Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich finished an astonishing comeback Saturday night to defeat front-runner Mitt Romney in South Carolina, plunging the Republican Party into a wrenching and potentially lengthy period of soul-searching: Can either of these jokers beat President Obama?

The new CNN/Time/ORC polls out today for the first four states on the Republican calendar underscore the breadth of Newt Gingrich's rise - and the extent of the threat confronting the erstwhile front-runner Mitt Romney.

In each of the states except New Hampshire, Gingrich is consolidating the voters that have long been the most skeptical of Romney, while dividing those that had been most open to the former Massachusetts governor. That's a formula for success - if the former speaker can maintain it, admittedly a big question.

(RELATED: Gingrich Leads in Three of Four New Early-State Polls)

Gingrich is now succeeding among both sides of the party - dominating among the vanguard half that identifies with the tea party movement, and holding his own with the less ideological half that does not. What's more, the evidence from these polls suggests that along each track, the voters most skeptical of Romney are moving to unite behind Gingrich, at least for now. In particular, among the groups most dubious of Romney, Gingrich is now attracting much larger shares of the vote than any single candidate did in surveys earlier this fall.

In all four states, Gingrich now leads Romney among GOP primary voters who identify with the tea party movement. Gingrich's share of the vote among tea party supporters has increased as if launched from a rocket: since the last round of CNN/Time/ORC polls in late October he's up from 13 percent with them in Iowa to 40; in New Hampshire he's jumped from 6 to 37; in South Carolina from 11 to 53; and in Florida from 14 all the way to 62.

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Said the 2008 Republican nominee John McCain on Sunday: "If I had, frankly, a criticism of the process, it is that I think maybe we're really getting a little too heavy on the debates.''

It's not an uncommon refrain. But so far, there have been roughly the same number of debates in this election cycle as there were in the last Republican primary.

McCain participated in 10 debates televised on major network or cable channels as of this time four years ago, missing only the PBS debate in Baltimore on September 2007, for a total of 11 debates in all. He subsequently appeared in six more before clinching the nomination.

This year, if you don't count the May 5 debate in South Carolina that didn't include several major candidates, Thursday's debate in Des Moines will be - you guessed it -- No. 11.  (No, I'm not counting Mike Huckabee's Saturday night special or Donald Trump's wanna-be reality show or the Newt Gingrich's Lincoln-Douglas-esque debates.) Another 11 debates are proposed between Thursday and March 19^th, but who knows how many of those will materialize.

The perception that the 2012 GOP primary has been overloaded with debates may stem from their impact more than their quantity. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have all seen their poll numbers soar after strong performances, while Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry endured the opposite.

The best test of whether there are too many debates is the number of people watching them, and some have attracted twice as many viewers as they did four years ago. 

It might be a blip, but the latest CNN/ORC national poll out this afternoon shows a new reason for more of Mitt Romney's hair to turn gray.

Overall, the survey showed Newt Gingrich edging past Romney to lead the field overall, with 24 percent compared to 20 percent for the former Massachusetts governor. That makes Gingrich the sixth GOP contender to lead a CNN/ORC poll this year - a level of volatility unmatched in any Republican presidential race since 1964.

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Gingrich actually didn't move much in the new poll, compared to the previous survey last week when he surged into a near-tie with Romney. Gingrich's support among the roughly half of the GOP that identifies with the tea party edged up only from 29 percent to 31 percent, a change within the poll's 6.5 percent margin of error among that subgroup. Among the half that doesn't identify with the tea party, Gingrich also remained virtually unchanged at 17 percent, compared to 16 percent last week.

Pizza magnate Herman Cain, newly deposed from top-tier status in a USA Today/Gallup poll out today, has thought better of his decision to blow off the powerful New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper.

Publisher Joe McQuaid said via Twitter today that the candidate has agreed to an hour-long interview to be taped by C-SPAN next week. Cain relented after snubbing the newspaper in the first-in-the-nation primary state last week when McQuaid refused his demand to limit the interview to 20 minutes without a camera in the room.

Cain was no doubt hoping to avoid a repeat of the fiasco in Milwaukee, when a similar meeting with Journal Sentinel editors and reporters produced one of the most awkward moments in modern politics:  Cain struggling through several long pauses to answer a basic foreign policy question about whether he agreed with President Obama's foreign policy in Libya.

His inability in several venues now to pass even a basic presidential timber test may be fueling Cain's fall in the polls. He was in third place in the Gallup survey, having been displaced by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was in a statistical tie for first place with Mitt Romney.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of California Republicans released yesterday shows that the basic divide in the GOP presidential race extends even to states not yet in the center of the action.

