That perennial favorite, Ida Noe, is tops with 22%. Romney is second with his 17% share unchanged from his RCP average before the withdrawals of Huckabee, Trump, and Daniels. Is that his limit, or is it the effect of his big health care speech?
Sara Palin -- as yet undeclared -- is two points back.
Newt (Two Feet Only One Mouth) Gingrich is one point behind Ron Paul and one point ahead of Herman (Who?) Cain. 8% for Cain is a stunner given his very low name recognition. He has nowhere to go but... nowhere?
Here are the complete results at Gallup. They describe the redistribution of Sarah Palin's supporters to their second choice. Lots of folks pick up 2 points, Newt and Ida pick up three each. Percentage-wise Bachmann gets a 40% bump from 5% to 7%.
The big percentage point winner if Palin decides not to get in is local favorite Gary Johnson, heretofore stuck at two points, who would jump 50%... to three points.
If you think I'm being a bit flippant about this momentous data set, you're right. There were ten people on the initial query list -- eleven if you count Ida -- so the expected value for random selection was 9 or 10%. Romney, perhaps the best known guy who has been running non-stop since 2008, couldn't get more than twice that. And Newt got just that!
If we include Ida and subtract the expected value of 9 from each score, we get more interesting numbers:
Noe
Romney
Palin
Paul
Gingrich
Everyone else is underwater.
Not that it has any more significance!
