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There is a way to think about the up-and-down GOP nomination fight that at least partially explains its volatility and the seemingly endless array of short-lived challengers to front-runner Mitt Romney as well as Romney's surprising resilience.

It's been the battle between the rationals and the notionals.

A new poll in Tennessee underscores the stakes for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in tomorrow's Michigan primary.

Like the Quinnipiac University Ohio survey released on Monday, the Vanderbilt Poll showed Santorum marshaling powerful support in Tennessee from the key elements in the GOP's populist wing- particularly tea party supporters and evangelical Christians, while remaining competitive with (or even leading) Romney among more managerial voters. Tennessee, along with Oklahoma and Georgia, loom as, in effect, the top second-tier of contests on March 6, behind Ohio, which is likely to hold center stage on that day. With polls in the GOP race gyrating wildly all year, the results in Michigan are likely to cast a long shadow over those contests.

The Tennessee survey, conducted from February 16 to 22 for Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, showed Santorum leading Romney overall by a resounding 38 percent to 20 percent, with Ron Paul (15 percent) and Newt Gingrich (13 percent) lagging. Santorum's lead is grounded in big advantages among groups at the GOP's ideological vanguard. Three-fourths of Tennessee voters in the survey identified as born-again Christians and they prefer Santorum over Romney by 39 percent to 15 percent. Among the nearly two-thirds of likely primary voters who say they support the tea party's ideas, Santorum led Romney even more decisively-43 percent to 13 percent.

First came Mitt Romney's dismissive remarks about President Obama's "faculty lounge" pals. Now Rick Santorum is calling Obama snobby for urging people to go to college - and defending that view in a series of TV appearances.

"There are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college," Santorum said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "We should not look down our nose" at people who go to trade school to learn carpentry or plumbing, he added on NBC's Meet The Press, "and say they're somehow less" because they didn't get a four-year college degree.

It's quite fitting that this year's Republican presidential race, which has often drawn comparisons to reality TV contests, is beginning to immerse itself in the dark art that defines such shady, self-serving competitions: choosing sides. Indeed, much like any suspense-filled home stretch of Survivor, the Republican contestants are now building alliances based on the shared interest of preventing their chief rival from claiming victory.

The most obvious example is the apparent ceasefire between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, who have reportedly forged a strong friendship during their twin presidential bids. The media -- and rival campaigns -- have undoubtedly observed how Paul's presence in the race has helped Romney, yet have chosen to avoid any conspiratorial chatter. But after Wednesday night's debate -- which saw Romney and Paul relentlessly attack Santorum while whispering nary a negative word about each another -- Santorum's camp couldn't hold back its frustration.

"Clearly there is a tag-team strategy between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney," top Santorum strategist John Brabender fumed to reporters after the debate. "There've been 20 debates, right? Why don't you go back and see how many times Ron Paul has ever criticized anything Mitt Romney has done."

For more than a year, Rick Santorum has labored to cast himself as an outsider ready to go to Washington to challenge business as usual, which makes it all the more puzzling why he decided to use the crucial debate in Mesa to sound like the ultimate Washington insider. Over and over again, Santorum came off as a defender of Congress, a champion of earmarks and a master of legislative minutiae.

Legislative ratings, Title X, Title XX, earmarks, voting for things you opposed - these are the things that the former Pennsylvania senator talked about. At one point, his tortured explanation prompted Mitt Romney to admit -- or taunt -- he hadn't understood what Santorum was talking about. At other points, his inside-Washington talk and use of legislative jargon set him up for jabs and jibes from Rep. Ron Paul.

It could not have been what Santorum wanted to do in what could be the final Republican debate, the first one held since Santorum surged into the lead in many polls. Perhaps his worst moment was his attempt to explain why he voted for No Child Left Behind even though he opposed it. There were echoes of John Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it" only without Kerry's coherence. He said he voted for it because President George W. Bush asked him to do so. "I have to admit I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in. But, you know, when you're part of the team sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader. And I made a mistake." Not a great answer when you're running to be a leader of a party deeply suspicious of Washington's ways.

 Forget the polls. You don't need to monitor the public opinion polls to track which Republican presidential candidate is surging. All you need to do is see which rival Texas Rep. Ron Paul is attacking - and how sarcastically he gets doing it. In the earlier debates, Paul went after Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Wednesday night, in Mesa, it was Rick Santorum's turn in Paul's sights.

The first question from CNN moderator John King was why Paul is calling Santorum a fake in his television commercials. With the bluntness that has gained him a cult-like following, the veteran congressman man responded, "Because he's a fake."

The Michigan primary will test one of the most common- but as yet unproven - assumptions in the Republican presidential race: the expectation that Rick Santorum will be a strong candidate for blue-collar voters.

