Eating Crow: Newt Gingrich Could Win South Carolina By Eight Points

It’s raining this morning in Southern California — and projecting a sentiment that seems to match the morning’s political forecasting for South Carolina.

At FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver writes,

South Carolina has been surveyed by more than a dozen distinct polling firms over the past week, and the surveys are in agreement that Mr. Gingrich gained significant ground on Mr. Romney after the Monday night debate in Myrtle Beach. If Mr. Gingrich was also helped by the Thursday night debate, as the Public Policy Polling data suggests, his margin of victory in South Carolina could be impressive — perhaps reaching into the double digits.

This seems the appropriate response:

The reason for my quietly dismayed facepalm can be summarized best in these three sentences from Ann Coulter’s December 21 column:

Before angry rebels foist another Sharron Angle on the national party and turn a likely win into a landslide defeat, consider that Gingrich is almost certainly unelectable based solely on his having cheated on and divorced two wives.

This isn’t just a personal moral position. You may call it a historical fact.

Meanwhile the train continues to come off the rails elsewhere, Politico via The Daily Beast:

Iowa Republicans announced just before midnight Saturday—the day of the South Carolina primary—that Rick Santorum was, in fact, the winner of the Iowa caucus. Mitt Romney had originally been declared the winner of the caucus by a narrow eight-vote margin, but on January 18, eight voting precincts realized their results had not been reported. With the new votes counted, Santorum led by 34 votes, causing the Iowa Republicans to first call it a statistical tie before eventually dealing the blow to Romney.

Great. Three primaries, three different winners. The incompetence of Iowa’s caucus demonstrated beyond dispute. I guess the conservative fratricide will just continue on, further empowering the Soros Stealth Socialist network in its efforts to secure Barack Obama’s second term.

In more cheerful news, capitalism survives and the creative entrepreneurs still thrive, as evidenced by the premiere of the third season of Shark Tank on ABC, which I discuss this morning at PJ Lifestyle.