• "First, Mr. Gingrich is truly Clintonian in all his faults."
• "Second, before Mr. Gingrich was the ultimate insider, he was the ultimate outsider."
• "Finally, then as now, he is a man of ideas."

Huh. I hope the Washington Times didn't pay a lot for this analysis, because it fails to actually explain why Mr. Gingrich could win the Republican nomination for president.

We have a flood of these "Gingrich could win!!" stories now, because, following the self-immolation of Rick Perry and Herman Cain (and, so long ago it feels like, Michele Bachmann), Gingrich now holds sudden and commanding leads in Florida and South Carolina. He's leading in Iowa. He's even gaining in New Hampshire.

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Belief in American exceptionalism is declining, the Pew Research Center concludes in a new report:

About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;” 44% in Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

While opinions about cultural superiority have remained relatively stable over the years in the four Western European countries surveyed, Americans are now far less likely to say that their culture is better than others; six-in-ten Americans held this belief in 2002 and 55% did so in 2007.

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Gingrich also took on healthcare policy, by repeatedly pointing out that he did not have enough time to say anything about healthcare policy, a subject about which he is known to be among the world's foremost thinkers.

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Birthers have an 83 percent favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, by the way.

I think these are largely casual birthers -- not the ones who examine the "evidence" such as it is and concoct bizarre conspiracy theories, but people who believe it because they heard it somewhere, and they don't like the president. Dave Weigel says "birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship," with birthers giving higher favorability marks to Palin, Huckabee and Gingrich than the non-conspiratorial respondents.

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Overall, are you sympathetic or unsympathetic to the protestors in Egypt who have called for a change in the government?

Very sympathetic 42 | Somewhat sympathetic 40 | Somewhat unsympathetic 6 | Very unsympathetic 5 | No opinion 6

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Six months later, a negotiated settlement between the two parties has fallen through, and Ali's lawyer recently recently withdrew from the case for reasons that are not clear. Ali has been representing himself since Jan. 6, according to court filings

Meanwhile, Research 2000, once a significant player in the small world of national polling, has gone out of business. Its website refers viewers to the Wikipedia page for "opinion polls."

"No, I'm not doing any polling -- at this time," Ali told me in a brief interview last week. He declined to comment on the lawsuit. Moulitsas said in an email: "The wheels of justice grind slowly."

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QUESTION: Overall, how much do you blame each of the following for the shooting in Arizona -- a great deal, a moderate amount, not much, or not at all?

The laws under which guns are bought and sold in this country

Great deal 30% ... Moderate amount 22% ... Not much 14% ... Not at all 33%

The use of harsh rhetoric and violent metaphors by politicians and commentators

Great deal 25% ... Moderate amount 23% ... Not much 17% ... Not at all 32%

A map on Sarah Palin's website that marked 20 congressional districts, including the district represented by the congresswoman who was shot, with an image that looked like the crosshairs of a gun

Great deal 19% ... Moderate amount 16% ... Not much 15% ... Not at all 44%

The resources available to deal with people who may be mentally ill

Great deal 41% ... Moderate amount 29% ... Not much 13% ... Not at all 15%

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Taegan Goddard of Political Wire asked if a Rasmussen poll in Hawaii was the worst prediction of the year:

A Rasmussen survey in Hawaii showed Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) leading challenger Cam Cavasso (R) by 13 points two weeks ago, 53% to 40%. The final results showed Inouye winning re-election by 51 points, 72% to 21%.

And New York Times polling guru Nate Silver made this assessment early Wednesday morning:

Rasmussen polls quite consistently turned out to overstate the standing of Republicans tonight. Of the roughly 100 polls released by Rasmussen or its subsidiary Pulse Opinion Research in the final 21 days of the campaign, roughly 70 to 75 percent overestimated the performance of Republican candidates, and on average they were biased against Democrats by 3 to 4 points.

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Here's something for election eve. We're about to put a new set of politicians in office, and we're going to hear a lot about two things: the party swing, and the oddball winners. They're both good stories, and should be covered. But we're going to hear a lot less about the overall quality of the newly elected pols, and why that even matters. So, as I join others in pointing to a new venture over at YouGov called Model Politics, in which political scientists run and then analyze interesting poll data, I'm going to talk about one piece in particular, to eventually get around to thinking about political skill.