From the moment Santorum emerged as a serious contender in Iowa, many analysts (present company included) have assumed he would run well among the growing ranks of non-college white voters in the Republican electorate. On a policy level, Santorum stresses his determination to rebuild the nation's manufacturing capacity and laments the decline of upward mobility for working-class Americans in language rare among Republicans. On a personal level, Santorum highlights his years growing up in Western Pennsylvania steel country, and his grandfather's experience as a miner; he also projects a regular-guy aura that contrasts with rival Mitt Romney's vast wealth.

Rick Santorum is out with an effective new television ad in Nevada and Colorado, a 60-second spot that opens with three playing cards lying face-down on a table. "On the other side of these cards are the pictures of three politicians," the narrator says, his voice ominous. "Here are some clues as to who they are."

The narrator proceeds to detail four policies that all three politicians have previously supported, including: "radical cap and trade legislation," "giving illegal aliens some form of amnesty," "government health mandates" and "Wall Street bailouts."

You can see where this is going, right? The cards will flip over, showing President Obama in the middle, flanked by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, further emphasizing the message Santorum has been pushing relentlessly in recent weeks: That he is the only "true conservative" in the race, the lone Republican candidate capable of drawing a bright contrast against Obama.

In the almost six decades that Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba, Republican presidential candidates have elbowed each other and fought to portray themselves as the toughest on Castro - until Thursday night when Rep. Ron Paul showed again that he is quite willing to be different. To a question suggesting that the United States has not been involved enough in influencing governments in Latin America, Paul called for an end to the half-century-old U.S. trade embargo of Cuba.

"Free trade is an answer, the answer to a lot of conflicts around the world," he said. ""I'm always promoting free trade. And you might add Cuba, too. I think we'd be a lot better off... trading with Cuba." Later in his answer, he added, "I believe with friendship and trade you can have a lot of influence. And I strongly believe that it's time we had friendship and trade with Cuba."

None of the other three candidates - who have been ardently wooing the state's influential Cuban community, most of whom are stridently anti-Castro - jumped in to agree. Former Sen. Rick Santorum indicated he did not agree with Paul's response but turned his answer into an attack on President Obama. The president, he said, has a policy of "siding with leftists, siding with Marxists" and seeking common ground with Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

"Angry Newt" took the night off. In a striking role reversal, Newt Gingrich looked more like a firefly than a firebrand in a high-stakes debate Monday night, while rival Mitt Romney called the surging former House Speaker a disgraced, influence-peddling, Washington insider.

Somebody must have awakened the cool-and-nonchalant Romney out of his debate slumber and told him the GOP nomination was slipping away. Gingrich stunned the political world -- and frightened much of the GOP establishment -- with a landslide victory in South Carolina on Saturday night that erased Romney's lead in national and Florida polls.

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?

This morning's front-page headline in the State, one of South Carolina's leading papers, offers the bookend to National Journal's report on the movement toward Mitt Romney among business-oriented managerial Republicans. The headline reads: "S.C. Evangelicals Split, Frustrated."

Though evangelical Christians constituted a solid 60 percent majority of GOP primary voters in 2008, they "are divided among the faith-and-values trinity of the 2012 S.C. GOP primary, supporting Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry or Rick Santorum," writes reporter Adam Beam. Beam quotes Oran Smith, the executive director of the Palmetto Family Council, a leading local social conservative group: "I do sense frustration that there is not a single candidate that is being put up against Romney."

The Monmouth University survey released Tuesday - which showed Romney holding a double-digit advantage overall in South Carolina - quantifies the reason for Smith's frustration. It showed Romney attracting 29 percent among self-identified evangelicals - much better than his 11 percent with them in 2008, but not much more than the 27 percent John McCain won among them that year while amassing a narrow plurality win in the state. 

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The only five men standing between Mitt Romney and the Republican presidential nomination took a walk Saturday night -- attacking each other and the media as the former Massachusetts governor coasted toward the brass ring.

Still am.

Link to today's spot story with Naureen Khan is here.

If the conservative movement's anti-Mitt Romney forces want to knock the front-runner off his seemingly inevitable path toward the nomination, they're running out of time. And, if the fallout from Romney's victory in Iowa is any indication, they know it, too. 

Politico reported Wednesday that a group of conservative leaders -- including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Don Wildmon, an ex-chairman of the American Family Association -- are meeting in Texas this weekend to find a presidential candidate they can unite behind. Thus far, the movement has been incapable of anointing a leader any for more than a few weeks, intermittently rallying behind contenders like Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich only to look elsewhere weeks later. 

"...for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" -- Galatians 6:7.

It's an adage older than our time, one that elucidates Rick Santorum's remarkable showing in Iowa: You reap what you sow.

