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If the election were held today, Romney would earn 29% of the vote and Gingrich would earn 27%. Texas Congressman Ron Paul continues to show resolve by earning 16%. Herman Cain gets 10%. No other candidate is in double digits. WHY GINGRICH IS GAINING When asked why people felt Gingrich was moving up in the polls, 44% of respondents cited his depth of knowledge on the issues. Ten percent referred to his strong debate performances while another 6% said they liked that he was challenging the media in those debates. Ten percent referenced his past experience as Speaker of the...

Newt Gingrich's stumble out of the campaign gate -- causing him to lose his top advisors to Rick Perry -- might well be the best thing that has ever happened to his political career. That, along with his debate performances and a handful of other circumstances, explains why the former speaker of the House is now surging in the polls and why it is likely to continue. And yes -- those are the words of one who has written Newt off for good on more than one occasion. And for what surely seemed like good reasons. But those reasons seem...

Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is more skeptical, saying that Gingrich’s candidacy will be a “hard sell” for many voters. Land has been doing informal focus groups among Southern Baptists for the past two years on Gingrich’s candidacy, as he expected Gingrich to run and be a serious contender. He found that women are especially wary of Gingrich. “He’s got a gender problem,” Land says. “His toughest audience is going to be evangelical women. Evangelical men, depending on what Newt does and says, are more likely to give him the benefit of...

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has come under fire on several fronts, including healthcare and the housing crisis, but the ongoing attacks haven’t slowed the former House speaker’s surprising surge in the polls. One new survey by Rasmussen Reports shows that Gingrich has now opened up a huge 13-point lead over Mitt Romney in Iowa. “As Mr. Gingrich rises in Republican presidential polling, and as others among the GOP contenders stumble or flame out, he is coming under much closer political and personal scrutiny,” the Christian Science Monitor observed.

Sometime today, someone uploaded to Youtube about 40 minutes of Newt speaking & answering questions at a Tea Party meeting in Dallas on 10/20/10. I seek out these events recorded by citizens; they're more interesting & informative than the prepackaged 2-minute bits from the MSM. Haven't watched it myself yet, and I don't expect anything earth-shattering, but I hope some on FR find it interesting. The event is broken up into 2 videos.

Two things are true about New Hampshire Republican primary voters. They vote for people they know. And they love an underdog with a comeback story. Four years ago it was the weathered but feisty veteran John McCain who revived his once hanging-by-a-thread campaign to win the nation’s leadoff primary. And so it seems almost fated that after political observers have scratched their heads for months wondering who will emerge as the non-Romney candidate in the Granite State, the voters’ eyes should turn to Newt Gingrich, a man who was Speaker of the House during the previous century and whose own...

Three marriages. Two divorces. Add up the numbers, and Newt Gingrich is an improbable candidate to win over the influential social-conservative bloc in the GOP. But in this unconventional cycle, both national and early-primary-state evangelical and social-conservative leaders are signaling that Gingrich’s personal history is no insurmountable obstacle, although some would like to see him further address his past decisions. “In general, I think people who have experienced the ultimate form of forgiveness themselves are willing to extend mercy and extend forgiveness to others,” says Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “In Newt’s case, he’s...

By the time he spoke at a private fundraiser in Jacksonville on Thursday evening, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had already appeared at two events in Northeast Florida’s ‘First Coast City.’ Gingrich had spoken to a crowd at Jacksonville Landing in the city’s downtown district. The First Coast Tea Party had to move the event from the original location because so many people wanted to attend....

His campaign has said that he did no lobbying; but his consultancy practice was centered around his ability to help big corporate interests speak the language of Republicans and navigate the corridors of Capitol Hill on issues vital to their businesses.

And there is Gingrich the liberal. “The liberal revulsion toward him obscured how unorthodox — occasionally, how liberal — his conservatism was. The books then and now are full of heresy. He showed a willingness to criticize other Republicans, even Reagan at the height of his popularity. He advocated a health tax on alcohol to discourage drinking — social engineering, it’s called — and imagined government-issued credit cards that would allow citizens to order goods and services directly from the feds. He thought the government should run nutritional programs at grocery stores and give away some foodstuffs free. He was...

