Social mood in action: rotating front runners

Gingrich's Lead Over Romney Among Republicans Collapses

After enjoying 14- to 15-percentage-point leads over Mitt Romney in early December, Newt Gingrich is now statistically tied with Romney in national Republican preferences for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination: 26% for Gingrich vs. 24% for Romney. This follows a steady decline in support for Gingrich in the past 10 days.

RealClearPolitics has a running chart of the GOP presidential candidates' poll numbers. Notice that each candidate has only managed a lead for a few weeks and each shows a similar topping pattern.

On the demand side, voters are unsatisfied with the candidates because they are in a negative mood, they are more critical of candidates and none are able to survive the ringer. It almost looks like musical chairs, where the candidate who shows up last wins. Assuming no one else enters the race, Romney could survive the musicals chairs because he's had the most consistent poll numbers, but John McCain won by default over Romney in 2012 and Tea party and grassroots conservatives were not happy with him. Already, seeds of a third party are being sown with a lot of big name conservatives blasting Newt Gingrich and others unsatisfied with Romney. Obama and the Democrats appear unified because the attention is on the Republicans, but cracks in their alliance have shown up with Obama's Keystone pipeline decision, which is flat out insane unless one considers that he's placating the environmentalists in his base.

A fall in social mood will expose all the cracks between voters. People are looking for a fight and the appeals to save it for Obama will fall by the wayside as all the guns are brought to bear on the GOP's own candidates. This will be a prelude to an even more contentious and possibly violent (echoes of 1968) election, with a possible third party exposing the fault lines within the Democrat party.

Here's a look at what could spark open warfare on the Republican side. GOP will take off the gloves if Ron Paul wins Iowa. Speaking of Buchanan's shock 1996 win in New Hampshire:

While many Republicans dismissed Buchanan's New Hampshire win as irrelevant, arguing his support was too narrow to ever win the nomination, the neoconservative wing of the GOP darkly warned of a Buchanan menace. "People are panicked," Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard told Newsweek. "If they're not, it's only because they don't know what's going on."

The liberal mainstream media dutifully filled out Kristol's picture of "what's going on." Newsweek put an ominously lit picture of Buchanan on the cover under the words "Preaching Fear." The article stretched itself into contortions to paint Buchanan as a white racist. (Buchanan was campaigning in South Carolina, which still flew the Confederate flag over its capitol.)

Ted Koppel, on "Nightline" in the days after New Hampshire, relied on unsubstantiated tales (for which he later apologized) about Buchanan's father as a way of tying the son to "bigoted and isolationist radio orator Father Coughlin." He also cited a Jewish neighbor of the Buchanans who was beaten up and called "Christ-killer" -- without mentioning that Pat was off at college at the time.

Insinuations of racism and anti-Semitism were the weapons of the mainstream media, but Buchanan's sins in the eyes of the GOP establishment were different. They feared Pat because he rejected a rare inviolable article of faith among the party elites: free trade. Also, in the post-Cold War era, Buchanan's foreign policy had become far less interventionist than that of the establishment.

In 1996, social mood was heading into a peak. People were optimistic, looking to work together and the assault on Buchanan pushed him out. In 2012, a similar attack risks triggering open warfare because there's no consensus. A major attack on a single candidate will push entire groups out of the party and possibly open up new conflicts. Looking at Paul in particular, his foreign policy makes him unpopular with most of the GOP, but his domestic policy is quite popular. The leaders of the GOP also consider Paul's domestic agenda to be unacceptable, but Bachmann, Perry and Palin all have spoken favorably of his domestic policies or proposed very similar policies. Paul will face similar attacks as Buchanan:

But neither his establishment-irritating adherence to principle, nor his hawk-angering foreign policy, will be the focus of the anti-Paul attacks should he carry Iowa. His conservative critics and the mainstream media will imply that he is a racist, a kook, and a conspiracy theorist.

Paul's indiscretions -- such as abiding 9/11 conspiracy theorists and allowing racist material in a newsletter published under his name -- will be blown up to paint a scary caricature. His belief in state's rights and property rights will be distorted into support for Jim Crow and racism.

Will an attack on Paul kill the messenger, or be seen as an attack on the message? This could be big because a win in Iowa also throws open the New Hampshire contest: Can Ron Paul Win New Hampshire?

Then, New Hampshire. Here is what the Granite State looks like right now, according to the RCP Average. Romney is at +11.3 percent, still hanging on to a much-eroded lead (his total poll share is 33.3 percent). Gingrich is in second (22 percent), Paul third (15.7 percent) and Jon Huntsman fourth (11.3 percent).

All of that would matter very little the minute Paul wins Iowa. If he can beat Gingrich there, the real contest in New Hampshire will be between Paul's defiant leave-us-alone-and-bring-the-troops-home Republicanism and Romney's managerial competence. Paul seems a better fit for New Hampshire voters, and Iowa can remove the taint of unelectability (see Obama, Barack).

Social mood doesn't necessarily favor a Ron Paul candidacy, but it does mean a very volatile and contentious primary season that gives an ideological candidacy its best shot in 50 years.