Granted, it seems unlikely that Santorum, a deeply religious man, would base his campaign strategy on a centuries-old piece of Scripture. But as the returns rolled in Tuesday night, one couldn't help but think that the Biblical proverb -- both as a farming metaphor in a state dependent on agriculture, and as divine instruction in a contest dominated by evangelical Christians -- went straight to the heart of Santorum's success.

Simply put, Santorum would never have reaped the incredible results of the 2012 Iowa caucuses without long ago planting the perfect seed.

It came in the fall of 2010, when Santorum traveled to Des Moines on a chilly October morning and climbed aboard a black and purple bus parked outside the state capitol. While other potential White House contenders were quietly and carefully mapping out the preliminary stages of their would-be campaigns, Santorum set off across Iowa on the "Judge Bus Tour" -- a conservative crusade to rid the Iowa Supreme Court of three justices who had voted in favor of legalizing gay marriage in the Hawkeye State.

There must be something in the Iowa air that impels politicians to give off-key speeches after the votes have been cast in the caucuses. Eight years after Howard Dean committed political suicide by screaming out the names of states and four years after Hillary Clinton put so many oldsters on stage that she looked like she was taping an AARP commercial, the Republican candidates Tuesday night gave us so many fresh memories to cherish.

There was Ron Paul declaring, "I'm waiting for the day when we can say we're all Austrians now." The Texas congressman was referring to the Austrian school of economics and his favorite economist, Freidrich von Hayek. But television viewers could be excused if they wondered whether the rally would break into a rousing singing of "Edelweiss." And Paul wasn't finished with the strangeness. In a first in modern American politics, he welcomed to the stage an active-duty soldier wearing his camouflage uniform and critical of American foreign policy.

Corporal Jesse Thorsen, of West Des Moines, is only 28 years old so perhaps he could be excused for forgetting the Defense Department regulation hammered into all members of the Armed Forces that they may not "participate in partisan political... rallies" and "cannot appear at any kind of political forum in uniform." But Paul, himself a veteran, should have known better than to put Thorsen in a position where he could be disciplined by the Army.

A lighter - but also odd - touch was in Rep. Michele Bachmann's valedictory after her sixth place finish. She praised her husband, Marcus, but drew a wince from him when she disclosed that on the day before the caucuses "he was out buying doggie sunglasses for our dog Boomer."

BEDFORD, N.H. - Bill Cahill says he has visual proof that Rick Santorum's campaign has built an organization outside of Iowa capable of carrying on the momentum he gained after Iowa.

"It's here, the schedule is here," Cahill said Tuesday, holding up a thick stack of papers. Behind a cover page labeled "confidential," it contains a detailed itinerary of the former Pennsylvania senator's schedule for the next six days in the Granite State, Cahill said, evidence he'll be able to hit the ground running when he arrives for this first post-Iowa event Wednesday night.

After his 8-vote loss to Mitt Romney in Iowa on Tuesday, Santorum will have to prove whether he can succeed in states even without an aggressive retail-politicking effort. His near victory in Iowa was attributable largely to campaigning in the state longer and harder than anyone else in the field, a luxury he won't have now that the primaries take place one week after another.

If Rick Santorum does well tonight--and all indications are that he will--it's worth remembering that it wouldn't have been possible without good relations between evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. It's now considered a non-event that the two groups get along and are willing to vote for candidates of the other faith. But, of course, it wasn't always so. You can go back to the tensions between Catholic immigrants and native Protestants, the temperance movement which divided Catholic wets from native drys. The tensions did not end with the election of John F. Kennedy who famously told a Baptist clergy in the South that he would not let religion play a role in his public life. Santorum is, of course, devoutly religious and makes no apologies for letting his faith guide his public life. The same is true for Newt Gingrich, a recent convert to Catholicism.

In some ways the tensions between the groups are there over issues like proselytizing--the Third World has become something of a battleground for hearts and minds between Catholics and Protestants who have made deep inroads in Latin America. But there has also been a conscious effort on the party of conservatives to put aside their differences. Pope Benedict the XVI has continued the same outreach to evangelicals the John Paul II did.

In 1994, American Catholic and Evangelical leaders came together to sign a statement: Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. Its signatories included Chuck Colson, the prominent evangelist and Watergate figure and Pat Robertson, the Christian Broadcast Network found as well as Catholics like the lake Father Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal John O'Connor. The document pledged the groups to work together in common cause on issues like abortion and to not let doctrinal differences or conflicts over recruitment "give comfort to the enemies of Christ."

In the 18 years since, ties between conservative Catholics and fundamentalist evangelicals have only go stronger. Whether those ties will be enough to propel Santorum or another religiously oriented candidate forward remains to be seen but the alliance is remarkable enough.

