“Herman Cain is holding on in Iowa, but barely.”

Matt Towery, who does polls for InsiderAdvantage:

“Herman Cain is holding on in Iowa, but barely,” said InsiderAdvantage head Matt Towery. “He is still in the thick of it, but he is not doing well with the female vote.”

Iowa poll: Newt in a statistical tie with Romney for second; pollster expects Cain to fall

The poll finds Cain at 30%, Romney with 15%, and Newt at 12%. But -- in addition to the usual disclaimer that a minority of voters have are firmly in any candidate's camp -- the pollster, Matt Towery, found an interesting fact:

“We found most Republican voters in Iowa were unaware of the latest developments in the Cain case,” Towery said after Thursday night’s poll. “There is a great likelihood that his vote will fall off.”

...

“We have to remember that most Americans don’t read political newspapers or websites and these things take quite a while to trickle down.”

[Towery] said the importance of the Des Moines Register in Iowa cannot be overstated and that paper has not run the scandal heavily.

And remember -- Newt and Cain will be debating one-on-one Saturday, 8 PM EST. C-SPAN TV and C-SPAN.org will have it live.

Interesting quote from Matt Towery

Towery, whose history with Newt dates back a long time (though they have not worked together for several years), wrote this in his most recent column:

I never underestimate Gingrich when he is determined, and I saw that look in his eyes at the recent press conference.

I can't speak to that, but while all the headlines the last two days have been about, to me, pretty meaningless things, two pieces of news that have been under the radar have made me very optimistic about the future of the campaign:

1) As I wrote Tuesday, it was said of Newt that he "spends the majority of his awake time on the phone with potential donors." The importance of that cannot be understated. And while it may not be reflected in the upcoming campaign finance reports, it should show up in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

2) Twelve days in Iowa during July. The state is very much up for grabs, and Newt looks to be making a big play for it.

Matt Towery: Gingrich "could easily" rebound should he win June 13 debate

Matt Towery, a former Gingrich staffer and now CEO of InsiderAdvantage, writes that while Newt had a shaky rollout, "if he wins the first debate later this month, his candidacy could easily be resurrected."

It's an important point, because while Newt has suffered some bad press, he is still at the top of polls, including the most important one: Iowa. (For my post earlier today about the latest Iowa poll, click here.)

Four years ago, John McCain was cratering in the polls and on the verge of running out of campaign money. But through his performances in town halls and debates, he rebounded to win the nomination.

Newt is nowhere near the low that McCain had. A great debate performance, followed by holding numerous events in the early states -- especially Iowa -- and Newt will rise in the polls.

The entire electorate has not already locked in an opinion of Newt, as many suggest

One of the many bits of conventional wisdom surrounding the coverage of Newt Gingrich the past few months is that due to his high-profile Speakership from 1995-1998 and continuing to appear on Fox News for nearly the past decade, that everyone knows of him. And more importantly, everyone knows whether they will support him or not already. Thus, the argument goes, Newt has no room to grow.

Rich Galen, a Republican strategist who used to work for Newt, summed up this line of thinking by telling The Washington Post:

“Newt’s name ID is 130 (percent) so just about everyone who has ever even flipped by a cable news channel en route an NCIS rerun knows who (he) is, and has an opinion of him."

While Newt's name identification -- 80-85% -- is quite high, it is in line with the other GOP frontrunners: Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney. More importantly, in my opinion, is that it is a soft identification (some polls put the undecided about Newt number at nearly 40%). While Galen and others are right that most people know of him, how well do they know him? A recent CBS poll even had more Republican primary voters undecided about Newt than Huckabee.

It is easy for Beltway writers and political consultants to assume that everyone in the country follows politics as closely day-to-day as they do. The fact, of course, is most do not. So while most have heard of Gingrich, they may not have necessarily formed a solid opinion of him. In fact, as Matt Towery pointed out recently, nearly half of the public does not even know Newt was Speaker of the House. Some of that is the younger voters who were not old enough to remember obviously but that does not explain all of it.

But, according to Towery's data, when people are told of the numerous accomplishments during the time Newt was Speaker -- a balanced federal budget four years in a row for the first time in 70 years at the same time taxes were being cut, along with the only time an entitlement program (Welfare) has been significantly rolled back -- he shoots to the top of Republican voters' lists.

And while there were controversial parts of Newt's time as Speaker, a focus group of Frank Luntz's that I have discussed before shows that those low moments may not mean much at all:

Gingrich continues to enjoy a gut connection with Republican voters. Back in 2005, consultant Frank Luntz held focus groups in Iowa and New Hampshire on the Republican candidates. In a report published afterward, Luntz wrote, 'We were genuinely surprised by the strongly favorable reaction' to Gingrich's 'speeches and interviews.' According to Luntz, voters ignored, or in some cases forgot, the controversial nature of Gingrich's speakership. 'The words he spoke were like nothing they had heard from anyone else,' Luntz went on. 'While he didn't start either session with any measurable support, he ended both Iowa and New Hampshire sessions with the most new converts.' Out of office, Gingrich has remained largely insulated from the scandals and debacles of the Bush Republicans. In fact, the 2006 midterm election results could be viewed as confirmation of what Gingrich has been saying for some time: that the Republican party and broader conservative movement have lost their way, and the time has come for a rebirth of the reform impulse that in 1994 brought the GOP to congressional majority status for the first time in 40 years.

Earlier this year, Luntz did a focus group in Iowa in which he played clips of all the GOP contenders -- and Newt took the top spot.

Here is a partial video of the focus group:


All of which is to say that Newt has plenty of room to grow -- and he is already in good standing in polls. If he sticks to a few issues -- his record balancing the budget and the other policy wins as Speaker, jobs, energy, and security -- the public will rally to him.

Matt Towery: Poll shows Newt shoots to top spot when voters are reminded of his accomplishments as Speaker

In his article a week ago, Matt Towery -- who served as chairman of Newt's political organization for much of the 90s and who has known the former Speaker for years -- wrote an article about Newt's chances.

The strengths of a Gingrich campaign, according to Towery:

The upside is the polling data he is armed with. It shows that once the public is reminded of his accomplishments when he was speaker of the House, Gingrich soars from either second or third to first among the choices of Republican voters nationwide for the GOP nomination.

These voters are impressed when they are reminded that Speaker Gingrich forced Bill Clinton into consecutive balanced budgets, passed welfare reform and left office with the nation's entire deficit at under $30 billion dollars.

The Wall Street Journal got it right earlier this week. It said that Gingrich's real campaign, when it begins later this spring, will emphasize these signal accomplishments.

Another upside for Gingrich is that he has a huge list of names and devotees in data created through years of presence on the Web. His campaign likely will be the only one among leading Republican presidential hopefuls that will rival Barrack Obama's for its expertise and accomplishments in high-tech social networking and fundraising.

On one of the frequent attacks on Gingrich:

The story is simply not true that Newt Gingrich served his first wife with divorce papers, or had a heated argument about a divorce, while she was ill and in a hospital.

How do I know? Because the day that alleged event happened -- and every other day during that time -- I was riding in a car with him. On that day, we were working on debate preparation. Besides, polling suggests that most voters don't care about Gingrich's alleged past transgressions.

Newt's daughter from that marriage, Jackie, "considered them [the hospital bed allegations and other attacks] bogus and unfair." She appeared in a 1992 television advertisement to refute the charges.