Most Americans remember Newt Gingrich as being the former Speaker of the House who led America into the glories of conservative victory, and who guided the Republican Party to electoral success in its 1994 “Revolution,” which resulted in the economic boon of the Internet era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Most do not associate Newt, however, with his true record, which speaks volumes about his underlying ideology and motivations. This ideology is especially evident in his 2007 book A Contract with the Earth, which he coauthored with environmentalist Terry Maple. Gingrich’s environmentalism, as is the case with environmentalism...

He's baaack! Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is back in the saddle after falling off his horse at the starting line. At least according to one poll (Public Policy Polling), Mr. Gingrich is actually the GOP front-runner. Many say it's simply Mr. Gingrich's turn to be the not-Mitt contender, now that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have had their chances. But that's not entirely fair. Speaker Gingrich has been relentlessly seducing GOP voters in the debates. Mitt Romney may have been winning on points and technicalities, but Mr. Gingrich has been consistently winning the crowds.

When Richard M. Nixon ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, he faced a daunting problem: A lot of voters just didn't like him. Nixon had made his name in politics as an angry, partisan hatchet man, famous for lashing out against Democrats and the news media. To win the presidency, he needed to find a way to soften that too-harsh image. In the months before the 1968 primaries, Nixon's campaign staged gauzy television segments that showed the candidate gently answering questions from ordinary citizens, not pesky reporters. In a nation that was divided by domestic crises and the...

SHEFFIELD, Iowa – With the political winds shifting in his favor, Newt Gingrich is turning an incident that almost unraveled his entire presidential bid earlier this summer into a campaign trail talking point. Gingrich, whose luxury Greek vacation in June led to the mass resignations of several members of his campaign staff, now says he used the overseas trip to talk with Europeans about the banking crisis there. The former House Speaker told a crowd in West Des Moines on Monday, that he listened to the Greek people talk about their economic woes and even noted that his observations about...

In every debate so far, Newt Gingrich has made a point to pique the debate moderator, but, yet, today, a woman asked Newt Gingrich what plan he has to tackle the dirty tactics of the biased media. Has he not made it clear he’ll tackle the MSM one personality at a time? Gingrich’s first sentence in reply is humorous. “This may surprise some of you,” he says. “I was dead in June and July — as a candidate, not as a person.” Actually, what would surprise me more is if he had been actually dead and was now alive again....

As the debates accumulate, it becomes more and more evident that Newt Gingrich’s intellect, experience, articulateness and depth of knowledge elevate him to the top of the GOP field. Anyone should be happy to pay admission to watch him duel with President Obama in debate! He’s not as charismatic as Herman Cain or as smooth as Mitt Romney, but boy, does he have a brain! Ever since the campaign started, Newt has always gotten in his own way. Now he has graciously stepped aside and let his creativity and intellect shine through. Earlier in the debates, he bit the questioners’...

Rasmussen’s latest poll in Iowa gives Newt Gingrich a big claim to legitimacy in the Republican nomination fight, but it also is pretty good news for Mitt Romney as well. Among likely caucus-goers, Gingrich now leads Romney 32/19, with Herman Cain dropping more than half of his previous support: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers shows Gingrich with 32% followed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney at 19%. Georgia businessman Herman Cain, who led in Iowa last month, drops to third with 13% of the vote. Texas Congressman Ron Paul draws 10% of the...

Andy Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and arguably the most dazzling writer on the right, has been a one-man killing machine. In a series of pieces on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman, he has systematically done in (or helped to do in) more Republican candidates than Think Progress, the New York Times and George Soros ever could..... But none is so devastating as his literary journey through Newt Gingrich’s books. All of them. Twenty-one of them. In doing so he exposes what too few recognize: the vacuity...

<p>I'm afraid I can't get too excited about the Newt Gingrich boomlet.</p> <p>The field general of the Revolution of 1994 is suddenly out in front of the Republican presidential primary polls, but I can't help thinking that he will soon go the way of Rick Perry and Herman Cain.</p>

According to a new Iowa State University Poll, Herman Cain is still in first place in Iowa, with Ron Paul coming in second. Here is how it stacks up: Cain: 24.5 Paul: 20.4