NEWTON, Iowa -- In a dramatic moment on Monday, Rick Santorum fought back tears and his wife Karen grew misty-eyed when a voter asked them about criticism of their 1996 decision to bring home a newborn who died soon after childbirth.

Santorum choked up as he described the family's decision to bring home their child Gabriel after the newborn died in the hospital. Noting that his wife worked as a neo-natal nurse, Santorum said: "It was so important ... for the family to recognize the life of that child and for the children to know they had a brother."

(RELATED: Gingrich: Romney's a Liar)

The exchange was prompted by a voter who said she had heard liberal Fox News commentator Alan Colmes criticize the decision to bring home the child. "To some who don't recognize the dignity of all human life, who see it as a blob of tissue ... this is somehow weird, recognizing the humanity of your son. Somehow weird, somehow odd and should be subject to ridicule."

Earlier, as Santorum spoke, his wife Karen was heard to say: "It's so inappropriate."

(RELATED: Forget Winning Iowa: It's Better to 'Exceed Expectations')

Santorum concluded his response by restating his commitment to pursue an anti-abortion agenda. "I will stand and fight," he said. "I will hope to be able to look into the eyes of the American public and say 'Be more welcoming, open up your heart to love more, to love all life."

A second poll underscores the opportunity that division on the right is creating for Mitt Romney in Iowa. In the NBC/Marist College Iowa survey released Friday, Romney continues to draw only modest support overall - but remains positioned to capture the state because the groups most skeptical of him are fragmenting.

Overall, the poll showed Romney leading with 23 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 21 percent, and then Rick Santorum (15 percent), Rick Perry (14 percent) and Newt Gingrich (13) all bunched closely together. That largely tracks the findings of the CNN/Time/ORC Iowa survey released earlier this week.

In the NBC/Marist poll, like the CNN/Time survey, Romney continues to draw meager support among the party's most ardent elements. The new survey shows him capture just 13 percent among both evangelical Christians and voters who describe themselves as strong tea party supporters.

The Republican bubble has finally lifted Rick Santorum, at least to third place in one state.

For a while it looked like he'd be the only GOP presidential candidate in Iowa to miss out on his personal rise-and-fall saga. Now comes a CNN poll showing Santorum with 16 percent of the vote in Iowa - 2 points higher than a rapidly fading Newt Gingrich.

The comparison with a CNN poll earlier this month is striking. 

A bus tour is a great way to experience the under-appreciated glories of Iowa. (Seriously folks, the state is beautiful). It's also a valuable tool in a place that prizes personalized retail campaigning and hasn't seen all that much of it this year - especially from these two leading GOP presidential candidates.

Romney has been tending to his firewall in New Hampshire and trying to seem like he's not working too hard in Iowa lest he be embarrassed on caucus night. Gingrich has played the VIP celeb, counting mainly on debates to make him a contender.

That's changing this week in the final stretch. Romney gives a speech Tuesday night in Davenport and launches a three-day bus tour the next morning.  Gingrich and his wife Callista will be riding a bus for the duration. Their "Jobs and Prosperity" tour starts Tuesday with 11 stops in its first three days. 

That's small potatoes next to the 10 stops Michele Bachmann has scheduled for Tuesday alone. Bus tours have been a staple for Bachmann as well Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Ron Paul - the other candidates competing hard in Iowa. 

Polling in the unsettled race suggests Paul, Romney or Gingrich could win it. Bachmann and Santorum, short on money, are looking for a better-than-expected finish to keep them afloat. If Perry makes a surprise show of strength, he could re-emerge as the chief alternative to Romney.

Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times pointed out this week that some 370,000 Florida Republicans already have requested absentee ballots for that state's Jan. 31 primary -- more than all the Republicans who voted in the 2008 Iowa and New Hampshire contests combined.

Still, the snowball effect of doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire cannot be ignored. Thus the bus tours, the ads, the descending of the national media. 

The most accurate indicator of how candidates will fare Jan. 3 in Iowa is the Des Moines Register poll conducted by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines. In the final days of 2007, it was the only poll to pick up on Barack Obama's growing lead over Hillary Clinton, due to his success at bringing new voters into the arcane caucus process.

The caucuses that year were also held Jan. 3 and the final poll was released Dec. 31 based on interviews conducted Dec. 27-30. Obama led Clinton 32 percent to 25 percent, a margin almost identical to his 8-percentage-point victory over Clinton and John Edwards a few days later.

The Register won't disclose when it is in the field this year. But judging by the 2007 time frame, interviewers will be talking to Iowa Republicans throughout this week of intensified candidate activity, advertising and press coverage.

Did Paul peak too soon? Did Romney and Gingrich wait too long to make a full-court press, or are they coming on strong just in time? The Register poll will be our best clue to what is likely to happen next week when Iowa Republicans cast the first votes of the primary season.