The survey, conducted from October 30 to November 9, found the race closely bunched among Republicans who identify with the tea party movement while Mitt Romney held a big lead among Republicans who do not. That follows the pattern evident in most national surveys about the race, as well as the recent CNN/Time Magazine/ORC polls in the big four contests that will kick off the competition next January: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. California isn't scheduled to vote until June 5 of next year.

Survey results in New Jersey released Wednesday show both President Obama's residual strength in a classic coastal suburban state at the core of the new Democratic electoral map -- and why Mitt Romney may offer Republicans a better chance than his rivals of denting that fortress.

The Quinnipiac University survey showed that although New Jersey voters split only evenly on Obama's job performance, he led all four of the top GOP presidential contenders by substantial margins. In a potential 2012 matchup, the poll showed Obama leading both Rick Perry and Herman Cain by 23 percentage points and Newt Gingrich by 19 points. Only Mitt Romney held Obama to a single-digit advantage, and he just barely: Obama led him 49 percent to 40 percent. 

Romney, though, was the lone GOP candidate to hold Obama under 50 percent in New Jersey, and he did so by leapfrogging the president among college-educated white voters while the other Republican competitors lost that category by gaping margins. In 2008, Obama narrowly topped John McCain among New Jersey's college-educated whites, 51 percent to 49 percent, according to exit polls.

If it's possible to encapsulate the volatility and uncertainty of the 2012 Republican presidential race in a single chart, the one below might fit the bill.

It tracks the results of the 13 national CNN/ORC polls this year measuring the preferences of Republican primary voters. It also separates the results into three categories: the overall leader, the leader among the roughly half of the party that identifies with the tea party, and the leader among the roughly other half that does not.

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The chart points to several large conclusions. First is how fluid and unsettled the race has been. Five different candidates (including three that did not run, Mike Huckabee, Rudolph Giuliani, and Donald Trump) have held the overall lead in the survey; not since 1964 have so many different candidates led in a GOP presidential race in the year before the voting.

Within the two evenly balanced wings of the party, there's even more fluctuation. In the 13 polls, six different candidates have led among tea party supporters: Huckabee, Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and most recently Newt Gingrich. Among those who don't identify with the tea party, a similar group of six candidates have held the top spot: Sarah Palin, Gingrich, Trump, Romney, Giuliani, and Perry.

The latest CNN/ORC national survey showing Newt Gingrich surging to a statistical tie with Mitt Romney captures not only the continuing volatility of the GOP's most conservative wing, but cracks in Romney's standing among the party's more managerial and moderate voters.

Most directly, the CNN/ORC poll underscored the persistent inability of the GOP's conservative vanguard to settle on an alternative to Romney. In the poll, Gingrich now leads among Republican voters who identify with the tea party movement, drawing 29 percent. That's an 18 percentage point increase over the 11 percent Gingrich attracted among those voters in CNN's mid-October poll. Gingrich's gain among the tea party contingent is matched almost exactly vote for vote by Herman Cain's loss: he plummeted from 39 percent among them in October to just 22 percent now. Cain's ascent with the tea party came after Texas Gov. Rick Perry suffered a similar collapse with those voters from September through October.

New polls released late last week in three behemoth swing states underscore a central opportunity Mitt Romney could provide Republicans in the general election-and the threat he could pose to President Obama.

In the Quinnipiac University surveys in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania released on November 10, Romney ran more strongly against President Obama than Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. One key reason: Romney performed much better than his rivals among college-educated white voters.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Herman Cain sums up his world view in an all-too-simple phrase: "Peace through strength and clarity," he tells adoring audiences. "Clarify who our friends are and clarify who our enemies are."

Easy for Cain to say until faced at Saturday night's foreign policy debate with a question about Pakistan: Friend or enemy, Mr. Cain?

"Number one, he hasn't asked for it,'' said Jones, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university named after his family. "I had a reason for doing it the first time. I don't have that same reason this time.''

In a wide-ranging interview Friday afternoon in his stately office replete with mounted game, a bear rug, dark wood furniture and stained glass windows, Jones recalled why he backed Romney in 2007.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. _ Rick Perry hopes to salvage his GOP presidential campaign with a self-flagellation tour, topped Thursday night by this appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman."

But the betting in Spartanburg is that Perry is toast. Republican leaders say they don't see how he can recover from his agonizing memory lapse in Wednesday's debate, the latest stumble in a fumble-prone candidacy.