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The press' heroic work revealing just how much of a huge jerk Joe Miller is has also worked like a charm: 68% of Alaska voters have an unfavorable opinion of the smoldering hearthrob with his own personal goon squad and a history of alienating his coworkers with constant paranoid lying.

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The survey released Thursday from Fairleigh Dickinson University-PublicMind shows Coons holding a commanding 21-point lead, with 57 percent of likely voters saying they will vote for him compared to just 36 percent for O'Donnell. O'Donnell trailed by 17 points in a similar Fairleigh Dickinson poll released earlier this month.

"It would be an historic comeback for her to win on Tuesday," said Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson political scientist.

Cassino said O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who spent years as a conservative evangelical commentator on cable television, would probably win in other states that have more social conservatives and a larger tea party presence.

"But there just aren't enough in Delaware," he said.

O'Donnell, who has raised more money than Coons, has been dogged by past television appearances in which she spoke out against masturbation, characterized homosexuality as a disorder, and acknowledged dabbling in various religions, including witchcraft as a teenager. She also has drawn criticism for her thin resume and spotty financial history.

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One problem is that powerful female politicians tend to be divisive, to say the least. In a New York Times/CBS poll from the summer of 2007, Hillary Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 42% of registered voters. She polled as high as 46% unfavorable before that. (Gallup had her at 50% unfavorable.) Everyone also began hating San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi once she became Speaker of the House.

All these women have been relentlessly demonized by their political opponents. And for different reasons, they're all pretty easy targets (Pelosi, for one, never really seems to care). But these Palin numbers should be mentioned whenever anyone describes her as a front-runner for the 2012 nomination.

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About 62 percent of college-educated 30-year-olds were married or had been married, compared with 60 percent of those without a bachelor's degree, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. That is a significant shift from the 1990s, when young adults who didn't finish college were more likely to have wed than their better-educated counterparts, 75 percent to 69 percent.

The median age at first marriage for those lacking degrees has now risen to 28, drawing even with those who are college-educated. As recently as 1990, the gap had been as much as three years apart -- age 27 for college-educated, age 24 for those not.

Demographers attributed the shift partly to an economic downturn that has hit lesser-educated workers harder. As a whole, more younger adults are postponing marriage while they struggle to find work, and those lacking college degrees are seeing sharper declines in marriage.

The rising number of unmarried couples choosing to live together -- common particularly for those who are not college-educated -- is also contributing to the decreases in marriage.

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But as the Christian Science Monitor notes, the professionals have since arrived to take control of the O'Donnell campaign, and they have a month (and $2 million) to make her seem respectable. She's got smart new advisors and campaign operatives and as long as liberals keep laughing at her, the money will continue pouring in from disgruntled conservatives.

Not that money and staff is all it takes to make a loon seem credible, but, well, that is actually exactly the means by which the GOP is making loons seem credible this cycle.

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Emphasis mine:

Consider some of the statements from prominent politicians and their acolytes in the elite media regarding recent controversies -- the Ground Zero mosque, the Arizona illegal-immigration law, the financial-reform bill, the California marriage referendum, Obamacare, Afghanistan, and the administration's Gulf drilling moratorium. Their commentary suggests (if the polling on these issues is reasonably accurate) that approximately 70 percent of Americans are racist, xenophobic, greedy, homophobic, uncaring, and stupid religious bigots, and bloodthirsty, polluting imperialists to boot.

Well.

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Dave Weigel blames the media, and some conservative bloggers, because he is a communist Muslim.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, noting that only 34% of Americans think Obama is a Christian, describes it as "Barack Obama's Religious-Identity Vacuum," because, obviously, if one-in-five Americans thought K-Lo was an illegal Mexican immigrant, that would represent her "National-Identity Vacuum."

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There’s always been a great deal of smoke and mirrors obscuring the polling industry, but the revelations here go beyond mere number-massaging, possibly to the point of data actually being made up.

Until a few weeks ago, the prolific pollster was best known for its work on behalf of the liberal website Daily Kos, although it also had a number of other mainstream newspapers and TV stations as clients. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas ended his relationship with the firm shortly after Research 2000 repeatedly showed Bill Halter narrowly winning the Democratic Arkansas Senate runoff (he ultimately lost to Blanche Lincoln), and, more important, after Research 2000 ranked near the bottom of numbers guru Nate Silver's pollster ratings.

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