For all of the punditry (from myself and others) about Mitt Romney’s unpopularity with GOP voters, it’s worth noting the extent to which Republicans are perfectly happy with the former Massachusetts governor. Here’s Gallup with its most recent look at the Republican presidential contest:

Mitt Romney is just as popular as Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich, his problem—in part—is that he has too many competitors, and Republican voters are indulging the extent to which they have a fair amount of choice. When the field begins to winnow in January, odds are very good that Romney will pick up a lot more support from Republican voters.

My article in the Prospect's October issue is up at the homepage. It's a long feature, but here's a quick version: After the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2009, social conservatives at the local and national levels joined forces to attack the court. They used a once-obscure procedure of judicial selection to kick three judges off the bench, though the ruling on marriage still stands as law.

Campaign finance reformers are understandably disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision in McComish v. Bennett. Not only does it mark the second time in two years that the Court has ruled for plutocratic interests and against attempts to regulate the flow of money in elections, but the ruling itself is nonsense. Unless “restricting speech” is a euphemism for limiting wealthy interests, it doesn’t restrict speech to provide matching funds for candidates who accept public financing.

The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday afternoon that Rick Perry was ready to jump into running for president. The sourcing for the piece was incredibly unconvincing; I'm not sure how one "normally reliable Republican source" who is clearly not part of Perry's camp would know the Texas governor's intentions (and for what it is worth, Perry's official advisers have said a decision is still weeks away). But my major qualm lies with the timeline described for Perry's announcement.

Some Democrats want consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren to challenge Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown for his Senate seat in 2012:

In seeking to enlist Ms. Warren for a different campaign, Democrats are taking aim at two birds. They can lay the groundwork for a potential compromise over a different candidate to lead the new agency and, they hope, they can increase their chances of reclaiming Mr. Brown’s seat by sending against him a woman who has won considerable acclaim and popularity among liberals for taking on the financial industry. [...]

With Haley Barbour officially out of the presidential race, a pair of libertarian candidates in, and what appears to be a slow winnowing process underway for the Republican nomination, it's worth asking how a long-shot candidate would actually claim the prize. Jonathan Bernstein games out a possible scenario, and it seems to rely less on strategy than it does luck:

Mark this as one of the few times when I completely agree with Newt Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker exploring a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, said proposing a major overhaul of entitlement programs was not as politically fraught as it might have been a decade ago. But he said Republicans must be vigilant in defending their actions and mindful that Democrats were poised to attack.
 

“I think it is a dangerous political exercise,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview Monday. “This is not something that Republicans can afford to handle lightly.”