was a citizen of the state of Mass. during his administration I saw the chaos he left it in, again I hear nothing about it