The Cain sexual harassment story hit a new low on Thursday when the Republican presidential candidate's newly hired lawyer issued a threat to any woman considering stepping forward with information, saying they "should think twice."

Lawyer L. Lin Wood offered no specifics about why they should think twice, but a front-page story in today's New York Times is full of clues: Less than 24 hours after she acknowledged being one of Herman Cain's alleged victims, Karen Kraushaar, a career media specialist in the federal government, was the target of a leak about a workplace complaint she filed in the early 2000s seeking permission to work at home after a car accident. In the same story, Cain's campaign notes that Wood's services will include a "research team."

From National Journal:

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Not even close. Not any more.

With those two pithy sentences, my colleague Beth Reinhard concluded in her piece today that:

Another ugly jobs report. More lousy poll numbers. This must be a depressing day for President Obama and his reelection team.

Well, not if they're taking the long view.

There are a lot of reasons to say Herman Cain won't win the GOP nomination, much less the presidency. The snowballing sexual harassment story is an obvious one.

 This may be the best reason:

Cain: let me, let me, let me say one thing, I'm here with these doctors and that's what I'm gonna talk about, so don't  even bother asking me all of these other questions that you all are curious about, OK, don't even bother. 

Scott Thuman: But are you concerned about the fact that these women do want to to come forward. (repeated) 

Cain: What did I say? Excuse me, (raises voice) Excuse me! (yelling) What part of no don't dumb people understand?  

Herman Cain's campaign manager says the sexual harassment story has run its course, but he may be blowing smoke.

Well, that didn't take long.

The first question posed by CBS News bureau chief Bob Schieffer at National Journal's 2012 Election Preview drew a qualified defense of embattled GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain from a Republican insider.

The Des Moines Register's new poll showing Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tied for first place in Iowa confirms what the CBS/National Journal reporters embedded with the campaigns have been hearing on the ground for a couple of weeks now: Iowa Republicans are giving former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney a chance to win their hearts, even though the religious conservatives who dominate the state's first-in-the-nation caucus don't care for him on the issues and may not be entirely comfortable with his Mormonism. The reason?  Romney's electability argument is resonating.

More than ideological purity, it seems, many Iowa Republicans want someone who can beat President Obama, and Romney so far has made the most plausible argument for why he is that guy. Until recently, Romney spent little of his time or his considerable financial resources in Iowa, figuring that his best shot at an early-primary victory was with New Hampshire's more moderate and independent voters.

But the poll also contains some political intelligence that bodes poorly for a Romney win in Iowa.

It's about time to start planning for the post-Herman Cain world, and there are gathering signs that Newt Gingrich could be the next anyone-but-Romney contestant in the GOP primary race.

 If the Cain campaign implodes as it seems determined to do, the question would be who replaces him as the alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney - and if there has been anything consistent about the GOP contest, it's been the need among likely GOP voters for an anti-Romney. Could the baton go to the blunt-spoken former speaker of the House?

After struggling to put a couple pennies together, Gingrich announced in New Hampshire on Tuesday that his campaign had raised over $800,000 in the month of October, more  than in the entire third quarter of the year. Gingrich's poll numbers have also been quietly creeping up lately, from the low single digits to 10 percent in the most recent CBS/New York Times survey. The results put him in third place, after Cain, at 25 percent, and Romney, with 21 percent. The man who led Republicans to congressional victories in the mid-1990s is also now enjoying double-digit support among voters who identify with the tea party in the key primary states of Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, according to a CNN/Time poll earlier this week.

One reason the Republican presidential contest has been so unusually volatile is that it's become two races running along parallel but very distinct tracks. One of those races seems to be settling down, steadily if slowly. The other still appears perched on an earthquake fault. If that dynamic persists,  former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will remain the favorite for the nomination- even though a significant proportion of the party remains resistant to choosing him.

The evolution of the GOP contest into two distinct races becomes apparent when looking at the long trend in public opinion polling. In the twelve national CNN/ORC surveys about the race conducted since January four different candidates have held or shared the national lead: ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and businessman Donald Trump (neither of whom actually entered the race), Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Other national polls this year have recorded leads for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and more recently businessman Herman Cain.

After several days of botching an important issue for evangelicals and cultural conservatives, Cain inexplicably stepped into the abortion rights mess he's created again on Wednesday -- and promptly made things worse. At a campaign stop in Corpus Christi, Texas, Cain said that he is "pro-life, no exceptions," which contradicted his staff's explanations over the past several days that the candidate does in fact support the three exceptions embraced by mainstream Republicans: rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.